Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) play a critical role in industrial agriculture and have emerged as an ongoing environmental justice issue. These operations generate large volumes of animal waste that can contaminate air and water through runoff, groundwater infiltration, and the release of harmful gases like ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. As a result, nearby communities face elevated risks of respiratory illness, water pollution, and decreased quality of life.
Furthermore, inadequate regulatory enforcement and limited access to legal resources can leave affected residents with few avenues for recourse, reinforcing systemic inequities. Given that the workforce for industrial agriculture is predominantly made up of Latinos, it is of utmost importance that we provide our communities with resources and tools to successfully advocate for cleaner, safer, and more just conditions for their work and families.
GreenLatinos and Socially Responsible Agricultural Project therefore created this glossary of Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) vocabulary to improve language accessibility, especially for Spanish-speaking workers and residents. The aim of this glossary is to better educate the Latino community to participate in environmental and labor advocacy, engage in public discussions, and to navigate regulations that affect their communities. This is a living document, with the aim to continue to update, improve, and include new entries, as we know that these English to Spanish translations may differ based on country of origin and audience.
For more information on this topic, please visit https://sraproject.org/.
This report was originally published on November 12, 2025 and is updated today with recent actions corrupting safe, accessible public lands under the Trump Administration.
From neighborhood parks to remote wildernesses, the MAGA regime is corrupting public places for refuge and recreation so they can abduct our neighbors from their communities and families. Now we face an urgent need to defend our core freedoms to move safely, breathe clean air, protect healthy water, and provide a better life for our children and future generations.
This is a brief on proposed legislation and active executive policies by MAGA republicans related to mass surveillance on public land, public land militarization, and the abduction of our community members based on what we look like, where we come from, and how we express our beliefs.
Public lands of all kinds, near and far, are places for solace and meaningful connections with nature and your people. But dangerous policy changes and proposed bills aim to put recreationists under the eye of surveillance technology to bolster ICE and CBP’s ability to target black and brown individuals, people with an accent, and anyone they are with, while enjoying outdoor recreation activities. These active policy changes and proposed bills favor private security and construction firms whose bottom lines rely on mass surveillance at local and national public lands.
Trump’s Vanity Projects in Washington, DC
At least 30.5 percent of national park visitor entrance fee revenue has been redirected to vanity projects in Washington, DC. At the expense of closed trails, closed campgrounds, and canceled archeological surveys, President Trump prioritized delivering more than $12.8 million for hiring 450 new U.S. Park Police throughout the nation’s capital, and equipping them with new Flock AI surveillance cameras, radios, tasers, laptops, body cameras, and body armor. He has also spent $475,000 on drones throughout the region, a new park-police substation at Rock Creek Park, and other White House projects.
Secretarial Order 3442 and the Land and Water Conservation Fund
In September 2025, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued Secretarial Order 3442 affecting the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) to include funding for “facility-related security installations within or adjacent to public parks and recreation areas.” On May 1, 2026, the National Park Service (NPS) updated the Land and Water Conservation Fund Stateside Program Manual to clarify that fixed installations such as entrance kiosks, gates, fencing, communication utilities, fire suppression, and lighting are eligible for funding. In this period of increased ICE raids on federal public lands and county parks, we should all be concerned that LWCF resources are prioritizing law enforcement infrastructure over recreation facilities.
Border Lands Conservation Act and the FLASH Act
These bills would be more accurately called the Mass Surveillance and Demolition on Public Lands Act. The Border Lands Conservation Act (Senator Mike Lee, UT) and FLASH Act (Representative Juan Ciscomani, AZ) were introduced in the 119th Congress. They would undermine conservation management in wilderness and public lands across the northern and southern U.S. borders to proliferate mass surveillance and desecrate sacred and cultural areas. These bills would allow “tactical infrastructure" including observation points, remote video surveillance systems, motion sensors, and detection devices in wilderness areas and public lands.
Executive Order 14314 on National Parks
This July 2025 executive order enables the National Park Service to ID visitors, record their residential status, and charge increased “nonresident” fees. This is another way for the MAGA regime to record your recreational habits while inflaming anti-immigrant sentiment. The move also attacks equal access to national parks. A $100 per-visitor premium is charged to “non-residents” entering some of the most popular national parks (on top of existing entrance fees). Immigrants without residential status in the U.S. are no longer eligible to enjoy national parks for free, like everyone else, on fee-free entrance days.
Why Mass Surveillance Is Dangerous
These bills and policies will:
Already, Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) have confronted and detained tens of thousands of black and brown community members because of their skin color through the use of surveillance technologies (including those that scrape biometric data) under the shield of the SCOTUS ruling allowing immigration enforcers to racially and ethnically profile community members. This blatant violation of our core values of freedom, equality, and justice for all should stir a sense of injustice in each of us.
We should be asked for our consent before our biometric data is tracked and recorded. The Department of Homeland Security does not have the right to gather your biometric data–that’s why you can opt out of biometric facial screening with CBP and TSA. Consent is nonnegotiable and essential to data privacy. Without consent, the MAGA regime can use our biometric data to more easily harass, disappear, and detain our family members, teachers, neighbors, and colleagues.
Beyond mass surveillance technologies and strategies, the MAGA regime has taken active steps to give the army, private security firms, and immigration agents control over public lands and control over who gets safe access.
Immigration Raids in National Forests
In August 2025, two wildfire crew members were arrested by CPB. This happened after CPB stopped two full firefighting crews to check their IDs while in the midst of controlling the Bear Gulch Fire in the Olympic National Forest of Washington. The firefighters were detained at a private immigration detention center operated by GEO Group, a private prison company. GEO denied Congresswoman Emily Randall (WA-6) entry to the facility when she attempted to visit the firefighters.
Come June 2026, a joint operation between ICE and the Forest Service led to the shameful detention of 13 recreationists at a popular swimming area in the Pisgah National Forest of North Carolina. The Forest Service confirmed that it requested the ICE raid, yet rejected a call for a public meeting about the operation. ICE has yet to release the names of those detained, despite pressure from the press and advocates who claim that Latinos were specifically profiled.
Then in September 2026, a Labor Day weekend campout organized by five families in the Mount Baker-Snowqualmie National Forest of Washington tragically ended in family separation at the hands of ICE. After National Forest Rangers photographed the campers’ IDs and potentially sent the photos to ICE, ICE agents reportedly impersonated police officers at midnight, awakening the sleeping families including a pregnant woman and children aged 1-14 years old. They detained five family members who are now held at the Northwest ICE Processing Center which is also operated by GEO Group. The families set up a fundraiser to support the cost of basic needs and legal expenses.
Each of us who find peace and respite in our national forests should be outraged by these joint operations. These shameful operations make it increasingly clear that the evisceration of public land stewardship funding is for the benefit of private prison companies that have contracts with immigration agencies. Public land is meant to bring families together, not rip them apart.
U.S. Army Control of Southern Border Public Lands
National Security Presidential Memorandum 4 authorized the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture to militarize public lands on the southern U.S. border. In April, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum transferred jurisdiction over 109,000 acres of public land in New Mexico to the Army.
Interagency cooperation on borderland management has been ongoing for decades. The National Park Service had a pre-existing agreement with Border Patrol to ensure collaboration and minimize harm to wilderness and visitors. Before the MAGA regime undermined these agreements, border land management was usually in compliance with our generations of hard-earned environmental law.
Detention Centers
The Everglades detention center which was shuttered in June 2026. President Trump’s so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” was constructed in the heart of Big Cypress National Preserve and Miccosukee Tribe lands. Operations continued for months despite a federal court ruling ordering it to cease further construction and detentions in response to Tribal sovereignty and environmental law violations.
The National Park Service website about the detention center location (the former Everglades Jetport) was removed (alongside other history erasures from public lands and in museums). The Miccosukee Tribe intervened in a lawsuit aiming to shutter the facility because it is destroying Tribal members’ freedom to carry out their traditional and ceremonial relationships with the surrounding Tribal and public land. The National Park Service stewards Big Cypress National Preserve. This freshwater swamp is home to tropical birds, the endangered Florida Panther, the endangered Florida Bonneted Bat, black bears, river otters, manatees, mountain lions, Bowfin fish, white-tailed deer, turkey, mangroves, orchids, red-shouldered hawks, and many more species. These species’ habitat is the home and traditional hunting, fishing, and trapping grounds of the Seminole Tribe and the Miccosukee Tribe, including ten Tribal villages within three miles of the detention center.
More than 2,000 people joined the Florida Interfaith Coalition every Sunday outside of the detention center for prayer vigils and to demand clergy access for the abducted community members. Weekly vigils continue today at the Clearwater Freedom Vigil for Immigrant Justice.
Border Wall
The construction of the San Rafael Valley border wall–which the FLASH Act would intensify–cuts through the Coronado National Forest, harming conservation lands and community health north and south of the border by cutting off an essential migratory wildlife corridor. The FLASH Act would also expedite border wall construction elsewhere on the southern border and levy increased penalties on migrants, further exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. Interior Secretary Burgum has looked the other way as the Las Playas Intaglio geoglyph, a sacred Tohono O’odham heritage site in the Cabeta Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, and Big Bend National Park were irreparably destroyed for Border Wall construction, roads, and vehicle barriers.
A border wall is proposed in the heart of Quitobaquito Springs, also called A’al Waipai: a ceremonial anchor in Tohono O’odham and Hia C-eḍ O’odham life located at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. At a House Natural Resources Committee hearing, Secretary Burgum refused to commit to protecting Quitobaquito Springs, avoid using groundwater within five miles of the sacred site, and monitoring groundwater through construction activities after being questioned by Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva (AZ-7).
Project 2025 was written to enrich billionaires by privatizing public assets and shuttering essential government services. The MAGA regime is handing over jurisdiction of public lands to the Army to benefit military contractors; allowing public dollars to finance surveillance and police equipment, the border wall, and detention centers; and turning the Forest Service into immigration enforcement hounds. This is a favor to private prison and security companies, AI tech companies, construction firms, manufacturers, and other companies profiting from mass surveillance, bulldozing sacred places, and harassing and disappearing our community members.
Instead of addressing massive economic inequality in our nation and eliminating greenhouse gas emissions so communities everywhere are more safe and stable, the MAGA regime is scapegoating people of all backgrounds who made courageous sacrifices to start new lives in the United States and Puerto Rico. They are getting in the way of people who want to work hard for a dignified life, so billionaires can profit from mass surveillance in outdoor recreation areas and the militarization of our national public lands. These billionaires planned for 2025, but they didn’t plan for us.
The majority of us believe that it is our right to enjoy the outdoors safely. Most of us want this for future generations. We live in a mutually beneficial relationship with our public land and water. When they are healthy, whole, and honest, we are too. That’s why people like us, nationwide, continue to speak up. Together, we successfully took down a proposal in Congress to sell off our public lands. Millions of people, both rural and urban, continue to gather at rallies and protests to oppose the MAGA agenda. Millions commented, shared social media posts, and wrote to the press in defense of roadless forests, conservation and landscape health, as well as our national monuments.
We keep showing up for nature. In doing so, we must support one another. Ahora, seguimos adelante for racial justice, for our democracy, and for policies that allow people to flourish in this country, like an accessible pathway to citizenship, refuge, and a just and humane immigration system.
Lawsuit alleges ICE failed to assess air, water, and infectious disease impacts of reopening long-vacant Hudson prison
HUDSON, Colo.— GreenLatinos and the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition filed a lawsuit today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado challenging U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s decision to open and operate the Big Horn facility in Hudson, Colorado as a detention center without first conducting the environmental review required by the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.
The former Hudson Correctional Facility has been vacant since about 2013, according to the complaint. GEO Group reported in its August disclosure that it entered into a five-year contract with ICE to reopen the facility as a federal immigration detention center.
“No community should be treated as expendable for the purpose of expanding ICE’s detention system,” said Mark Magaña, GreenLatinos’ Founding President and CEO. “Our commitment to environmental justice extends to the people living near this facility as well as to those who would be confined inside it. We oppose any expansion that threatens the health and human dignity of those held, and the basic environmental protections of the surrounding community.”
The GEO Group posted dozens of job openings, moving forward with plans to reopen the facility while ignoring federal regulations. “Immigration detention centers harm the health and well-being of entire communities,” said Gladis Ibarra, Co- Executive Director, Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition. “The impact is felt not only by those detained in deplorable and inhumane conditions, but also by the families, neighbors, and community members who live in the same zip code and must bear the environmental consequences of having a detention center in their community.”
Hudson lies within the Denver Metro/North Front Range region, which does not meet federal ozone standards. The complaint alleges that equipment at the facility, detainee transportation, staff travel, and supply deliveries would add ozone-forming emissions and further pollute the region.
The complaint also raises concerns about increased demand on Hudson’s water supply and wastewater treatment systems. It cites a prior EPA enforcement action involving wastewater discharges from the same correctional facility and town planning documents identifying treatment-capacity and industrial pretreatment needs. Water demand from the facility would also increase the use of water imported from the Colorado River through the Colorado–Big Thompson Project, according to the complaint.
Traffic from facility operations could increase noise and create road-safety and emergency-response concerns. The complaint also identifies potential effects on wildlife from air and water pollution, vehicle traffic and nighttime security lighting.
“NEPA requires federal agencies to review the environmental effects of covered actions before moving forward,” said Jessica Herrera, GreenLatinos’ In-House Counsel. “Our complaint alleges that ICE prepared neither an environmental assessment nor an environmental impact statement for the Big Horn facility and did not invoke a valid categorical exclusion. We are seeking declaratory relief and an injunction to halt pre-construction activities and construction at Big Horn and prevent the facility from operating unless and until ICE complies with NEPA.”
The complaint highlights that proceeding without environmental review deprived residents and local officials of information about the project’s expected impacts and opportunities to participate in federal decision-making.
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About GreenLatinos
(NOTE: GreenLatinos is ONE WORD) GreenLatinos convenes an active comunidad of environmental, conservation, and climate justice leaders rooted in the power and wisdom of our culture, united to uplift our priorities, and driven to secure our political, economic, cultural, and environmental liberation.
About CIRC
Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition is a statewide organization working to improve the lives of immigrants and refugees by making Colorado a more welcoming state.
