The Teller County Sheriff’s Office launched a zero-tolerance enforcement operation on national forest land today — not because it chose the work, but because the federal agency responsible for it stopped showing up. The Forest Service Zero Tolerance Enforcement 2026 Operation covers more than 200 square miles of Pike National Forest inside Teller County, where resident complaints of reckless shooting, illegal off-highway vehicle use, uncontrolled fires, and destruction of forested land have accumulated without meaningful federal response.
The reason those complaints went unanswered is not complicated. Captain Dunfee of U.S. Forest Service Law Enforcement and Investigations Region 2 told TCSO that his agency is not filling vacant law enforcement positions in the Teller County area. He also said his leadership is unwilling to engage situations involving illegal aliens who are engaged in criminal activity, citing concern that USFS Law Enforcement could be perceived as cooperating with — or operating on parity with — Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
That position sits in direct conflict with the White House. The Trump administration’s January 2025 executive order directed all federal agencies with law enforcement personnel to support immigration enforcement objectives. USFS LEI Region 2’s stated rationale — fear of ICE association — runs counter to that order on land the federal government owns and is responsible for patrolling.
Those consequences land on Teller County. The Pikes Peak Ranger District, which administers the national forest land within the county, falls squarely within the federal workforce reductions that HCA reported on May 2. Colorado lost 1,753 public lands positions to the current administration’s DOGE-driven cuts — more than any other state, a 26 percent reduction across the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service. Before the cuts, USFS Law Enforcement and Investigations employed roughly 650 officers nationwide. Those officers covered 192 million acres of national forest land — approximately one officer per 295,000 acres. Teller County’s share of that ratio was already thin before Colorado lost a single position. It is thinner now.
The problems on the ground are not abstract. The area is what Teller County Commissioner Dan Williams called “the wild west” — a Front Range recreation corridor that fills with visitors every weekend, many of whom drive up from Denver without knowing a fire ban is in effect and act accordingly. The Turkey Track shooting area on the Teller and Douglas county line has historically produced five to ten human-caused fires per year from target shooting on federal land. An April 2025 fire at Turkey Track burned 128 acres and pushed to the edge of Highway 67 before crews from both counties and the state got it contained. That fire started on a Red Flag Warning day.
TCSO has helped enforce shooting and fire laws on national forest land before, but never at this scale or with this mandate. Starting today, deputies will patrol the affected areas with increased visibility. They will enforce all state laws and county ordinances, including the current fire ban. Deputies are equipped to extinguish unattended fires and investigate their origins and those responsible. The operation will be conducted regardless of the nationality, country of origin, or immigration status of anyone found engaged in criminal activity — a direct contrast to the posture USFS LEI Region 2 described.
The county will run this operation while maintaining normal service levels everywhere else. Teller County’s non-federal land — the roads, neighborhoods, and unincorporated areas that constitute the rest of the sheriff’s jurisdiction — will continue receiving standard coverage. TCSO offered no figure for the operation’s cost and no indication whether the federal government has been asked to share it.
That cost question matters. The federal government owns and is legally responsible for the land TCSO’s deputies will now patrol. USFS Law Enforcement and Investigations holds primary jurisdiction over national forest land; county sheriffs enforce state law there concurrently but are not structured or funded to substitute for a federal presence across 200-plus square miles of wilderness terrain. The sheriff’s office is absorbing that substitution anyway, on a county budget built for county problems, entering what state forecasters project as Colorado’s most dangerous wildfire season in years.
Colorado’s public lands workforce is at its lowest level in decades. The federal agency responsible for law enforcement on those lands has left positions in Teller County unfilled and, by its own account, has chosen not to engage one category of offenders for political reasons. The Teller County Sheriff’s Office is now doing that job, on a county budget, across terrain it was never funded to cover, entering the highest-risk fire season the state has seen in years.
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