The Aurora City Council approved a statement Monday night directing immigration detention contracting company GEO to cooperate with local health officials.

The Adams County Health Department confirmed an active case of tuberculosis at the Aurora GEO Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility last month.

Colorado law states that local public health agencies are required to investigate every confirmed tuberculosis case, a process that includes a patient interview, medical record review, contact identification and notification, testing, treatment and follow-up.

Health department officials requested the necessary information and GEO did not provide it. The ACHD then issued a public health order in late June requiring compliance.

As of Friday, GEO had not given the health department access or adequate information to conduct an investigation into the case and the possibility of other cases, ACHD spokesperson Jennifer Lucero-Alvarez said in a statement.

“We remain concerned about individuals in the facility, including those who are detained and staff who might have been exposed,” Lucero-Alvarez said.

In Monday night’s council meeting, Aurora lawmakers unanimously approved a statement, proposed by Mayor Mike Coffman and Mayor Pro Tem Alison Coombs, telling GEO to comply with the ACHD’s orders.

“We are deeply concerned about the risks to individual and community health posed by the Tuberculosis (Tb) outbreak at the GEO ICE Processing Center,” the statement reads. “We demand that the GEO ICE Processing Facility immediately and fully cooperate with public health officials to determine the scope of the active tuberculosis case to make sure that it is contained.”

Coffman told councilmembers Monday night that approving the statement is “not about how you feel about the issue of immigration or immigration enforcement,” but rather about public health.

Adams County and the state will likely go to court to force GEO to comply, he added.

“I think it’s in our interest to protect the public health of our community to merely make a statement that, in fact, requests or demands that they comply,” he said.

Several council members questioned the impact a statement would have, but none voted in opposition to releasing one.

In a recent meeting, the council also passed two ordinances requiring periodic inspections of and more regulated disease reporting from detention facilities in the city, including the GEO facility.

One of the ordinances changed city code to require all detention facilities to report health hazards to the local government.

The new ordinances came in response to a report released in March by a coalition of nonprofit organizations around the metro Denver area that claimed a variety of inadequate living conditions and medical concerns at the GEO facility.