Mesa County's district attorney has hired a prosecutor whose full-time job is to take the county's biggest highway drug cases out of state court and into federal court, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reported on Saturday, November 14. Janelle Surace, a former prosecutor in Tallahassee, Florida, and Glenwood Springs, has been sworn in as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney, and the first five cases she adopts will be ones Mesa County is dismissing in state court so they can be refiled federally.

Source: Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, via Mesa County, Nov 14, 2026

District Attorney Dan Rubinstein, whose 21st Judicial District office prosecutes cases in Mesa County, said the arrangement answers a complaint he has carried for years: drug loads stopped on Interstate 70 by local officers were being prosecuted at local expense, even when neither the drugs nor the driver had any real connection to Colorado. “It has been something that I thought was not appropriate for state court prosecution,” Rubinstein said.

Why Interstate 70 lands on Mesa County

The geography is the problem. Mesa County sits on I-70 at the Colorado–Utah border, on one of the main east–west trucking and trafficking corridors in the American West. “Mesa County happens to be on I-70 and happens to be on the Colorado to Utah border, and as a result of that I feel like we have a disproportionately large percentage of these types of cases that fall on our citizens to fund,” Rubinstein said, “whether that's the citizens of Mesa County to fund the DA's Office to prosecute them, or the citizens of Colorado to fund the Department of Corrections for the very long sentences offenders end up with.”

Many of the stops, he said, involve people who were simply passing through. “We end up with this interstate transportation from California to often Chicago or the East Coast that really has no tie to Colorado at all, and I think it's important that we prosecute those cases, I don't think it should be on Colorado citizens to fund them,” he said.

Rubinstein was clear that the point is not only longer sentences for couriers. The goal, he said, is to give investigators a federal path back up the chain: “Any time you have somebody who's in the multiple kilo or multiple pound level of drug distribution, it's something that my expectation is my lawyers are going to seek a lengthy prison sentence,” he said, adding that the aim is to see whether law enforcement can strike back at the organization behind the load, not just put a drug mule in prison.

How the fix was built

Rubinstein said he had pressed the U.S. Attorney's Office to take the cases itself, and was told it did not have the resources — and that adding federal prosecutors is not simple, because new Assistant U.S. Attorneys must be assigned through Washington, D.C. So he turned to the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, known as HIDTA, the federal program that supports enforcement in areas designated as critical drug-trafficking regions.

HIDTA already funds some law-enforcement operations in Mesa County. Rubinstein asked it to fund the prosecution side as well, HIDTA agreed, and the two offices have been working since January to stand the program up. Surace is technically an employee of Rubinstein's office, but her salary is paid by HIDTA and she files cases in federal court under the U.S. Attorney's authority, not the district attorney's.

“Everything has been going very smoothly so far, it has been wonderful to start out here while getting my security clearance approval, so I have been able to do a couple felony trials, and the on-boarding process has been great, I'm excited, I'm ready to hit the ground running adopting a couple cases federally,” Surace said. She has recently been sworn in and is going through orientation with the U.S. Attorney's Office. “Everyone collaborates and helps, it's really a team effort,” she said.

The official job description for the role, posted by the district attorney's office, shows its intended scope: prosecute federal drug-distribution cases — under the federal distribution statute, 21 U.S.C. § 841 — involving distribution quantities of fentanyl, methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine that originate in or are connected to Mesa County, and give legal advice to federal agencies including the Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security Investigations.

Source: 21st Judicial District Attorney's Office, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney job posting

The trade-offs of a borrowed prosecutor

Rubinstein acknowledged the arrangement is unusual: his employee will be supervised day to day by another agency and held to federal standards, which raises practical questions about performance reviews and quality control in a courtroom outside his building. “This is new territory for me,” he said, calling it a leap of faith that the office's partnership with the U.S. Attorney's Office will continue. For drivers on the corridor — including the large number of Punjabi and other immigrant truckers who run I-70 — the practical change is that a big-load stop in Mesa County is now more likely to become a federal case, with federal sentencing exposure, than a county one. The charges in any such case remain allegations until proven in court.