When gunfire erupted in front of his uncle’s business in Venezuela, it was the last straw for Jeremy Jimenez. He decided to make the long and dangerous trek to the United States.
Jimenez, 22, set out alone, but eventually made friends with others who were fleeing violence. After months of journeying through treacherous conditions in multiple countries, he made it to El Paso, Texas. There, he was told he could get a bus ticket to Denver before ultimately making his way to Chicago, where a friend of his lives.
And that’s what he did. Among a crowd of people getting food Tuesday at the migrant processing center on Denver’s Auraria Campus, Jimenez said he wants people to know he’s been treated well and welcomed in Denver. He wants to remain in the U.S. and work.
But for now, “I’m just taking it day by day” and making “small plans,” he said in Spanish. “If you have (too many) plans, it can be stressful and weigh you down.”
As the federal COVID-era immigration policy known as Title 42 ended Thursday, leaders of cities and immigrant-serving nonprofits across the United States had been preparing for an anticipated influx of migrants fleeing violence, instability and hunger in Latin America.
But the surge of people seeking refuge came earlier than expected, and Denver, like other cities, has once again found itself unprepared to handle — and pay for — the significant number of people arriving in the city each day needing assistance, even if temporarily. Colorado’s city, state and congressional leaders are calling for more resources from the federal government to address a growing humanitarian crisis, or, as Mayor Michael Hancock has said, Denver will have to make some tough choices.
The city has helped 9,320 migrants since December, according to available data, with hundreds arriving daily last week, as they had last winter before the numbers leveled off earlier this year. Immigration advocates worry there’s not been enough long-term planning by Denver in preparation for new arrivals and for coordinating assistance beyond just providing emergency shelter.
“We’re at a breaking point again and Washington can’t keep kicking the can down the road while we’re stuck in the cycle of emergencies,” Hancock said Thursday. “It is simply not sustainable.”
Title 42, which was meant to stop the spread of COVID-19, had allowed authorities to expel back into Mexico migrants who had come to the southern border, denying them the right to seek asylum. But there were no real consequences if migrants were caught illegally crossing into the country, so people tried entering repeatedly.
Under new rules proposed by the Biden administration, people are now able to apply for asylum, but those caught crossing the border without authorization will again face imprisonment and fines if caught. With asylum once again available, immigration experts expect more people to come to the border seeking that legal path to residency.
Denver leaders didn’t anticipate the number of people crossing the border — a monthslong process including travel through Central American countries — and landing in Colorado would increase so drastically so quickly. The latest “conventional wisdom,” Hancock said, had predicted cities like Denver weren’t likely to feel the effects of Title 42’s lapse until at least June.
Leaders of metro-area nonprofits have argued that the people seeking asylum aren’t leaving their home countries because of a policy change, but rather because conditions have worsened, and that Denver should have been more prepared for the most recent influx, particularly as hundreds — and then thousands — of migrants began making their way to the city at the end of last year.
“We didn’t know exactly when people were gonna start making their way to Denver, (but) we knew that eventually, that was going to happen,” said Andrea Loya, executive director of Casa de Paz. The nonprofit primarily helps immigrants released from detention in Aurora but stepped in to help with the migrant arrivals in Denver.
Why are they coming to Denver?
Migrants first began arriving in large numbers from buses in El Paso to Denver in December of last year without prior notification to city officials.
It was not a coordinated political effort, and asylum seekers who spoke to The Denver Post last week said they came to the city because they heard from others that people here could assist them in getting to their final destinations. Sometimes they would work to save up money for bus tickets that would take them closer to cities where they already had friends or family.
None of the migrants who spoke to The Post said they planned to stay in Denver.
Carlos Vasquez, 22, left Venezuela in September but didn’t make it to Denver until Monday. He had to put his trip on pause as he worked in Panama, Costa Rica and Mexico to make money — construction, painting, washing cars, whatever job was available — before moving on to his next stop.
Vasquez said he’s afraid for his family back home, but the best thing he can do for them is to work in the U.S. and eventually bring them to stay. He was getting ready to leave for New York on Tuesday. Like other immigrants who were in El Paso, he crossed the border from Juarez, Mexico.
“It was hard to live. It was hard to work,” he said of his home country. “It didn’t feel stable.”
Bus tickets from El Paso to Denver are often cheaper than if the migrants were to buy tickets directly to their final destinations. Plus, Denver is centrally located, Loya said, making it an ideal place to get to other cities on the East or West coasts.
By the time Yelitza Bustamante arrived in El Paso, she had run out of money. The 25-year-old chef left her 6-year-old daughter with her mom in Venezuela in hopes of making money and establishing a life for them in the United States.
Bustamante left Venezuela with $3,000, but between giving money to coyotes (people smuggling immigrants across the border), being forced to pay bribes in Guatemala and getting robbed, there was nothing left. Her mom wired her $90 to get a bus ticket to Denver.
From there, she sought assistance at the migrant processing center on the Auraria Campus, where obtained a bus ticket to New York because she had a friend who was waiting for her.
It’s no secret that Denver and Colorado have become more friendly to immigrants in recent years, regardless of their legal status, and limit local cooperation with federal immigration authorities. But Hancock calls the claim that Denver has somehow brought this situation upon itself because of its laws a divisive and cynical criticism, driven by politics.
Instead, he said, it’s because of conditions in Latin America that are driving droves of desperate people to the U.S. border as well as political dysfunction in Washington, D.C., that has prevented changes to federal immigration law and a broken asylum system.
“Denver’s reputation as a welcoming and humane community is not the reason we have a hemispheric migration crisis,” Hancock said.
New policies
President Joe Biden’s administration has introduced new regulations to try to curb border crossings to replace Title 42: People who show up to the United States-Mexico border seeking asylum without having first applied online or asking for protection in other countries will be denied entry and banned from applying for five years. Some exceptions will be made, including for unaccompanied children, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
As seen in the years when Title 42 was in effect, border crossings have been at all-time highs despite restrictions. And more than 10,000 people were attempting to cross the border daily before the expiration of Title 42 and the new rules took effect, according to Reuters.
While it had been legal to make it into the U.S. and then apply for asylum within a year of arrival, it still wasn’t an easy path, and immigrants often spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on attorneys to represent them. There are more than 1.3 million pending asylum applications, according to the American Immigration Council, and the average time it takes for these cases to be processed in immigration court is more than four years.
Many asylum seekers do pay attention to policy changes as they plan their harrowing journeys across multiple countries in the hopes of better lives for themselves and their families, said Marie Price, professor of geography and international affairs at George Washington University.
“Migrants are aware of the rules and the changes,” she said. “There is an urgency now. People aren’t sure what’s going to happen in the next days and weeks as the Biden administration tries to get this new plan in place.”
Not enough resources
Since Feb. 27, Denver had been leasing space on the Auraria Campus to serve as a processing center for migrants who arrived via bus at Union Station, mostly from El Paso.
There, nonprofits and city staff assessed their needs, provided them food, helped them get bus tickets to other cities and directed them to temporary shelter options. The city’s current limit on shelter stays is back up to a month, but that may change as the number of people needing shelter increases.
Many of the hundreds of migrants waiting at the processing center Tuesday were fleeing the humanitarian and economic crisis in Venezuela, which has led more than 7 million people to leave the country since 2015. An unstable government has imposed extrajudicial executions, jailed political opponents and violently quashed protests, according to Human Rights Watch. The country’s failing economy has pushed millions into poverty and made it impossible to access food, safe water, education and health care.
Venezuelan migrants who arrived in Denver described not being able to find enough work to pay for food. If they did find work, there was no food to buy. There was no stable education for their children or hope their futures would be any better. If they spoke ill of the president or the government, they were subjected to violence or jail.
“The situation in Venezuela is an economic crisis that is very hard — how do I explain? It’s very painful,” Bustamante said. “You work 12 hours, 14 hours but it’s not enough. Your son, your daughter, asks you for something to eat but you don’t have anything to give them because you don’t make enough money.”
So they left. For months, they traveled by foot and bus. They crossed borders and the 60-mile span of deadly jungle on the border between Panama and Colombia, walking in knee-deep mud and passing the bodies of other migrants lying on the side of the trail. They survived robbers who preyed on migrants and paid bribes to keep from being arrested. Some became survivors of assault and rape on their journeys while others didn’t make it.
“There are so many dead — dead children, dead pregnant women,” Bustamante said. “You see so many things that are out of the world on the road in the jungle.” Bustmanate herself was robbed at gunpoint and narrowly escaped a sexual assault when two people intervened.
Last week, so many people turned up in Denver, the city — which does not get prior notification of arrivals — ran out of shelter space as officials had to work to find more options for people. Some migrants slept in the processing center parking garage, others in an on-campus event space or in churches. Staff ran out of food and water.
On days with nice weather, advocates walked migrants downtown to homeless shelters. That was harder to do on the cold and rainy days later in the week, when the homeless shelters were more full, so other temporary locations were set up or expanded.
The migrant intake center has since moved temporarily to a city facility that’s not being disclosed for safety reasons. But, on Thursday, Hancock implored faith communities to open up their places of worship to house migrants. So far, Denver officials have not announced plans to reopen emergency shelters in city recreation centers that were shut down earlier this year, but there are currently five city-run shelters.
Even though most of the migrants who arrive get bus tickets to go to other locations — at their request or based upon immigration appointments — there are only so many tickets available each day. So, those hundreds of migrants need a place to stay for a few days as do the new people arriving each day.
Denver remains under a declared state of emergency, allowing the city to apply for grant funding. The city also reactivated its emergency operations, which had shut down March 3, on Thursday.
It’s not just Denver
Denver is among numerous cities grappling with an increasing number of migrants.
“The border has become the Ellis Island of the 21st century,” George Washington University’s Price said.
The mayor of Chicago on Wednesday declared a state of emergency and said that city had reached a “breaking point” as hundreds more people arrive daily. With shelters full, recent arrivals are sleeping in police stations and city officials are looking at repurposing closed big-box stores for shelter. New York City officials, too, say their city has fully exhausted its resources and is looking for spare space in city-owned buildings to use as shelters. In the border town of El Paso, authorities closed a downtown street and stopped streetcar service as crowds outside a church serving migrants overflowed into the roadways.
The United States is just one of the countries absorbing large numbers of migrants, Price said. Cities across the Western Hemisphere have taken in people fleeing crumbling societies, like those in Venezuela and Haiti. More than 2 million Venezuelans have moved to neighboring Colombia in the past five years — quadruple the size of the entire Venezuelan population now living in the much larger United States.
Colombia has created a system where Venezuelan migrants are able to quickly obtain a 10-year work visa, allowing them to find employment, Price said. The president of Colombia has presented the migration as an influx of workers that are beneficial to the country, she said.
“If the narrative is, ‘This is a crisis,’ and you’re treating people as if they are vermin, you’re going to get one reaction,” Price said. “But if you say, ‘Hey, these are working-age people, they bring skills and ideas,’ cities can frame it that way and get a positive response.”
Cities that are receiving migrants need to create a long-term plan to help connect people with work, housing, language classes and health care, Price said. Most migrants are not eligible for government social services and federal regulations don’t allow them to obtain work permits for at least six months after applying for asylum.
“People are just released into the country and just have to find their way,” she said.
Is there a long-term plan?
Leaders of some nonprofits have expressed frustration by what they say is a lack of long-term planning on Denver’s part, particularly because advocacy groups have been warning about an influx of migrants even before last December.
In November, Denver-area nonprofit groups were hearing from organizations like Annunciation House in El Paso that they were at capacity and people were trying to find other places to stay. Denver’s immigrant groups have been working with city and state officials for about a year on strategy.
Despite the scrutiny, Denver Office of Emergency Management spokesperson Mikayla Ortega said it’s important for everyone to know that the city hasn’t stopped serving migrants since Dec. 8.
“Every single day we have showed up,” Ortega said, adding, “We’re doing the best we can with the resources we have.”
What happens if more resources don’t come but the migrants continue? That’s not clear, and Ortega said she’s not sure what the solution will be if that happens.
Vive Wellness partnered with nonprofit Papagayo in Denver to assist migrants who were leaving shelters and planning to stay in Denver — about 10% of arrivals in the winter surge, Vive Executive Director Yoli Casas estimated. The organizations helped 850 people find housing and 210 families sign leases.
Despite Denver getting caught off guard by the large number of arrivals at the end of last year and early this year, Casas said the city and state stepped up and responded as well as they could. But when the number of migrant arrivals in Denver dwindled in March and April, advocates said the city should have had a better strategy ready for when the arrivals would go up again. The city doesn’t appear to have a long-term plan in place even for a small number of migrants showing up, let alone this many, Casas said.
Casa de Paz’s Loya said officials could have previously identified empty buildings to use as shelters or collected nonperishable food items and water bottles so they wouldn’t have run out.
“Just knowing what we know about how people see Denver — which I’m happy about — it’s seen as a safe place or a welcoming place or a sanctuary, that’s more reason for us to have a plan,” Casas added.
The mayor has repeatedly said Denver is not set up for this kind of humanitarian crisis, that city resources are stretched to the limit, and that leaders have made adjustments to their response since the first arrivals of migrants. Denver has also taken lessons learned from border cities and applied them here, Hancock said.
“This is not what cities do,” he said. “I don’t know a city in the country, even border cities, that are as prepared as you would expect us to be for this sort of thing. … I don’t know what perfection looks like in a humanitarian crisis. It doesn’t exist. You try to respond the best you can.”
Denver pleads for help
The state has contributed nearly $8.4 million to the response and Denver more than $15.7 million since December of last year, with the largest share of that, more than $6.9 million, going toward personnel costs, according to the city’s Department of Finance.
The money for the response had all come from the city’s general fund budget so far, but now the City Council is considering approving the use of $11 million from the city’s contingency fund to support the efforts. In 2023, the fund had about $32.5 million, which is used for unexpected expenses.
Meanwhile, Denver continues to apply for federal and state funding and is asking for additional resources and logistical support. As of April 21, the state reimbursed the city $2.5 million and awarded Denver a $1 million grant, according to Department of Human Services spokesperson Victoria Aguilar. At the federal level, as of last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had committed to reimbursing $909,000 to the city.
Ortega said one of the problems is that FEMA is set up to disburse funding to respond to disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes or flooding, not humanitarian crises. So while the city is continuing to ask for more funding, it will be difficult.
That’s why Hancock, Gov. Jared Polis and Colorado’s congressional leaders have been urging federal intervention for non-border cities like Denver. In addition to a letter Hancock and Polis sent to the Department of Homeland Security last week, Five members of Colorado’s Congressional delegation sent a letter to Biden asking for support for interior cities like Denver that have been receiving an influx of migrants. And Hancock signed on to a letter with other mayors imploring Washington for more assistance.
“We’re going to provide support, all the support that we can right now, but if it’s only us and a handful of nonprofits doing anything about it, that support is going to become insufficient very quickly,” Hancock said. “We’re sending out the distress signal. We need our federal and congressional leaders to hear it and to respond.”
The Denver mayor is also asking the federal government to suspend rules that don’t allow asylum seekers to work right away, especially with a worker shortage across the state. Ultimately, Hancock said Denver should not be spending taxpayer dollars on a federal responsibility.
“Cities don’t have a say in immigration policies,” Price said. “Most city leaders will give you an earful about what they would like to see — they need money.”
For now, Denver keeps seeing more people each day as Venezuelans continue to face violence at home. On Thursday, 173 migrants arrived. On Friday, another 117.
A 9-year-old in the dark red princess dress was one of those migrants on Wednesday as she stood outside a parking garage with her family, waiting for bus tickets that would be the last step of their 8-month journey walking from Venezuela.
“Not very bad, not very good,” Victoria Oropeza said of her family’s long walk.
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