The question for cities: to help, or not?
Hundreds of residents crowd meeting in Lakewood to urge against sanctuary policies
They came by the hundreds, crowding into a fourth-floor room in a nondescript office building in Lakewood — their message loud and earnest.
“We do not want to be Denver,” former Councilwoman Mary Janssen told the gathering. “I live in Lakewood. When did we decide to give away our immigration laws?”
Last week’s hastily arranged meeting in an office park near the Colorado Mills shopping center was the latest convulsion amid an ongoing and unprecedented migrant crisis in neighboring Denver, where nearly 40,000 new arrivals to the city have been processed over the last 13 months at a cost of more than $42 million.
The massive surge at the U.S. southern border has forced Colorado communities beyond Denver to respond to the crisis, too, as migrants leave the Mile High City to join family members or seek job opportunities across the state.
Some places have been more welcoming than others.
In Carbondale, dozens of Venezuelan migrants arrived suddenly in town last fall and were given shelter in public buildings after families were found sleeping under a bridge. Fort Collins has welcomed migrants from 32 countries in recent years, prompting its elected leaders to establish an Immigration Legal Fund to help the newcomers with asylum cases, acquiring work permits and handling deportation hearings.
The fund was launched in the summer of 2021 as a $150,000 pilot program, said Leo Escalante, a liaison in Fort Collins’ Neighborhood Services Department. The City Council renewed it through the end of this year with another $500,000 injection.
“This has to be a shared responsibility to help our immigrant communities among as many communities as possible,” he said.
But not all communities in Colorado see it that way.
In October, the Adams County Health Department held a special meeting to discuss Denver’s decision — later reversed — to house migrants in an Adams County hotel with little warning. The department said any migrant shelters need to meet health and safety standards to minimize the risk of the spread of infectious diseases.
That same month, Douglas County commissioners passed a resolution saying the county would not serve as a “sheltering solution” for migrants from Denver. On Jan. 31, El Paso County followed suit.
“El Paso County will not be designated as a sanctuary county,” county spokeswoman Natalie Sosa told The Denver Post. “We support immigration laws and we believe in the rule of law and will work to keep our community safe by not inviting individuals who are not here legally.”
Closer to Denver, a rumor in late December that migrants would be sent from the city to a Wheat Ridge hotel prompted a group of residents to gather together at an emergency meeting. Denver denied any plans to send migrants to Wheat Ridge, according to a Fox31 report.
As the new year dawned, the Lakewood City Council agreed to talk to Denver about how Colorado’s fifthlargest city could help its neighbor with its migrant challenge. The council will receive a report on those discussions at its meeting Monday, which is expected to draw a large turnout.
“I think it’s obvious, wherever you sit on the political divide on this, that we’re reaching a point where this can’t just be a Denver-only issue,” Lakewood Councilman Roger Low said at a Jan. 8 meeting. “Being a good neighbor means that if you notice that your neighbor is having an emergency you don’t shut the door, you don’t turn out the lights, you don’t just hide under the pillow and hope it’s all going to go away.
“You go out and ask,
‘How can I help?’”
At what cost?
That the migrant influx in Denver has reached a critical level is borne out by the increasingly ardent pleas from Mayor Mike Johnston to the federal government to provide more help. Johnston led a delegation of mayors from New York, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles to the White House in November to ask for more assistance managing and supporting the newcomers.
The number of arrivals to Denver has risen so significantly in recent months that hundreds of migrants set up tents outside as they time out of the shelters. As of Friday, nearly 3,600 migrants were living in city shelters.
Johnston recently asked city departments and agencies to identify potential budget cuts in response to the ongoing crisis. The mayor on Friday announced the first round of cuts, which add up to $5 million: Denver Motor Vehicle offices will close for a week at a time on a rotating basis, recreation centers will reduce hours and the parks department will slash programming by 25%.
Johnston fears that if the situation continues at this pace in 2024, the city may be forced to cut as much as $180 million — or 10% to 15% — from its annual budget.
That’s not a situation El Paso County wants to face.
“Our observation of cities such as Denver and Chicago, which have adopted such policies, reveals a clear pattern — the overwhelming strain on local resources, the overextension of services and the substantial financial burden on their budgets, and a conflicting message that our laws don’t matter,” said Sosa, the county spokeswoman.
The conservative county, home to Colorado Springs, further urged Denver to “reconsider its status as a sanctuary city for the sake of those who are being lured under false pretenses, and neighboring cities and counties, like ours, whose residents will likely feel the burden as this emergency spills over into our boundaries.”
The term sanctuary city generally refers to municipalities that refuse to cooperate with immigration authorities. While Denver has never declared itself as such, it was called out by name by the Trump administration in 2017 as a sanctuary city when the administration was considering withholding federal funds to cities that didn’t toe the line on immigration enforcement.
Colorado Springs received its first busload of 21 migrants earlier this month, prompting Mayor Yemi Mobolade to take to Facebook to pledge to stay ahead of the issue and prevent it from spiraling out of control. He declined to comment for this story.
“It’s also important that you know it’s my duty to care for our residents first,” Mobolade, himself an immigrant from Nigeria, said in his address. “Not that the migrants coming through the southern border do not matter, but I signed up to be a mayor of Colorado Springs residents.”
So-called sanctuary policies, said Douglas County Commissioner Abe Laydon, do more harm than good.