Board declares non-sanctuary status for influx of migrants

GRAND JUNCTION>> Mesa County Commissioners couldn’t have been clearer: The county is most definitely not a sanctuary for migrants who have arrived illegally.

The commissioners sent that message in two ways Tuesday, approving a resolution saying so and sending a letter to Denver Mayor Mike Johnston telling him the county isn’t going to help with his city’s recent immigration woes.

An issue came to light a week ago when a national news outlet reported that Johnston had been speaking with the cities of Grand Junction and Fort Collins about taking in some of the migrants who have been bused from the southern border to U.S. cities that have declared themselves sanctuaries, such as Denver.

But that wasn’t true, at least not in the case of Grand Junction and Mesa County, the commissioners said.

“It was Denver, not this county, that made the decision to become a sanctuary city, and now they’re faced with the consequences of that decision,” Commissioner Janet Rowland said. “The solution is not to send these folks to Mesa County. The responsible thing for Denver to do is to rescind its decision as a sanctuary city.”

The resolution and letter to Johnston says Mesa County’s first priority is to its own residents, saying that more than 46,000 county residents — one-third the county’s population — are receiving some form of public benefits, with an average of 1,500 new applications for aid each month.

Furthermore, commissioners said the county has an estimated 2,300 homeless people and is short about $400,000 in funding for its Senior Nutrition Program, also known as Meals on Wheels.

In short, the county can’t afford to help even if it wanted to, the board said.

The commissioners said that if Johnston was talking to anyone in Grand Junction or the county, it was some nonprofit group.

Although such groups may have the wherewithal to provide food and other services, they aren’t able to provide such things as shelter, health care or education, the commissioners said.

“Good intentions don’t magically create new resources, so we want to project to everybody that we can’t be an immigration sanctuary town because we don’t have the resources,” Commissioner Cody Davis said. “We don’t feel like it’s ethical or moral to project that to anyone. We’re just trying to set the record straight with the resolution and with the letter to Mike Johnston, and to nonprofits as well who may be relying on potential funding sources locally to help house, feed, all these things.”

The commissioners said they aren’t without empathy to the migrants’ plight, but they don’t want to give them false hope that the services they require are available in the city or county.

They also wanted to make it clear that they distinguish between migrants fleeing their own nations for economic or political reasons, illegally or not, and the properly documented migrant workers who come to the county to work on farms and orchards.

“To invite people to freely come without going through the process and have no provisions for shelter, food, health care, that is cruel,” Rowland said.

“It’s also important to clarify the distinction between immigrants, which is what we reference in our resolution, and migrants who are here typically for work and typically for short periods of time. I’ve heard some people suggest that someone was going to be turning away the migrant workers that come here every year to work in our farms and ranches, and that is not the case.”

Charlie Talbott, who helps run Talbott Farms in Palisade, told commissioners there also seems to be a misunderstanding that such operations could help the situation by hiring some of the new migrants, but that, too, is not so.

By law, they cannot.

Instead, they are required to go through the federal government’s H-2A program, which requires them to recruit migrant workers on a temporary basis through legal channels, providing them fair pay, shelter and transportation to and from the border to their operations.

“From the agriculture employer standpoint, there is a thought that perhaps this would provide an abundance of workers to ag employers, and that just is not true,” Talbott said.

“We and our peers in the fruitgrowing industry throughout Mesa County rely almost 100% on the H-2A program,” he added.