As Denver Aids Arriving Migrants Its Unhoused Residents Feel Left Behind — ProPublica

For months, Venezuelan migrants had been arriving in Denver with nowhere to go. At first, they came in groups small enough to escape notice by most. A few immigrant aid groups with connections on the U.S.-Mexico border warned city officials to prepare for more but were ignored.

Then, in December 2022, a busload of about 90 migrants stepped into the freezing night, bound for Denver Rescue Mission. The shelter, which serves the city’s growing unhoused community, was full.

City officials and local aid organizations scrambled, filling a recreation center with beds to keep migrants from sleeping on the streets. A week later, their growing numbers prompted an emergency declaration, freeing up state and federal resources to help. The city filled a second recreation center with beds and transformed a third into an intake center. By the end of the month, city shelters housed nearly 500 migrants.

It was just the beginning.

Most of the migrants crossed into the U.S. in El Paso, Texas, which is an easy bus ride away from Denver compared with Chicago or New York. Through the winter and early spring, they arrived in the high-plains city largely on their own accord, drawn by word of mouth that Denver had jobs.

Then in May 2023, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott began sending busloads of migrants to Denver, seeking to score political points by forcing liberal cities to share in what he saw as a burden being foisted on border states.

Mike Johnston became Denver’s mayor two months later. An ambitious politician with big ideas and a flair for poignant speeches, Johnston was a fluent Spanish speaker who had been principal of a high school with mostly immigrant students. He was determined to do right by the people arriving in his city, the “newcomers,” as the city took to calling them. If Abbott thought he was sending a “plague” to “somehow destroy” Denver, Johnston said, the city would prove the migrants’ arrival to be the opposite. He believed that with a little help getting settled, they would fuel Denver’s economy and enrich its culture as generations of immigrants had before.

As Johnston mobilized the city to care for the newcomers, he was also grappling with a growing unhoused population. More than 5,800 people were experiencing homelessness; many lived in downtown encampments. Johnston had declared a state of emergency on his first day in office, and promised to house 1,000 people by the end of 2023.

But by the following January, Denver was feeling the full weight of being a welcoming city. More than 300 migrants a day were rolling into Denver, just over 4,000 were living in shelters and hundreds more were sleeping on the street. The city had spent $42 million to help them, with no sign of meaningful alternatives from the federal government. And with record numbers of asylum seekers arriving at the border, it seemed likely more would make their way to Denver. Local newscasters called it a crisis. Aid workers reported flaring tensions between migrants and the unhoused at food banks and shelters.

This was the moment that Monica Navarro and her family arrived.

She and her partner, Miker Silva, had just $10 between them. But because Denver wasn’t leaving migrants without support, the couple and their two children, ages 13 and 9, were quickly given a free room at the Comfort Inn. They could stay for six weeks. The city hoped that would be enough for the family to find their own housing, either in Denver or elsewhere. Navarro and Silva had no idea how they would support themselves, but they were grateful for the help and determined to make it on their own.

“We came here to make a new life, not so much for ourselves but for our daughters,” Navarro said.

Tim Rogers, a Denver native, was riveted by media coverage of the arriving migrants. The stories focused not just on what the mayor was spending, but on how the community was rallying to support newcomers. Residents delivered food, knitted winter hats and even opened spare bedrooms to them.

Watching these families shuttled into hotels and shelters, Rogers couldn’t help but think about his own decade-long battle with homelessness. He had nothing against the migrants and grasped their plight in a way only someone who’s lived on the streets can. But he had spent years on a waiting list for housing assistance. He still had friends living on the streets. And he couldn’t reconcile how the city would spend so heavily on the newcomers when its homeless population had long been desperate for that kind of help.

“It ain’t fair,” he said. “We got guys doing what they’re supposed to do, seeing their case managers and trying to get housing. If they ask to get a pair of shoes they get a big runaround.”

Even Johnston wondered how long the city could keep it up. At the end of 2023, hundreds of migrants who had timed out of the shelters had erected a sprawling tent encampment, where families with small children were living in the dead of winter. Under mounting political and humanitarian pressure, he organized a city effort to disband the camp and in one day got all of the migrants sheltered again.

But as Johnston touted the city’s accomplishment to reporters, two more buses pulled up with more newcomers in need of help.

“‘It was like, ‘Will there ever be an end?’” Johnston told ProPublica. “That was a moment where, even when we were creating heroic solutions, we weren’t sure how sustainable they would be.”

A Sanctuary City

Colorado was once openly hostile to immigrants. English-only and show-me-your-papers laws were strictly enforced. Businesses faced stiff penalties for hiring undocumented workers, and immigration officers routinely raided restaurants, farms and factories across the state.

Then, about 15 years ago, immigrant rights activists pushed back, organizing campaigns to shield migrants from the raids and galvanizing support to repeal the anti-immigration laws. The state’s Latino population grew by 25% in the last decade. Activists organized immigrants and residents alike to support pro-immigration policies. Over the next decade, Denver adopted some of the most progressive protections in the country. Local police are barred from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on civil deportations or detainers, and undocumented migrants can’t be arrested based on their status. During the Trump administration, churches and community aid groups formed networks to host refugees and protect people from deportation.

Both the community and Denver’s largely Democratic elected leaders were proud of its reputation as a sanctuary city (they prefer the term “welcoming city”). When Abbott began busing migrants to Denver, they weren’t about to be cowed.

But the newcomers weren’t like past immigrants, who typically chose a destination based on the advice of family or friends who had established lives in the U.S. and could help with a job and place to stay. Such people arrived in immigrant neighborhoods and agricultural towns without drawing much attention and with most everything they needed.

The Venezuelans had instead been driven from their country in overwhelming numbers by the almost complete collapse of the economy, arriving conspicuously by the busload and without a network to put them on a path to self-sufficiency. The Biden administration lifted pandemic-era restrictions on border crossings for such asylum-seekers with no federal plan for their resettlement during the years-long wait to have their cases heard.

As a result, they ended up concentrating in a few cities. Denver was one of a handful of places where the number of new migrants commanded an exceptional and visible government response. Taxpayers had to step in for missing family and federal government support, a dynamic that seemed to harden public opinion against immigration in other Colorado cities and the rest of the country.

And in many ways, Denver was in no position to take in thousands of new residents. Rents are high; housing prices have soared; and the job market is tighter than in many U.S. cities. The newcomers needed far more than the city had set aside to help its existing residents contend with those realities.

Since Denver opened the first emergency shelter, it has provided assistance — from a bus ticket to another city, to six months of free rent — to nearly 43,000 migrants at a cost of $76 million. That’s in addition to the $155 million the city is projected to spend on Johnston’s program to shelter the unhoused swept from downtown encampments.

“Cities have now had to air their dirty laundry, that they’ve never figured out how to deal with their unhoused population. They’ve never figured out how to properly serve their undocumented population,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “It’s unfortunate that these communities end up sort of pitted against each other, rather than us having the bigger conversation of ‘how do we make sure that housing is accessible for all people and affordable for all people?’”

“We Migrants Did Not Come To Be a Burden for You”

Navarro and Silva met years ago at a party in the Venezuelan state of Miranda. They fell in love and built a life together but never married. Their hometown of Cua wasn’t far from the beach, where they would picnic and wade in the warm Caribbean Sea. She did promotions for well-known brands and he worked as a bricklayer. Their first child died as an infant. They had two more daughters — whose names are tattooed over Navarro’s heart — before the country’s economy collapsed. Once it did, everything they needed to do to raise their girls became impossible. Hyperinflation put buying food, diapers and medicine out of reach. When a clinic offered free sterilization to women, Navarro decided to go even though she still wanted a son.

“It was very difficult to sustain a child in Venezuela,” said Navarro, whose dark eyes and warm smile are framed by a cloud of curly hair. “There were no diapers. There was no milk. The little children got too sick. So I decided not to have any more babies.”

In 2018, they left for Peru, but after five years the economy there also turned sour. They decided to follow the millions of others on the journey to seek asylum in the United States: making the treacherous hike through the Darién jungle, encountering militias who stole everything, clinging to the roof of a train through Mexico. Penniless at points along the way, Navarro sold candy on the streets. She watched over her daughters as they slept on the ground outside gas stations. But Navarro knew they were among the lucky ones. She had passed the bodies of migrants, including children, who had died attempting to reach America.

As the family traveled, Navarro searched social media for a good place in the United States to settle, using terms such as “jobs,” “good apartments,” “good economy.” She watched TikTok videos from migrants who had successfully settled in Denver and decided that’s where her family would go.

Instead of attempting to slip across the border illegally, the family followed the Biden administration’s guidance to use a smartphone app called CBP One to make an appointment to enter the United States and file an asylum claim. They crossed the border at Calexico, California, and were immediately eligible for Social Security cards and work authorization because they had used CBP One. Other asylum-seekers who didn’t use CBP One typically have to wait six months.

The couple didn’t have friends or relatives to turn to for help as past immigrants had, but they received critical assistance from an array of other sources. An immigrant aid group paid to fly the family to Denver, where the city set them up in a shelter and paid the fees for their work authorization cards. Volunteers helped them fill out the seven-page applications written in English.

They were in a safe and stable place for the moment. But they only had six weeks to find work, otherwise they would end up on the streets as they’d seen happen to so many others. “Many of them ran out of time and slept in the cars, or you saw them leaving the hotel and looking for a tent to sleep,” Navarro said.

After a week at the shelter, Silva met a construction worker at Popeye’s who threw the family a lifeline: a spot for Silva on his crew. It wasn’t a steady job but it delivered something as important as income. Local nonprofits were providing rent assistance to migrants who had a proof-of-employment letter. Silva got one from the lead contractor, ensuring his family’s rent would be covered for six weeks.

In March, the family moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a sprawling complex of 1970s low-rise buildings in Aurora, a suburb just outside Denver. The lawns were well kept, and the managers were diligent about the rules. They once fined Navarro for putting a grill on her porch. Most of the neighbors were immigrants. Navarro’s daughters had good schools to attend. The rent was $1,800 a month.

The quiet apartment complex in Aurora bore no resemblance to the fabricated picture Donald Trump would paint of their new hometown. During the presidential debate in September, the Republican presidential nominee described Aurora as overrun by Venezuelan prison gangs, making the city a focus of anti-immigrant furor. Local officials described Venezuelan gang crime in the city as concerning but isolated. The most excitement Navarro had seen at her complex was when a neighbor accidentally set her kitchen on fire.

Once settled, she tapped into a network of community members who were helping migrants. Through Facebook, she found free furniture for the apartment: a charcoal sofa, a beanbag chair, an oversized mirror in the living room and bookshelves that hold brightly colored flowers. She also befriended two women – members of the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church — from the Facebook groups. Janice Paul would send odd jobs their way. Susie Pappas would drive Navarro to food banks when Silva’s checks didn’t cover the bills.

“They are my angels,” Navarro said.

When the six weeks of rent assistance ran out, the couple had difficulty meeting their expenses. Silva had fairly steady work with the man he had met at Popeye’s, but Navarro’s work authorization card had been lost in the mail. Even with Pappas’ help battling the federal agency in charge of replacing it, the process was dragging on. Navarro grew anxious over her inability to help support her family.

Then, the man stopped paying Silva. He looked for a new job but finding one wasn’t as easy as TikTok had led them to believe.

Silva networked with their immigrant neighbors and stood outside hardware stores hoping to be picked up. Paul helped him write a resume and submit job applications. The family fell behind on their electricity bill. And then their rent. In August, Paul lent the couple $1,000.

Johnston insisted that expediting work authorization and matching migrants with employers was key to moving newcomers off city assistance. On paper, jobs abound: The region’s employment website lists 4,800 more openings than applicants. But Silva’s experience didn’t reflect Johnston’s rhetoric.

Silva also wasn’t having much luck in Denver’s “shadow economy” of cash jobs, which had supported immigrants before the newcomers’ arrival. It seemed saturated by the sheer number of new arrivals. Migrants without work authorization huddled in Home Depot parking lots and stood at intersections washing windshields for tips. Abbott’s buses exacerbated this. He only sent migrants who weren’t yet eligible for work cards.

Navarro was grateful for “the support and the love” she found in Denver, but she didn’t migrate to the city to rely on the government or the kindness of strangers.

“We migrants did not come to be a burden for you,” she said.

In August, the family caught a break. Three weeks after Pappas wrote U.S. Rep. Jason Crow’s office asking for help with Navarro’s work authorization, a new card landed in her mailbox.

“I Wish I Was The Mayor. I’d Switch It All Around”

A blue canvas fishing chair in the corner of Rogers’ sunny apartment is a reminder of his old life on the streets of Denver. A reminder to keep doing the hard work of staying sober.

Since becoming housed, Rogers has built new routines. He still rises early, but now he makes coffee in his own kitchen and from the couch organizes his day with local TV news playing in the background. Sometimes he visits his mother. Other days, he’s with his daughter and grandson — relationships built anew after his drinking put them on pause.

Rogers, a slight man with wiry muscles built over decades of manual labor, moved into the apartment just before migrants from Venezuela began rolling into Denver. He watched the city mobilize to keep migrants sheltered and fed in a way it never had for him or his friends.

“I’m sorry to say it, I know we’re all human, but to me it ain’t fair,” he said.

“Back in our day, you’d go up to a cop and he’d say, ‘We got a place for you,’” meaning jail, Rogers said. “They never threw us on a bus and took us to a motel.”

Rogers grew up with well-to-do parents, who divorced when he was young. His drinking started early. But he almost always held down a job — at a lube shop or as a machinist making rifle scopes. He lived with his mother for a long time, but his drinking was hard on her and he felt it was best to leave.

Rogers’ time on the street runs together in his mind and he has difficulty putting dates to significant events in his life. But he estimates he spent more than a decade living outside. For a long while, he slept in what he called “the cubby” — a concrete entryway on the side of a historic mansion turned office building near City Park. To avoid bothering the office workers, he left before sunup and returned after sundown. But the owner of the building turned out to be kind, leaving food and plastic bags to keep Rogers’ belongings dry.

The cubby was near his “office,” Ready Man day labor on Colfax Avenue.

“I built that hospital — well, helped build it,” he said, pointing to St. Joseph’s, which was under construction from 2012 to 2014. Rogers ran a jackhammer, cutting down concrete floors and carrying the pieces out in a wheelbarrow. After a day of hard labor, he’d return to his bed on a sidewalk.

Rogers was well known to downtown outreach workers, one of whom put him on the waiting list for a housing voucher. He spent years going to required check-ins, but according to eligibility assessments, Rogers was never quite vulnerable enough to qualify.

In February 2022, his caseworker presented a different option: an ice fishing tent at a safe camp run by a nonprofit. There, he became friends with Ian Stitt, the camp manager, who would help put him on the road to sobriety.

Rogers kept working. He also kept drinking — often with his buddies sitting around in canvas fishing chairs — until Stitt found him in such a stupor he called paramedics to take him to a detox center. Rogers blew a .40, a blood alcohol level that could kill a person less accustomed to drinking.

This was Rogers’ rock bottom. His sobriety didn’t happen all at once, but he took medication to reduce cravings and talked to a therapist regularly. Unexpectedly, other doors opened.

“Come on, you’ve got a meeting,” Stitt told Rogers one morning at the camp.

“Well, I’m getting kicked out, I guess,” he thought as he followed Stitt.

It wasn’t bad news. Federal pandemic relief money had funded more vouchers than usual, and Rogers was getting one. His excitement was mixed with self-doubt.

“I thought, ‘Knowing me, I’ll screw this up, too,’” he said.

Housed and sober, Rogers volunteers on Friday nights at the Network Coffee House, where Stitt is now the executive director. He serves hot brew to people living on the streets, including some of his old “sidekicks” from his unhoused days. There’s Patrick, who Rogers worked with at Ready Man and who still lives outside. Another friend has an apartment but can’t afford food on his disability checks.

“Did you check in on Jimmy?” Rogers asks Stitt as he changes a coffee filter. Jimmy is one of Rogers’ “sidekicks” from the safe camp. He, too, got a voucher and beat an addiction, but had started using again, Rogers heard. Stitt says he hasn’t had a chance to catch up with Jimmy.

It’s tough for Rogers to see his friends still in need.

“I wish I was the mayor,” he said. “I’d switch it all around.”

“It Was Not Sustainable”

As the staggering number of buses rolled into Denver last winter, nearly overwhelming the city’s shelters, Johnston put his hope for more resources in an immigration and border security reform bill in Congress. He wanted three things: faster work authorization so migrants could be self-sufficient; more money for cities responding to the crisis; and a system that would distribute asylum-seekers across the country, instead of concentrating them in a few cities.

But Trump, hoping to campaign on the crisis, successfully pressured GOP lawmakers to kill the measure. Denver was on its own.

Johnston called a news conference to announce that in order to afford his migrant resettlement efforts, he’d have to make significant budget cuts: reduced hours at recreation centers, closed motor-vehicle offices, cuts to recreation programming and elimination of the city’s flower-planting program. Fighting back tears, Johnston implored the community not to blame the newcomers for the budget cuts.

“I want it to be clear to Denverites who is not responsible for this crisis that we’re in: the folks who have walked 3,000 miles to get to this city,” he said. “They have asked for nothing but the ability to work and support themselves.”

But Denver was about to roll up its welcome mat. In March, a video surfaced of Johnston’s political director imploring a group of migrants at the city’s intake center to leave Denver. The city would pay for bus tickets. “The opportunities are over,” the staffer said.

About a week later, Johnston announced that arriving migrants would get a bus ticket to a new city or 72 hours in a shelter. Gone was the 42-day stay in a hotel. City representatives traveled to El Paso to spread the word: Denver was no longer offering long-term shelter and housing. The city had already begun closing its hotel shelters.

“We were to the point where we are out of shelters. We are out of space. We are out of staff. We are burning through cash to keep the shelters open and running. And it was not sustainable,” city spokesperson Jon Ewing said.

Johnston was acknowledging the city couldn’t continue to house thousands of people indefinitely. But he wasn’t abandoning the effort entirely. Instead, he came up with a plan to provide more services to a smaller number of migrants. The 850 in this new program would have their rent and living expenses covered for six months — not six weeks. They’d also get English classes and job training.

He didn’t call it a surrender, though some of his critics did. Instead, he framed it as an evolution to a more sustainable program — one that other cities could replicate.

“We can’t solve this for the whole country” by taking in more newcomers than the city is able to support, Johnston told ProPublica. “But we can help figure out a system that could work for the whole country if we all adopted it.”

By summer, it was still too early to tell whether Johnston’s new resettlement program was any better than the city’s initial approach. Participants were just starting their English classes and job training. And now migrants arriving in the city for the first time had much less support. Outside city hall, there were signs that while Johnston was supporting a small number of people, the burden of aiding new arrivals shifted to others in the community.

On Mondays, aid workers like Amy Beck would gather on the lawn outside city hall to serve food and provide clothing to the unsheltered. Migrants would show up, too. Some would try to snag produce or baked goods without standing in line. Shoving matches had ensued over bags of donated clothes. The tensions worried Beck.

“I spend a lot of time peace-making because it is so important to me that Denver remain peaceful over this topic,” Beck said.

But as the city dialed back its resources for migrants, Beck was left to catch those who fell through the gaps — both newcomers and the unhoused. Migrant families no longer eligible for shelter space called her looking for a place to sleep. She has unhoused friends who just missed a shot at moving inside with the city’s help because they weren’t in a camp about to be swept.

“Everybody wants off the street,” she said.

“It’ll Get Better”

At the end of July, Johnston invited more than 100 people to a luncheon at city hall to thank them for supporting the newcomer response. Some had fed and housed migrants. Some had put on legal clinics for work authorization and asylum applications. Some had raised money for rental assistance. As the mayor celebrated their hard work, he had the bearing of someone taking a victory lap. Invitations to the event claimed incorrectly that “none” of the newcomers were living on the streets. But some advocates felt painting a “perfect picture of things” ignored the people who still needed help.

The number of migrants arriving in Denver has slowed to a trickle since the Biden administration cracked down on the number of asylum seekers entering the country. Those who do arrive have no dedicated shelter. The city closed the last one in September. Others trying to establish roots in Denver were facing eviction after rental assistance had run out. More than 1,700 people have moved out of encampments and into shelter or housing thanks to Johnston’s program for the unhoused, but nearly four times that number still need help.

Johnston acknowledged that some of the unhoused who had struggled on the city’s streets for far longer had reason to feel forgotten amid Denver’s migrant response. “There is a very fair outcry from folks to say, ‘There are many of us suffering in this condition and we need to fix all of it.’ And we agree with that,” he said.

“Of course the work is far from over,” Johnston said. “We have families here that are scraping through every day to pay the rent and get their kids into school. But I feel like we are meeting the challenge. And for that I’m incredibly proud.”

Rogers and Navarro are among those “scraping through.”

Rogers continues the hard work of maintaining his sobriety, visiting a therapist and staying connected with family. He’d like to return to work eventually, but the day labor he used to rely on isn’t an option. Under the terms of his voucher, if he earns money, he must contribute a percentage toward rent. Day labor isn’t stable enough to hold up his end of the bargain. Although he sometimes wonders whether he’s competing with migrants for work, he doesn’t resent anyone’s hustle for a job.

“We’re all human,” he said. “It’ll get better.”

Less than three weeks after she got her work card, Navarro landed a job through an employment agency that caters to immigrants. She works the night shift at a dessert factory. The agency takes about 30% of her wage. She comes home in the morning exhausted and sore in time to get her girls off to school. But she is finally earning money to support her family. Within a month, Silva also had a job at the factory.

“It’s going to be better next year,” she said.