Two years ago, the capital of Colorado was overwhelmed by illegal migrants bussed up from the southern border to the self-declared sanctuary city. Now neighboring communities are passing ordinances to manage the overflow into nearby suburbs.
In December 2022, then-Denver Mayor Michael Hancock declared a state of emergency as the city braced for the crisis arriving on Coloradans’ doorstep after fewer than 250 illegally present foreign citizens turned up at local homeless shelters.
“Let me be frank: This influx of migrants, the unanticipated nature of their arrival and our current space and staffing challenges, have put an immense strain on city recourses to the level where they’re on the verge of reaching a breaking point at this time,” said Hancock. “What I don’t want to see is a local humanitarian crisis of unsheltered migrants on our hands because of a lack of resources.”
In 2017, Hancock signed legislation to codify Denver’s resistance to working with federal officials to enforce immigration laws. The Colorado Sun reported last week Denver taxpayers spent $63 million to shelter the more than 40,000 new arrivals over the last 15 months. The office of Denver’s mayor elected last spring, Mike Johnston, said the city may spend up to $180 million to confront the crisis this year.
“Denver is closing all migrant hotel shelters but one, a signal that services are winding down,” the Sun reported, meaning a closure of six hotels operating as shelters. “The decision comes as the number of daily arrivals has been declining.”
Last year, Colorado Democrat Gov. Jared Polis sent some of the migrants to New York City. Communities neighboring Denver have begun to pass ordinances to contain the influx of illegal migrants throughout the region. In February, the Aurora City Council passed a resolution to declare no services for migrants who enter Denver’s largest suburb.
“It’s been pretty tense here, we’re feeling it,” said city council member Danielle Jurinsky, who sponsored the limiting resolution, in an interview with Fox News. “We will not be aiding this migrant crisis.”
Further south, in Colorado’s sixth-most populous county, Douglas County, commissioners are threatening to fine and seize buses that drop off migrants within the jurisdiction.
“No more freeloading,” Commissioner George Teal told Fox News. “We thought this ordinance was required to make sure that we can keep our community safe.”
In an interview with The Federalist, Teal said the new bus ordinance is just one of several measures taken by county officials in recent months to prepare for Denver sending migrants into the community. In October, commissioners passed a resolution demanding Denver rescind its status as a sanctuary city and followed the measure with a public health order in December to keep migrants from being sheltered in Douglas County.
“Because of the actions we’ve taken up until now,” Teal explained, the migrant crisis “hasn’t hit [Douglas County] by any measurable degree.” But, the commissioner stressed, “We want to be proactive and be prepared with a legal toolkit to respond appropriately,” once migrants make their way down from Denver.
Officials in Colorado Springs, the state’s second-largest city that is an hour south of Denver under the shadow of Pike’s Peak, passed a resolution in February to affirm the city is not a sanctuary for illegal migrants.
“We are not flush with cash and ready to pay for large-scale…illegal immigration, we don’t have that money,” said city council member Dave Donelson, who sponsored the measure.
And last month, Woodland Park, a suburb of Colorado Springs, “joined an avalanche of Pikes Peak area governments in declaring its status as a non-sanctuary city,” according to the Pikes Peak Courier.
“While the resolution does not have the power of law and is primarily a political statement, it is a powerful one,” the Courier reported, saying the resolution was “harsh in its criticism of sanctuary cities’ refusal to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.”
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