Denver’s asylum-seeker program for Venezuelan migrants won’t return in its current form in 2025

The Denver Asylum Seeker Program — designed to house, feed and provide job training to mainly Venezuelan migrants while they file federal asylum applications and await authorization to legally work in the U.S. — will not continue in its current form in 2025, city officials say.

Future iterations of the program with potentially different levels of services and support based on migrants’ needs are being considered, according to Jon Ewing, a spokesman for Denver Human Services.

“We will still be offering services, we will still be offering support. But it won’t look like what you’ve seen in 2024,” Ewing said in an interview Monday night.

The future of the program came up Monday when the City Council approved a $6 million contract with local nonprofit Haven of Hope to provide food, clothing, laundry and other services to migrants in the city.

The contract — which runs through the end of July 2025 — includes a requirement that the organization handles future enrollment of the Denver Asylum Seeker Program.

The program, known by the abbreviation DASP, is Mayor Mike Johnston’s signature initiative to support a small fraction of the nearly 43,000 migrants who have arrived in the city since December of 2022, many of them fleeing economic strife and political violence in Venezuela. Launched in April, it provides enrollees with six months of subsidized housing, money for food and clothing and English language and job training support while they await federal work authorization.

There are currently 865 migrants enrolled in the program, half of which are children, Victoria Aguilar, deputy director for the city’s newcomer program, told council members Monday.

In asking questions about the contract, Councilwoman Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez said that her understanding was that the program would not be continuing after the current cohort of enrollees graduates.

Aguilar noted that the food bank and other services Haven of Hope has agreed to provide are available to all migrants in the city, not just DASP enrollees.

The contract eventually passed 12-1. Councilwoman Shontel Lewis voted no. She opposed the approach where Haven of Hope will provide food directly to migrants, rather than the previously discussed approach where the city would provide financial assistance and let migrants buy basic needs for themselves.

After the final vote, Ewing emphasized that the contract was about providing food security for DASP participants in particular. Because of various enrollment timelines, some participants won’t graduate from the program until early 2025, he said.

“(We’re) just making sure everybody has enough to eat,” Ewing said.

But Gonzales-Gutierrez’s comment was correct, he said. The program will change going forward and the city will not enroll a second cohort in the DASP as it currently operates.

He noted that the needs of migrants in the city have evolved over time. The number of new arrivals in the city has also plummeted from upward of 1,000 people per week at points this winter to just a handful per week this summer, city data shows.