Denver’s revamped migrant program in recent days began enrolling the roughly 800 people who are expected to be the first beneficiaries of a new approach city leaders consider innovative.
Participants will receive six months of housing, help with living costs, job training and legal support as the city files asylum claims on their behalf in an effort to get them qualified for work permits.
Those are the “haves” among the city’s migrant community, the people who qualify for the narrower, more intensive — and less expensive — scope of the city’s new strategy, announced by Mayor Mike Johnston last month.
But there will be many more “have-nots” under the city’s retooled migrant response. Those who arrived in the city after April 11, the launch date of Johnston’s Denver Asylum Seekers Program, receive no more than three nights in a group shelter, support from city-contracted case managers and, if they want it, a bus ticket to another destination.
Migrant advocates and some City Council members are sounding the alarm that rolling back shelter stay lengths from weeks to just a few days will have consequences.
“When you turn someone out in the street, they’re not going to just disappear,” said Candice Marley, executive director of All Souls Denver, a nonprofit that serves migrants and people who are homeless.
Denver on Wednesday shut down a migrant encampment in the eastern part of the city. The camp included roughly 60 people, most of them families with children, according to Jon Ewing, spokesman for the Denver Human Services.
Many residents of that encampment refused city-provided hotel rooms and intensive case management services, Ewing said. Some had already been moved into leased apartments through the city’s nonprofit partners but had since been evicted for various reasons.
“I will be very frank and say we have our work cut out for us,” Ewing said.
But advocates warn those situations will only grow in frequency with such limited offerings for new arrivals.
Johnston has said the new approach is best for the city, which had projected a worst-case scenario of a $180 million budget shortfall this year because of the costs of caring for the influx of migrants.
He also says that the level of services for people enrolled in the new program is best for those migrants, meeting the unique needs of people who have arrived in Denver with no other path to working legally in this county. It’s an approach he thinks may become a model for other cities.
“We wanted to be a welcoming place where we could help newcomers be successful,” Johnston said. “And we needed to protect our budget and make sure we can provide all the rest of the core city-wide services at the same time. And we think this allowed us to find a win-win.”
He points out that the city has set aside $10 million should it need to ramp up shelter offerings to accommodate surges in new arrivals.
“Who is falling through the cracks?”
For City Councilwoman Amanda Sandoval memories of the large migrant camp that sprang up in her northwest Denver council district last year are still fresh in her mind.
That gives Sandoval pause when she’s assessing the Asylum Seekers Program, even if she feels it is designed to meet enrollees’ needs.
“My concern is, who is falling through the cracks?” Sandoval said. “I really want the young children of newcomers to be in a safe environment.”
The city’s response so far has been to emphasize opportunities for onward travel.
Between April 11, when the new policy took effect, and May 3, 551 people arrived in Denver through the city’s intake system, according to the Denver Department of Human Services. Roughly 80% of newcomers accepted bus tickets upon arrival since the policy change, according to DHS.
V Reeves, with the advocacy group Housekeys Action Network Denver, says the city is creating a false sense of scarcity with its 72-hour shelter policy that is driving people to accept onward travel in greater numbers.
“It’s really fear mongering and a lot of the intimidation,” Reeves said. “They are not being offered anything but a ticket out of town.”
Reeves warned that if 72 hours in shelter is the best the city can offer, new camps will continue to pop up.
Migrants had demands to come off the streets, including privacy and transportation for their kids to get to school. Ewing said the city was not willing to remove 24-hour security from within shelters. But he emphasized that Denver was already working toward making many of the other changes on the migrants’ list.
“It was back and forth where we were trying to figure out what were the barriers (to people coming inside) and we figured it out,” he said Thursday. “Today there are fewer homeless families on the streets of Denver and that’s a win.”
Marley, the director of All Souls Denver, wants the city to create a safe outdoor site for migrants, and engage more with nonprofits on the ground to address the people who are on the outside looking in on the asylum program.
Johnston, for his part, has questioned if advocates are always acting in the best interest of migrants.
“We’ve had situations where there are partners who are intentionally trying to keep people from talking to us or (from) trying to accept services because they see this more as an act of defiance than as a way to serve families that need support,” he said.
Advocates’ views of program changes differ
When the city first changed its length-of-stay policy at shelters, service providers working with migrants, including Yoli Casas of ViVe Wellness, had to scramble to let new arrivals know.
But Casas said the situation has since improved as word spread.
Casas believes the asylum program is the right move for Denver. It gets participants the assistance they need as they wait for work authorization, including enrolling their kids in schools and providing education on cultural norms, access to health services and skills training. Her organization on Monday was approved for a $1.4 million contract to provide case management services for newcomer families through the end of 2024.
“Nothing’s perfect, but I feel like this is a new beginning and an opportunity to integrate (migrants) and to help those that need it, and continue to serve our city,” Casas said.
Other advocates meanwhile have voiced frustrations about when they learned about the new program and that they weren’t included in discussions to shape the city’s approach.
Jennifer Piper of the American Friends Service Committee said she and others were caught off guard by a decision that affects migrants and providers. It appeared that the city’s plan was not fully formed or ready for implementation on April 11, she added.
Ewing said he understands why nonprofit groups may have felt blindsided, but city leaders were worried about misinformation spreading before the program was ready.
Sarah Plastino, the city’s recently hired newcomer program director, also acknowledged at a recent council briefing that the administration feared that if word of the new program got out too quickly, it would have created a rush of migrants trying to reach Denver to claim a spot.
Funding questions
ViVe Wellness, along with other nonprofits, has been receiving money from the state to pay for migrants’ rental deposits and first month’s rent. The city has earmarked money to support their rent for the remaining months of the six-month program as part of a $90 million budget for newcomer services this year.
The final $42.2 million of that total was secured on April 29, when the City Council approved two bills moving money from sources that included the city’s general fund and capital improvements fund into a pot of money set aside for responding to the migrant crisis.
Denver City Councilwoman Flor Alvidrez, the daughter of a Mexican immigrant father who crossed the border as a teen without authorization, was the only council member to vote against the two funding bills for the city’s migrant effort last month.
She is uncomfortable with the lack of detail in the spending plans she has seen, she told The Denver Post. Her discomfort extends to how the city is staffing the evolving migrant program.
“We have the Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs that has been doing this work for a long time. We have DHS and now another department, so there is confusion on who is doing what, and why do we need all these new staff?” Alvidrez said.
Atim Otii, director of the Denver Office of Immigrant and Refugee Affairs, told The Post in an email that her staff is working to help find a legal services provider that can do the heavy lifting of filing hundreds of asylum claims.
It’s going to be a massive undertaking based on the experiences of Violeta Chapin and her students who have prepared asylum claims as part of a legal defense clinic for immigrants at The University of Colorada Law School.
Chapin, a former public defender turned professor, said she applauds the city for stepping in to take on what should be the federal government’s responsibility. But she sees a major flaw in the program design: the city has so far not committed to providing legal representation for migrants at their actual asylum hearings — which are likely to take place years from now.
“To walk away from them and say, ‘We’re not going to help you with your final hearing,’ I would never sign up to do something like that — because I don’t think that’s ethical,” Chapin said.
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