4 MAY 22-28, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Summer Signup WHILE IMMIGRANTS LAID LOW FOR A WHILE, THEY’RE NOW SIGNING UP IN UNPRECEDENTED NUMBERS FOR ACC’S SUMMER CAMP. BY BENNITO L. KELT Y Shortly after federal agents began raiding homes and deporting immigrants from Colorado, Chris Gattegno, the executive director of Aurora Community Connection, was startled to see dozens of immigrant families rush to sign up for his nonprofi t’s summer camp. “They’re having to make a decision: ‘Do I hide in fear? Or do I live my life?’” says Gat- tegno, himself an immigrant from France. “And people are choosing to live their lives... to me, it’s surprising.” Colorado has seen three large raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement so far in 2025, with reports of agents bursting into apartments and arresting occupants for deportation despite the immigrants showing asylum paperwork and work permits. Smaller- scale detainments have occurred as well; im- migrant Jeanette Vizguerra, a national activist who took sanctuary in a Denver church in 2017, was arrested leaving work in March. The crackdown against immigrants un- folded during President Donald Trump’s fi rst hundred days in offi ce, making good on the aggressive deportation plan that Trump dubbed Operation Aurora last October, after Aurora gained national attention for exag- gerated claims that a violent Venezuelan gang had taken over the city. Frightened by the news of raids and de- portations, immigrants stopped coming to ACC for the health and educational services they had been using before Trump took of- fi ce, Gattegno says. ACC tried hosting Know Your Rights workshops to advise them how to talk to ICE offi cers and avoid arrest, but the events were sparsely attended. But now more immigrants are again leav- ing their homes to attend ACC activities as summer nears — just as Gattegno prepares for a deep hole in funding. From its offi ces at 9801 East Colfax Av- enue, ACC hosts pop-up vaccination clinics, after-school tutoring for kids, child-care classes for parents and mental health counseling. Recently, Gattegno introduced workshops to help immigrants study for their citizenship tests and get through the naturalization process; that was the only program that didn’t see a huge drop in de- mand in early 2025. The summer camp has always been popu- lar, though, and once registration opened in mid-April, Gattegno noticed a surge in inter- est. With a maximum capacity of eighty kids, the camp fi lled up within the fi rst few days; he now has a waitlist of twenty families for the summer camp in June. “It’s an unprecedented demand for our summer camp,” Gattegno says. “Families are trusting us, and that’s apparent, because they’re coming back. I think a lot of them want their kids to be safe, and they know that if anything does happen, their kids will be safe with us.” Nearly all of the families who come to ACC are immigrants, Gattegno says, but that’s not by design. Like many other Aurora nonprof- its, ACC was founded in 2008 to fi ll a gap in services in North Aurora, with a focus on well- ness, health care and education. Nearly all of the people who ended up using those services happened to be low-income, Spanish-speaking families who lived in the area; today, most are within walking distance. He estimates that more than 90 percent of the summer camp par- ticipants are children of Mexican immigrants. The ACC summer camp, which starts on June 2, charges families $35 for eight weeks; that pays for a kid’s four-hour day at camp, Monday through Friday, and two meals a day. Most of the counselors are teenagers who used to be in the program. Guadalupe Cordova, a single mother who immigrated from Mexico about twenty years ago, has enrolled her daughter in the ACC camp for the past two summers. “They’ve helped my daughter a lot. It’s a way to connect to more kids because she’s very shy and doesn’t talk to other kids,” Cordova says. “Now she plays more and has more confi dence around other kids. She has better grades. Her grades are higher than ever. I see her with more enthusiasm.” As an immigrant, Cordova appreciates that ACC doesn’t ask for a lot of information during camp registration, such as her im- migration status. Cordova has permission to work in the United States and is seeking her permanent residency, but in the meantime, she doesn’t have a legal status that fully protects her from deportation. Cordova has never been more afraid of deportation than she is now. If she were deported, she says that her daughter’s life “would turn upside down. I’m the only one she has.” She’s also afraid that her two adult sons, who were born in Mexico, will be ar- rested by ICE and deported, and that they’ll be separated from their children. “One of my sons is already a dad, and it would be very diffi cult for my daughter- in-law to continue on with three kids by herself,” she says. “My other son lives in Alabama, which is a state where it’s really hard right now, too. I’m always with the thought that, even though we have permis- sion to work here, they’ve already taken away our protections, and I’m very afraid that something will happen to us. We’ve been here for more than twenty years. We love this country like it’s our own.” As more immigrants like Cordova enroll their kids in ACC’s summer camp, Gattegno has seen the Trump administration cut fed- eral funding and issue stop-work orders for nonprofi ts that help immigrants, including some in Colorado. In Denver, the Rocky Mountain Immi- grant Advocacy Network had to end free legal services for immigrants at courthouses and detention centers because of a stop-work order that Trump signed on his fi rst day back in offi ce. Refugee resettlement into Denver and Aurora has not yet fully resumed because of a Trump executive order that was also signed on January 20. Although the RMIAN has been allowed to reinstate free legal ser- vices for children, it still cannot help adults. In Aurora, Trump’s funding cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have re- sulted in at least $5 million in grants taken from the Village Exchange Center, a nonprofi t food bank and donation center that was key in responding to the migrant infl ux into Aurora over the last two years. Gattegno says other Aurora nonprofi ts are losing money, too. “If I look around right now at the budgets for all the other Aurora nonprofi ts for the year, they’re all in the red,” Gattegno says. “We operate on a calendar year, not a fi scal year, so we won’t know where we stand until December, but we’re expecting that we’re going to be in the red, too. It’s going to be some challenging years ahead for us.” Half of ACC’s funding comes from private sources and the other half from government funding, mostly from the state. “It’s probably going to be the case that we’ll have to rely on less government funding and rely more on private funding,” Gattegno says. “But that’ll be challenging, because we won’t be the only ones. I imagine that without government fund- ing, there will be a greater demand for private funding. Typically, we only have to compete with ten or twenty others for a grant. Now I’m expecting something like fi fty to a hundred.” So Gattegno is getting creative about where he looks for funding. He hopes to secure a $15,000 grant from the University of Colorado to study how kids use artifi cial intelligence at the ACC summer camp. He’s trying to get more money from organiza- tions that already fund him, like Caring for Colorado, a health and wellness nonprofi t. “Everything counts,” he says. “We’re going to have to hunker down, and we’re not going to be able to grow for a while.” In 2023, the City of Aurora gave ACC a $30,000 grant for youth exercise. But in 2024, Aurora City Council passed a resolution saying it wouldn’t fund any support for migrants in the city, including from nonprofi ts. “They came out and said, ‘We won’t be funding nonprofi ts that help migrants,’ and that kind of made it clear that we shouldn’t expect any help from them,” Gattegno says. “We get more funding from counties like Arapahoe, Adams than from the City of Aurora, but it’s not much.” Gattegno expects “everything to tighten” and worries that cuts at the federal level will “trickle down,” making it harder to fi nd money anywhere. “We’re not dependent on federal funding, but I’m expecting a year or so where everyone is going to have to tighten their belts.” In the meantime, camp is almost in ses- sion, and Gattegno knows what it means to not just the kids, but the parents. “They’re very open,” Cordova says. “They talk to us. They listen to everything we say. They’re very attentive to our needs, and they’re listening. I always see how they take care of the kids, how they treat them, they feed them there. They’re always trying to do the best for the kids, and I’ve seen it.” Email the author at [email protected]. NEWS KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS Around 100 immigrant families have signed up for the Aurora Community Connection summer camp. COURTESY OF AURORA COMMUNIT Y CONNECTION
