4 DECEMBER 14-20, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | The Bus Stopped Here A YEAR LATER, MIGRANTS CONTINUE TO FLOOD INTO DENVER. BY BENNITO L. KELT Y On December 5, 2022, a bus pulled into downtown Denver and dropped off 100 mi- grants without warning, igniting a year-long crisis that Alan Salazar knows all too well. “We were just getting busloads of people,” recounts the former Michael Hancock chief of staff. “The governor of Texas would issue some kind of a statement playing politics with it. There was no coordination. ... Sometimes you’d get the heads-up. Sometimes you wouldn’t.” Since that fi rst week of last December, about 30,000 migrants have poured into the Mile High City from the U.S. southern bor- der. “We’ve been doing it for a year, and we’re tired,” says Jon Ewing, spokesperson for the Denver Mass Care Department Operations Center. “We’re trying to provide what we can with what we have. We have limited funding, we have limited resources, but we’ve been going for a year now. It’s not required, but they’re coming here, they’re asking for help, Texas is busing them here, and we’ve tried to treat them like human beings.” On December 4, 2023, a “ghost bus” — with no known origin or announced arrival — dropped over 100 migrants at the Colorado Capitol; they were placed in city-provided housing or offered transportation to another location. Another group appeared the next day, on the one-year anniversary of the fi rst mystery load of migrants. “I was hoping for the city’s sake and for the new administration’s sake that they wouldn’t have this challenge continue, but it has,” Salazar says. “I expect we’ll have more of this until we can get comprehensive immigration reform through Congress.” As the situation worsened, the city de- clared a state of emergency on December 15, 2022, before eventually evolving and adapt- ing “over time” to the infl ux, Ewing says. In fact, things appeared to be under control for several months. “I thought we were over the worst back in March,” Salazar says. “And then, of course, the numbers kicked back up.” “There was a point in early October when we sort of sounded the alarm because we received nine buses in a single day,” Ewing notes, adding that at the time, there were an estimated 2,500 migrants in city shelters. “We primarily use hotels. We have staff working [them]; we have a whole litany of nonprofi ts that we work with to provide support. We have dashboards and databases that we didn’t have a year ago, so it’s evolved in many ways, and we’re still providing that support. We’re trying to get people out of the cold now.” It’s unclear exactly how many buses of migrants have arrived in Denver since De- cember 2022, but in the past six months alone, Ewing knows of more than 200 that have come in directly from Texas. “It’s a lot,” he says. “There could be any number of people on those buses.” For the most part, the buses are being chartered by the Texas state government, but some have been sent by municipalities like Eagle’s Pass, Brownsville and El Paso, according to Ewing. “Those cities, they’ve been overwhelmed in many regards,” he says. “So they’ve been getting people up to Denver because there’s at least some level of support. They’re overwhelmed; they’re much smaller than we are.” The Webb Municipal Offi ce Building, at 201 West Colfax Avenue, is “the most com- mon place that you’ll see migrants dropped off,” Ewing says, which he fi nds frustrating, because it’s not a shelter (though it was once used as a processing center). Dropping migrants off there forces the city to shuttle them to shelters, sometimes at odd hours. “It’s a longstanding challenge I think we’re going to have to live with, unfortu- nately,” Salazar says. When the fi rst busload of migrants came a year ago, the city set out cots for them at a recreation center. “It started off in rec centers and things along those lines,” Ewing remembers. “We’ve been utilizing hotels for the last several months.” Over the past year, Denver has spent more than $33 million trying to house, feed and fi nd services for migrants, even sending many to another, requested destination. “A lot of times people come up, and they never even wanted to come to Denver,” Ewing says. “That’s why we end up buying tickets for people to get to other places.” About a hundred migrants have been arriving nearly every day via buses since early December 2022. It’s gotten to the point where a “bus arrival is nothing surprising,” Ewing says. “Buses arrive every day. We’ve asked Texas, which is chartering these bus companies, we’ve asked them multiple times, ‘Can you just drop people off at a shelter? Could you just do that?’ And you know, it’s one thing when it’s happening in the daytime. It’s another thing when they’re dropping people off in the middle of the night nowhere near a shelter.” The city is now relying on at least fi ve shelters to house migrants — four in Denver and one in Aurora near East Mississippi Av- enue and Interstate 225 — that are converted hotels or motels. The most well-known one in Denver is the former Quality Inn at 2601 Zuni Street, where an encampment of several dozen migrants has sprung up outside. Cur- rently, more than 2,700 migrants are staying in Denver shelters. When migrants do get to shelters, they can only stay for a limited period of time. Single individuals are allotted fourteen days, while families with kids get 37. After that, many end up on the streets at encampments like the one outside the Quality Inn. “Near Zuni, we know about that one, and we’ve got the outreach teams out there, we’ve got the port-a-johns out there, we’re still com- municating with them — and then obviously, when it’s cold, we encourage people to come in. We activate the shelter plan so we have the extra space,” Ewing says. “They are not forgotten. We have not overlooked them.” The main challenge for the city right now, Ewing says, is “work authorization,” since many migrants are not being authorized to work by the federal government. “It’s limited,” he explains. “We need to expand the work authorization to get people to work. How do you take care of yourself if you can’t work?” Salazar remembers that last December, young men staying at the city’s rec centers told him they were willing to take on any kind of work the city could offer at that mo- ment. “They said, ‘Listen, we’ll do anything. You’re taking care of us,’” he recalls. “’Can we shovel snow? Can we do something?’ And I remember asking the city attorney if there was any possibility of employing people even to help work at the rec center, and, of course, federal law prohibits that. I always felt that was an absurdity of the system.” Adds Ewing: “The end goal should not be staying in a shelter. The end goal should be trying to make a life for yourself, so we’re trying to help them in any way possible.” To that end, Denver tries to get families with kids off the streets, even if shelters are packed. “We’re actively encouraging anyone with children, please come inside,” he says. “We’ll fi nd space. We’ll make space to get you back inside.” The Denver community, meanwhile, has been eager to help: In addition to groups like Highland Mommies, which has organized gift drives and pop-up barbershops to bring in donations, people have been helping indi- vidual families and even taking migrants into their homes. “It’s been remarkable to watch the community support,” Ewing says. “The community has stepped up in a big way, es- pecially recently, so we’re thankful for that.” Salazar noticed the same interest as the Hancock administration worked with the migrant community. “That’s the heartwarm- ing part,” Salazar says. “For the most part, the people of Denver were open-hearted, and the volunteer effort was tremendous. People want to help.” Last week, 250 people showed up at a job fair specifi cally geared to hiring workers to help migrants. Denver is running a holiday gift drive for the migrant community through Monday, December 18; donations can be dropped off at both the Webb Building and the Taylor Munici- pal Building, at 4685 Peoria Street, Suite 251. Next year, Ewing says that he expects the city will “need substantially more fund- ing” — something Mayor Mike Johnston requested when he paid a November visit to Washington, D.C., alongside four other mayors. In a letter addressed to President Joe Biden, they requested $1.4 billion for “food, shelter and services” for migrants. “We have limited space, we have limited staffi ng,” Ewing says. “We continue to call for more funding. If we had more funding, we could do more. We’re limited where we’re at.” “I don’t think we’re out of the woods with any of this,” Salazar concludes. “My hope is that better angels will prevail and that the politics in Washington will accommodate some changes, because cities can’t solve this problem on their own.” Email the author at [email protected]. NEWS KEEP UP ON DENVER NEWS AT WESTWORD.COM/NEWS Migrants line up for tacos outside the encampment at 27th and Zuni. BENNITO L. KELT Y
