Extensive Update: Mayor & City Drastically Strip Away Migrant Support to Barebones, Worsening Conditions for All

April 10th, 2024

As the city of Denver turns its backs on migrants – their backwards version of advocacy involving having City officials like Andres Carrera telling people that, after crossing through 8 countries in perilous conditions, their journey has not yet ended and their children will suffer if they stay – many continue to fight for migrants’ right to not only exist but thrive as a vibrant and critical part of our community. Here’s an update on the situation as it stands, and what we need to fight to change.

• Mayor Mike Johnston closed 6 different migrant shelters since March 5th, resulting in thousands of migrants, including infants and children, being kicked to the streets or lied to about available opportunities in other states instead of being connected to suitable housing or alternate sheltering. Now, one shelter for singles/couples without kids (DCC) and one for families (Quality Inn) are all that remain while thousands keep coming into the City.
  • In one case that echoes many, a family with a sick, young child went to the City for support, including medical care. City official Carrera coerced them to go to Minnesota in the middle of winter, where they supposedly had so many more resources for migrants. So they left by bus and upon arrival, their son was immediately admitted to a hospital where he stayed 10 DAYS, during which they discovered that the Minnesota shelter information they’d received was nonexistent and that there was hardly any support, let alone a brittle cold harsher and more unforgiving than even Colorado’s at that time. The hospital bought them tickets to return to Denver. They attempted to receive help again but were turned away, as they had already used their one chance at support by way of tickets out of town.
  • While migrant families were being continuously kicked out and ran out of town, one migrant shelter worker who was employed at McNichols at one point described how their staff was severely reduced to nearly a fifth of its original size and many were sent home without pay, told to standby for the day the shelter may open. Meanwhile, the empty shelter was fully stocked with blankets, baby formula, and all sorts of other amenities to be able to shelter hundreds of families and their children. Instead, during some of the coldest days of this year, it remained closed while many suffered outside and staff were forced to quit so that the City wouldn’t have to deal with their own unemployment disaster.
• Meanwhile, shelters for the general unhoused population have been actively turning away any migrants simply based on them being migrants.
  • This includes Crossroads Shelter, which has been denying beds based on identity, as well as Denver Rescue Mission, which has refused to allow migrants to congregate in spaces because just standing and talking as a group supposedly looks like gang behavior. This is despite the fact that people who only speak Spanish will obviously be spending time with other people who only speak Spanish.
  • Even migrant resource organizations, like Servicios de la Raza, are turning away Venezuelans in need. They are instead being funneled to Papagayo and Vive Wellness – two organizations, and in fact two people, which have also proven to be over capacity and who have “ghosted” tons of migrants who reached out for support, either never starting or ceasing communication mid-way. This has resulted in some people, who were expecting to receive rental support, following the instructions told to secure housing for themselves only to later be evicted due to lack of payment and silence from these organizations without explanation. 
• The extreme reduction in safe places for migrants to simply exist, let alone receive any sort of help, has resulted in many being forced into dangerous situations.
  • When closing a nearly 70-person-strong encampment that had consistent community support and had been helping folks satisfy their immigration process steps to legal citizenship, the City lied about efforts that would be made to further connect them to housing and job opportunities if they were to enter the shelter. Instead, they lost all the food, safety/privacy, and immigration process support they had while at the encampment, now finding themselves on mats on the floor where they are forced to stay quiet and have been told continuously by the migrant resource orgs Papagayo and Vive Wellness that there’s simply nothing that can be done for them
  • Though many community members, and surely these resource organizations, know how to support migrants with simpler paperwork such as changing their place of residency and immigration court, DCC chose instead to send individuals directly to an ICE office to fill these forms with no assistance or advocacy while there. This resulted in one individual being detained on the spot and never returning to the shelter, with his friends and family wondering what happened or how long he could be trapped there. ICE detention centers are known to have some of the most inhumane conditions and profit off of the privatized imprisonment of vulnerable people seeking asylum. DCC should have, and would have, known better, but chose not to care and to put lives at risk for simple paperwork that they did not want to help fill out.
• The shelter is NOT a safe place by any means…
  • DCC has police sheriffs on-property 24/7, even sleeping in the same room where the migrants are sleeping on mats on the floor. They intimidate individuals and search personal belongings when people are out looking for work. They restrict people from playing music!!! Let alone speaking to each other, and this is at all times of the day. 
  • Not a single one of the security personnel speaks Spanish, putting them at risk for situation escalation and increased hostility due to lack of understanding.
  • Shelter staff have been lying about reasons for exiting individuals without any real incidents occurring or any process being followed consistently. In fact, DCC doesn’t have an official system to track reasons for kicking out individuals, nor a process that would prevent a miscommunication from leading to expulsion. Several individuals have already been found to have been wrongly kicked out by other shelter staff members who confirmed that there wasn’t evidence for the reason behind their exits. Because of how the system’s rigged, being kicked out of the migrant shelter before your already limited time means you’ve been kicked out from all shelters and lose all ties to resources or progress made while inside the shelter. 
• Individuals are at high risk of getting sick due to systemic malnourishment –
  • In regards to the food:
    • They can’t bring outside food into the shelter and save it for themselves.
    • They can’t cook (despite staff having access to a kitchen).
    • The food they’re given once per day has made many people sick and is wildly insufficient to sustain anyone’s health, resulting in many simply refusing to eat it. One day individuals cut open burritos to see that the middle had started to grow green mold from being spoiled.
    • Months ago, in talks between advocates and the Mayor’s shelter communication representative Jon Ewing, advocates shared horror stories about the culturally-insensitive and nutrition-deficient diet that migrants and their children were forced to eat by not being able to bring any outside food into the family shelter. His response was that their time was trying their best every day to improve the diet, but without billions of dollars more, they couldn’t do anything differently. He continued to make a tone deaf, offensive comment to suggest that his responses were leaving us dissatisfied “like the migrants’ bellies left unsatisfied” from lack of food. 
  • As for access to hygiene:
    • People must schedule their showers ahead of time and accept whatever is available if they’d like to shower, regardless of work schedule or appointments.
    • They are allotted 5 minutes to shower, not one minute more. One individual said the water was manually shut off by a staff person while he still had suds all over his body.
    • They don’t have enough towels and soap for everyone, resulting in many needing to air dry or use limited clothing.
    • There is no help with laundering clothing, resulting in many needing to continue wearing their dirty clothes.
    • Nearly 100 people residing there share 6 toilets – 4 for women and 2 for men. 
    • To make matters that much worse… Migrants recorded a staff member at DCC stating that they were punishing everyone by closing the bathrooms for a day, and then they wouldn’t allow anyone to shower!!!!
  • No special accomodations are made for individuals who are pregnant or disabled (such as recently recovering from surgery or on oxygen), all of which are currently in the DCC shelter and continuing to sleep on thin mats on the floor, receiving the same limited access to poor food and hygiene resources when in need of more.

These conditions have led migrants, and many others, to an overwhelming question – WHERE is the millions in funding for migrants going?!?

• The few operating shelters left are stretched beyond thin – understaffed with little staff training, under-resourced with insufficient immigration process support, lack of space or privacy, diets leading to sickness and malnourishment – and yet, the family shelter Quality Inn still has dozens of rooms empty at any given time… Where is the funding here?!?
• The only two operating migrant resource organizations that still work with Venezuelans are primarily run by two over-capacitated individuals with limited prior experience to any sort of housing or employment assistance who will offer little to nothing or stop responding after some time… The very organizations that used migrants stories to garner thousands in additional donations through a 9News press event while poorly translating and repressing the voices of the few current unhoused migrants present.

Nothing about this situation suggests that these funds are being appropriately used to support those in need. Indeed, the City’s strategy has now become to intimidate newcomers by increasing policing, ticketing, and threats of arrest/deportation. The City perpetuates falsehoods about greener pastures anywhere but here in ways that continue traumatizing and oppressing people who just want the chance to work, to raise their children, to not starve or freeze – to bring their skills and talents and richness to the otherwise sterile Denver landscape that the City is trying to create. We refuse to see or treat their histories, their struggles, their triumphs, their love, their existence like the Mayor and Denver has – as a stain they’re trying to bleach out of the fabric of our City – but rather, as the profound hue and vibrancy that makes our City and our nation beautiful.

Here the thin mats on the floor are seen less than one mat-width apart. 

An example of the one meal per day provided to migrants. 

Security searches the belongings of a person who is not present.For