Summer Camp for Immigrant Kids Faces "Unprecedented" Demand as Funding Declines

Shortly after federal agents began raiding homes and deporting immigrants from Colorado, Chris Gattegno, the executive director of Aurora Community Connection, was surprised to see dozens of immigrant families rush to sign up for his nonprofit's summer camp.

"They're having to make a decision: 'Do I hide in fear? Or do I live my life?'" Gattegno says. "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; immigrant Jeanette Vizguerra, a national activist who took sanctuary in a Denver church in 2017, was arrested leaving work in March/

The crackdown against immigrants unfolded during President Donald Trump's first hundred days in office. The administration is beginning an aggressive deportation plan that Trump named Operation Aurora last October, after Aurora gained national attention for exaggerated claims that a violent Venezuelan gang had taken over the city. 

Frightened by the news of raids and deportations, immigrants stopped coming to ACC for the health and educational services they had been using before Trump took office, Gattegno says. ACC tried hosting Know Your Rights workshops to advise them how to talk to ICE officers and avoid arrest, but the events were sparsely attended. For Gattegno, that made sense as Denver and Aurora public schools saw a drop in attendance.

But now more immigrants are leaving their homes to attend ACC services and activities again as summer nears — just as Gattegno prepares for a deep hole in funding.

Unprecedented Demand After Quiet Times

Once registration for the annual ACC summer camp opened in mid-April, Gattegno noticed a surge in interest. With a maximum capacity for eighty kids, the camp filled up within the first few days of registration. He now has a waitlist of twenty extra 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 nonprofits, ACC was founded in 2008 to fill a gap in services in North Aurora, with a focus on wellness, healthcare 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.

Most of the families who rely on ACC live within walking distance from its offices, according to Gattegno. He doesn't ask people their immigration status or nationality, and is unsure how many might be undocumented immigrants and from where. However, Gattegno estimates that more than 90 percent of the summer camp participants are children of Mexican immigrants. He doesn't see Venezuelan migrants much except during the vaccination clinics, and African migrants, mostly single men, tend to seek job training and help finding work, he says.

Guadalupe Cordova, a single mother who immigrated from Mexico about twenty years ago, has been enrolling her daughter in the ACC camp every summer for the past two years. She credits the camp with making her daughter more social and helping her with school.

"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 confidence 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, like her immigration status. Cordova has a permission to work in the United States, but with no permanent residency or citizenship, she doesn't have a legal status that fully protects her from deportation. She's seeking her permanent residency, she says, to better protect herself. 

"You can't put your kids in a lot of other places because they ask a lot of requisites that you can't fill out," Cordova says of ACC, which "adapts more to a person's needs."

Cordova has never been more afraid of deportation during her two decades in the U.S. than she is now, she says. If she were deported, Cordova says 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 arrested 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 difficult 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 permission 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."

Nonprofits Serving Immigrants Under Attack

As more immigrants like Cordova enroll their kids in ACC's summer camp, Gattegno is seeing an attack on nonprofits. The Trump administration has been cutting federal funding and issuing stop-work orders to halt resources and pathways into the U.S. for immigrants offered by nonprofits, including some in Colorado.

In Denver, the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network had to end free legal services to immigrants at courthouses and detention centers because of a stop-work order Trump signed on his first day in office, January 20. Refugee resettlement into Denver and Aurora has not yet fully resumed because of a Trump executive order that was also signed on January 20. The Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network has been allowed to reinstate free legal services for children, but not yet for adults.

And in Aurora, Trump's funding cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have severed at least $5 million in grants from the Village Exchange Center, a nonprofit food bank and donation center that was key in responding to the migrant influx into Aurora during the last two years. Gattegno says other Aurora nonprofits are losing money, too.

"If I look around right now at the budgets for all the other Aurora nonprofits for the year, they're all in the red," Gattegno says. "We operate on a calendar year, not a fiscal 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."

Gattegno says that half of ACC's funding comes from private sources and the other half from government funding, mostly from the state. A small amount comes from individual donations, "probably less than it should be. I might have to rely on that more," Gattegno admits.

"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 funding, 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 fifty to 100."

Except for money that came in during the last few years from the American Rescue Plan ACT (ARPA), a spending bill passed in 2021 for COVID relief, ACC doesn't depend on any federal funding. Gattegno notes that ARPA funding was allocated to the state and then awarded to organizations, and state governments had to commit the last of their ARPA funds by the end of 2024.

Governor Jared Polis signed a $44 billion budget on April 28, but a billion-dollar deficit is expected to lead to cuts to state spending on healthcare and education. The summer camp and after-school tutoring both rely on state funding from the Tony Grampsas Youth Services Program (TGYS), a government initiative that funds community organizations that prevent youth violence and drug use.


Gattegno says he's getting creative about where he looks for grants. He hopes to secure a $15,000 grant from the University of Colorado to study how kids use artificial intelligence in his summer camp. He's trying to get more money from organizations that already fund him, like Caring for Colorado, a health and wellness nonprofit. Partnering with other nonprofits will be "indispensable" because it looks better on grant applications, and it's a way of sharing services, like English classes or therapy, for kids without hiring new staff, Gattegno says. 

"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."

The City of Aurora "has not given us a dime" in the last two years, Gattegno says. In 2023, the City of Aurora gave ACC a $30,000 grant for youth exercise. In 2024, the Aurora City Council passed a resolution saying it wouldn't fund any support for migrants into the city, including from nonprofits, and Gattegno says that put the kibosh on any hopes for funding from the city in the future.

"They came out and said, 'we won't be funding nonprofits 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."

Even though ACC relies on state funding, Gattegno expects "everything to tighten" and worries that cuts at the federal level will "trickle down," making it harder to find money anywhere, including from private organizations that could also be losing grant and government funding.

"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," Gattegno says. "We're going to have to chase more grants, but, either way, we're expecting to keep things super lean for the next few years."


"They're very open. They talk to us. They listen to everything we say. They're very attentive to our needs, and they're listening," Cordova says. "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."