Denver Officials Prepare Immigrants for New Trump Administration

With six weeks until the second Trump presidency begins, Denver officials and advocates reassured immigrants at a town hall on December 5, saying that they won't cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and clarifying what laws and resources the city has to protect anyone in fear of deportation.

"No city employee can share information with ICE. We cannot gather information that asks for citizenship or immigration status so that we can never be forced to turn over information to ICE," said Councilwoman Jamie Torres, explaining the laws Denver passed when it became a sanctuary city in 2018. "We created very clear boundaries of what we are responsible for and what we would then have to share with the federal government." 

More than seventy people attended the town hall at Re:Vision Gallery in the Westwood neighborhood, which is part of Torres's District 3 area. She was joined by Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas, who promised that his officers will never arrest someone simply because of immigration status.

"The responsibility of the Denver Police Department is solely to serve and protect the people that live in the city," Thomas said. "We will never have the responsibility of enforcing federal immigration laws."


She referred to resources like the Denver Immigrant Legal Services Fund, "so you can see a lawyer for free," she noted, and groups like Catholic Charities of Denver and Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network. "These are all organizations that you can contact today if you want to file for citizenship," she said.

Torres urged immigrants to prepare by applying for citizenship if they've been here for five years, the baseline requirement for naturalization. "If you have DACA, renew it, now," she added, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a federal policy that allows undocumented immigrants to avoid deportation if they were brought to the country before the age of eighteen.

But she also offered suggestions on how people can prepare for deportation: "There are things you don't even think about in the worst-case scenario. Who is able to pick up your kids from school? Start to build your network. Who do you trust?" she offered. "I don't want you to panic. I don't want you to get afraid right now, because there are a lot of organizations that are willing and ready to come and support what you need."

She reassured immigrants that Trump will not get any help from the City of Denver for his mass deportation plans.

"One thing he cannot do is enforce mass deportation all by himself," Torres said. "Which is why they will be seeking to partner with local communities, the police department, the sheriff's department, state troopers, to support him in that fashion. Denver will not do that."
Torres was in charge of the city's office of Immigrant & Refugee Affairs in 2015 and 2017. "When Trump went into office last time, he issued three executive orders," she recalled. "After that he changed 472 things administratively on immigration that never had to go through Congress, never had to be passed into law. They were quick and easy changes that only a president can do. He will probably be looking to do similar things."

She noted that most of the Denver organizations that immigrants rely on for health, education or legal support are funded by local or state dollars, adding that federally funded organizations can be impacted more directly and quickly by Trump administration decisions.

During the question-and-answer portion at the end of the meeting, someone asked: "Why have new immigrants had more opportunities to get permission to work compared with someone who's been here ten, twenty, thirty years?"

Torres explained that the city had 43,000 migrants arrive over the past two years and "we had to react," she said.

"Those were people who would have ended up in our streets, who would have ended up in our homelessness system, who had an immigration process that they followed by court, asylum-seeking. These are just the paths that were available to them that we opened up," she said. "It does not feel fair, it does not feel equal. There are a lot of people who saw what Denver was doing and felt like, 'I didn't get any of that.' It's probably not an easy answer to hear."

But she noted that those migrants will be vulnerable to Trump's deportation plan.

"Those individuals, we don't know where their status will stand once Trump takes office," she said. "They're also in a new level of vulnerability where we don't know if they will actually get their work status or their asylum case in court. All of these things are still unknown."