Victoria Aguilar, a public information officer for Denver Human Services, says that she and fellow city employee Corazon Ocanas, who works with the Denver Department of Public Health & Environment, volunteered to go to the border town to tell migrants that Denver had changed its length-of-stay policy at shelters. Now, city shelters only allow three-day stays instead of past policies allowing as many as six weeks.
Mayor Mike Johnston revealed in April that he had sent two liaisons to El Paso to tell migrants that they would now only get up to three days in Denver's shelters. Johnston warned in January that Denver was facing a projected cost of $180 million to shelter nearly 5,000 migrants at a time for two to six weeks for the rest of 2024.
The two first arrived at the border on April 10, but made multiple trips between Denver and El Paso. The first trip was "exploratory," Aguilar says, and lasted only a few days. The second trip kept Ocanas for two weeks and Aguilar for nearly a month; they both returned in May.
In early April, Johnston announced a $90 million, cost-saving migrant budget that would get Denver through the rest of 2024 without laying off employees or cutting city services. Instead, the city would cut department hiring budgets and limit services to migrants, which meant shrinking the length-of-stay policy and closing nearly all migrant shelters.
"Denver, as a city, our values have not shifted. What has shifted is our ability to shelter long-term," Aguilar says. "It really is just out of respect and letting people know what to expect so there are no surprises when they arrive in Denver."
Migrant Information Hub in El Paso
Aguilar discovered that migrants in El Paso wanted to come to Denver because they had heard about the two- to six-week length-of-stay policy from fellow migrants who had already gone through the Denver shelter system. According to Aguilar, shortening it to three days has weakened the incentive to come to the Mile High City."Their decisions to come to Denver may have been based on that outdated information," she says. "So the short-term 72-hour policy is really helping to mitigate that misinformation and pull factor."
Aguilar and Ocanas spent most of their time rotating among various migrant shelters in El Paso. The two also met with officials from El Paso Office of Emergency Management to decide if Denver officials should have a fixed space inside the El Paso Migrant Support Services Center, where they had a temporary informational booth. Now, both cities are "in the final stages" of a long-term setup, Aguilar says.
"Denver is working on establishing a more permanent presence there," she says. "Plans for the future are definitely to have a presence long-term in El Paso."
The city expects to keep liaisons in El Paso through 2024, but it could go on "for the foreseeable future," says Jon Ewing, the spokesperson for Denver Human Services. The length of Denver's stay in El Paso will depend on how the migrant crisis evolves during the next few months, he adds.
"We want to see what the trends look like," Ewing explains. "There's a lot that can change, down to the election in November. We don't know. There's a lot of variables."
"We want to see what the trends look like," Ewing explains. "There's a lot that can change, down to the election in November. We don't know. There's a lot of variables."
Denver Newcomer Updates
Sarah Plastino, Denver's Newcomer Program director, updated the City Council Newcomer Response Working Group with more details about the city's newest plans for migrants during the group's second meeting on Tuesday, June 4.Among the updates were plans to open a new migrant shelter at a warehouse on Seventh Avenue, according to Plastino, as well as the reactivation of the Comfort Inn migrant shelter in Central Park, which had initially closed in early April. She also reaffirmed that the Quality Inn migrant shelter on Zuni Street will close at the end of June, which was first announced in April.
Aguilar, who also spoke during the working group, said that Denver wasn't the only city represented in El Paso. Four full-time staffers in the Illinois Department of Human Services are also rotating through migrant shelters, collecting slews of data to help the City of Chicago prepare for incoming migrants.
Speaking to Westword after the hearing, Aguilar says that Illinois was "much more advanced" than Denver in its data collection with migrants.
"Although their program is still a pilot program, they are able to have their case managers gather information from newcomers as they are in the shelters," Aguilar explained. "Before a bus arrives to Chicago, they know what percentage of people are going to other cities, what percentage of people do not have sponsors [people who will take care of them]. They also have a detailed list of any medical conditions, developmental or intellectual disabilities, any vulnerable populations that may have been exposed to human or sex trafficking."
"Why isn't the state of Colorado down there for us?" Council President Jamie Torres wondered during the meeting.
Although Illinois has a statewide human services department and Colorado has a county-based system, Torres felt like "it's a missed space for the state to be in, given they also have an Office of New Americans."
"That seems like a huge space where they could be helping since they're not really helping any other county," she added.
Plastino admitted that "we need to do better about collecting data and reporting" during the meeting.
New York City had a couple of city officials there who were also exploring the possibility of establishing a permanent presence in El Paso and learning from Denver, according to Aguilar. Councilmembers lauded Aguilar "for going down there with no template, and you just kind of figured it out," as Councilwoman Diana Romero-Campbell said.
Plastino said staffing for the El Paso-Denver informational hub will be in place during the next week or two.
The most common questions from migrants who met Aguilar were about Colorado weather, the job market and the average rent in Colorado, she told the council. However, Denver has a great reputation among the migrants, who were often excited to meet people who worked for the city, Aguilar said.
"Overall, as we had conversations with newcomers, and they were extremely grateful. They were like, 'You're Denver?'" Aguilar recalled. "They were very thankful and appreciative that we were there."
Since December 2022, more than 42,000 migrants have come to Denver, mostly on buses from El Paso or other parts of Texas. More than 20,000 migrants are believed to still be in the Denver metro area, according to the City of Denver. The city has spent more than $70 million offering migrants food, shelter and transportation in that time span.
The number of migrants arriving in Denver and across the country is dropping, according to DHS. Only twelve buses carrying migrants to Denver came in May, compared with 27 buses in April, 25 in March — and 143 in December. The city has only been sheltering 500 to 600 migrants at a time after it started shutting down shelters in late February; DHS isn't sure why the numbers are dropping, but Aguilar says it may have to do with the rainy season in the Darien Gap, a stretch of dense jungle between Colombia and Panama, or the hot, dry season in northern Mexico.
