Lenny Maris Gonzalez wanted to come to the United States for her children’s sake, she explained as her youngest, 2-year-old Yaxi, scrambled to climb onto her lap beside their tent on a Denver sidewalk.
On a chilly December day, the Venezuelan mother described how, after her husband died from COVID, she traveled the rest of the way to the United States from Colombia with her five children and her brother. Now they cook their meals on a tiny grill on the street, wearing donated snow boots and warming up in a tent outside the Quality Inn near the corner of Speer Boulevard and Zuni Street.
“He left me with five children and I decided to migrate for a good future, for my children, for their studies,” Gonzalez said in Spanish as she sat in a plush green recliner outside the door of her tent.
Around her, the street in the northwest Denver neighborhood of Highland is unrecognizable, a result of a city overwhelmed by its efforts to help the nearly 30,000 Venezuelan migrants who’ve arrived in Denver in the past year. The tent encampment, which has stretched farther and farther up the street in recent weeks, is outside one of five hotels that the Denver Department of Human Services is using to house 2,700 migrants.
Cars can hardly pass because both sides of the street are lined with tents covered in tarps. In the middle of the street, nonprofit workers and volunteers park vans and trucks to pass out food and children’s cough syrup. People dig through cardboard boxes overflowing with shoes and kid-sized coats, and a child squeals after finding Spiderman pajamas among the donated clothes.
Most of the families, including Gonzalez, have rooms in the hotel. But perishable food is not allowed inside the rooms, so Gonzalez and her children spend their days outside so she can cook for her family. Also, being outside means they will see the volunteers who are bringing donated food and other items each day.
Some of the children in the encampment are attending nearby schools, and Gonzalez said a Denver Public Schools worker who visited the camp told her that her kids could start going to class next week.
The migrant encampments are growing in other parts of the city, too, including near some of the other hotels rented by the city’s human services department. That’s in part because families previously were allowed to stay in the hotels for 37 days, and when their stay ended, some moved into tents outside. The city changed its policy Nov. 17 due to cold weather, however, and is now allowing families to stay in the hotels indefinitely.
Single adults, though, are allowed to stay for only 14 days before their time runs out. For many, that’s not enough time to find more permanent housing, and they end up in a tent.
LEFT: Migrants from Venezuela who have arrived in Denver in recent weeks have stayed in and around a Quality Inn hotel near Speer Boulevard and Zuni Street, used as a temporary shelter by Denver Human Services. RIGHT: Migrants receive food and grocery items Dec. 5, 2023, in Denver. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
ABOVE: Migrants from Venezuela who have arrived in Denver in recent weeks have stayed in and around a Quality Inn hotel near Speer Boulevard and Zuni Street, used as a temporary shelter by Denver Human Services. BELOW: Migrants receive food and grocery items Dec. 5, 2023, in Denver. (Olivia Sun, The Colorado Sun via Report for America)
“There is no reason that anyone with children should be sleeping outside.”
Gonzalez said she used up her 37 days in the hotel, then moved outside for about 10 days. She was invited to move back into the hotel after the policy change, she said.
“They put me back in because of the snowfall,” she said, wrapped in a brown fleece coat. “It was snowing and they were bringing all the people who were here inside.”
Busloads from Texas arrive daily, including 40-50 people who were dropped off in front of the state Capitol early Monday morning.
Venezuelans began arriving by busload in Denver a year ago this week, and since then, the city has enacted an emergency operations system and spent $33.6 million. The number of Venezuelans who have come through the city since last December is expected to reach 30,000 by the end of the week. Thousands have received one-way bus tickets to other cities, mainly New York and Chicago, and an unknown number stayed in Colorado.
Migrants, many of whom applied for asylum after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, check in at a reception center after arriving in Denver. If they want to stay in the city, they are shuttled to one of the shelters, including the Quality Inn across Interstate 25 from downtown.
Denver Human Services was able to eliminate the shelter time limit for families because, after a surge of arrivals in October, the numbers were dropping. “And there was quite a bit of snow in the forecast and cold weather,” said Jon Ewing, a Denver Human Services spokesman. “We just wanted to ensure the children were not in the streets in dangerous conditions. We told the families that had timed out, you can come back inside.”
Ewing said some families refused, choosing instead to stay outside with the belongings they’ve acquired since arriving in Denver. On a recent night in freezing temperatures, he tried to persuade a woman and her three children to stay inside, suggesting her husband stay in the tent to watch their things. “She would not do it,” he said.
“There is no reason that anyone with children should be sleeping outside.”
Families are choosing to stay outside — or choosing to stay in their tents in the daytime and sleep in the hotels at night — in part because they are accumulating piles of clothing, blankets, food, barbecue grills and even furniture, Ewing said.
“We do have concerns about people accumulating too many belongings,” he said. “Hotel rooms have limited space in them. You can’t stack blankets and clothes — it’s a fire hazard.”
So many people are staying in tents that food served in the hotels, provided for the migrants by Denver Human Services, has gone to waste, Ewing said.
While families are no longer timing out of their rooms, they can get kicked out for not following the rules, including violent behavior, Ewing said. In the past, some people have been asked to leave after receiving multiple warnings not to stockpile perishable food in their rooms, he said.
The goal is for the migrants to find stable housing, and many have received help from nonprofit organizations that will pay their apartment deposit and sometimes the first month of rent, Ewing said. But there is not enough housing, funding or enough nonprofits to help everyone fast enough.
After a year of near-daily arrivals of Venezuelans, evidence that public entities and nonprofits have been overwhelmed is visible around the city and other parts of the state.
An encampment also formed around another hotel rented out by Denver Human Services, this one near Interstate 70 and Peoria Street. And at a hotel in Aurora, residents who pay a weekly rate said they were ordered to move out to make way for Venezuelan migrants whose rooms were paid for by the city.
“We would never ask existing guests to leave,” Ewing said. “That did not come from our direction. I’m not very pleased with that.”
And in Carbondale, near Aspen, dozens of migrants were living in cars and tents under a bridge until a local nonprofit invited them to sleep in a community room last month as temperatures dropped below freezing. Local officials are now searching for longer-term housing.
Buses arrive almost daily from Texas, sometimes in front of state and city buildings
Meanwhile, Gov. Jared Polis and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston have been pushing the federal government to make it easier for migrants to get work permits and for more federal aid. They’re also calling out Texas Gov. Greg Abbott for chartering buses to send migrants to Denver, often in the middle of the night and in front of city and state buildings without advance notice.
More than 400 migrants have arrived in Denver so far this week.
“We get buses every day,” Ewing said. “Are they usually dropped off in front of the state Capitol? No, they’re not.
“I don’t really want to get into a fight with the state of Texas. But we are talking about 3 in the morning. Who is out at 3 in the morning to even see this? You’re not even getting attention politically.”
Colorado officials have given Abbott’s administration the address of the shelter-hotels, urging them to drop off migrants there instead of downtown, Ewing said. One night two weeks ago, in 16-degree weather, four buses arrived downtown between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., Ewing said.
“We were able to scramble, to get a shuttle over there and get them out,” he said. “They are getting off with thin little blankets. We are talking about children, pregnant women, people who are sick. They don’t know the city. They don’t know the language. This would all get prevented if they dropped them off at a shelter.”
The political stunts add to the chaos of what is already a confusing journey for the migrants, many of whom travel for months or even years to escape political turmoil, violence and poverty in Venezuela to reach the United States. Once they arrive and ask for asylum, they’re given a hearing date — often months or even years out.
One mother staying in the northwest Denver hotel with her husband and four children said her family was given a hearing date seven months from now, in Los Angeles. Alejandra, who didn’t want her last name published, worried about how they would get to California for the appointment, but also had more immediate concerns. After more than a month in the hotel, she believed her time was up and that they would have to move out this week. She had not been told, or did not understand, that the time-limit policy had been dropped.
Alejandra is hoping to find work as a house cleaner or a cook, and her husband, who has experience in security systems, is looking for whatever job he can find. They have yet to apply for work permits because they don’t have the money for the application fees, which can cost up to $500, and they were unaware that nonprofits will help.
Her two oldest children, ages 8 and 9, were attending the bilingual Valdez Elementary, while her 4-year-old son played outside the hotel and her 2-year-old daughter sat on a bench eating a styrofoam cup of instant noodles with a plastic spoon.
They had been traveling for years, through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Ecuador and Mexico. The children walked through the jungle and had to cross dangerous rivers. By the time they arrived at the U.S. border, they were “tired of walking, of going hungry, of sleeping in the street,” Alejandra said in Spanish.
“Thank God we are here alive and well.”
Volunteers are bringing tents and medicine to camps
Jamillah Richmond, who lives in Boulder and speaks English and Spanish, has been coming to the street every day for two weeks, bringing boots and tents, and driving Venezuelans who are sick or pregnant to medical clinics. She’s spent about $500 on children’s cough syrup to hand out in the camp, she said.
Of the several hundred people sleeping in tents outside the hotel, only one or two are children, Richmond said. They’re single adults who’ve timed out of their shelter stay, and some are elderly. None were prepared for Colorado winter temperatures, which is why Richmond has been collecting camping gear and layers of clothing from Boulder friends and neighbors.
She’s also collecting migrants’ phone numbers, asking them to call her if they need to get to a medical or dental clinic.
Venezuelans mainly have been asking her about housing and jobs, but also for easier things, including baby formula. Denver Human Services is also collecting donations.
“We have a lot of babies,” Richmond said. “One of the babies is 6 months old. I have a woman who is six months pregnant. They need boots and shoes, they need coats.
“He’s wearing shoes that are two sizes too big, but that’s all I had,” she said, pointing toward a preschool-age boy stomping around the sidewalk in plush-lined, tan leather boots.