El Paso County commissioners, voices amplified by a microphone, left no room for misinterpretation: Migrants are not welcome in Colorado Springs.
“Keep going. Find a sanctuary city,” Commissioner Carrie Geitner said two weeks ago during a hastily called news conference after a few South American migrants arrived at a church-run shelter. “They asked for those folks to come to their cities. Find one of those. That’s where they should go.”
About a week later and an hour up the highway, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston was quoting from the Statue of Liberty: “Please, send us your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” he said, even as he announced budget cuts brought on by housing and feeding migrants. “These are folks yearning to breathe free, and they believe in the promise this country made that they could breathe free.
“We as a city are bigger than this moment,” he said. “And we will find a way through.”
Colorado’s two largest cities have long been political opposites, but their contrary stances on immigration have never been more evident.
More than 38,500 migrants, most of them fleeing political turmoil and poverty in Venezuela, have come through Denver in the past year. The city has spent $42 million so far, much of it on renting rooms in seven hotels so that the newcomers — some who legally sought asylum and some who crossed the border illegally — have a warm place to sleep.
The Salvation Army in Colorado Springs, meanwhile, has helped just 24 families — the news of which this month prompted elected officials to tell nonprofits not to help migrants and reiterate that Colorado Springs is not a “sanctuary city.”
The city has offered no emergency shelter or meals.
In Denver, hundreds of migrants whose time was up in city-funded hotel rooms set up encampments under bridges and in the Highland neighborhood across Interstate 25 from downtown. A road near Zuni Street and Speer Boulevard was clogged with barbecue grills, furniture and tents for weeks until city crews cleaned it up in January and paid first months’ rent in apartments for about 100 people.
In Colorado Springs, a police sergeant in charge of homeless outreach told The Colorado Sun that in the past year he has seen “half a dozen” migrants in his city. The fire department’s supervisor of homeless outreach programs said she had “heard of one family from Venezuela.”
It’s not just Colorado Springs. Denver is the only city in Colorado that has stood up emergency services to help people crossing the border start new lives. Lakewood residents packed a city council meeting this week to protest false claims that the Denver suburb would house migrants in vacant school buildings. Southern Colorado sheriffs have come out in force to back a piece of proposed state legislation that would reverse laws that prevent them from handing over immigrants here illegally to federal immigration enforcement.
So does declaring that a city is not a sanctuary city keep migrants away? The answer is complex, but clearly it has some effect even if it has no legal significance.
El Paso County officials want to prevent “spillover” from Denver
El Paso County leaders say they are worried about the “spillover” of immigrants from Colorado’s capital city, which is why when the Colorado Springs Salvation Army notified the mayor that a busload of migrants showed up at the nonprofit’s family shelter, city and county leaders loudly reinforced their stance.
This week, the Colorado Springs City Council passed a resolution 6-3 to affirm that it is not a sanctuary city, stating it was “protecting the security and quality of life of the citizens of Colorado Springs.” The definition of a sanctuary city is nuanced, but in general it means that local law enforcement will not cooperate with federal immigration officials and will not deny services based on immigration status.
Colorado Springs is short on resources for its citizens, city leaders argued, and the federal government has failed to secure the border, “resulting in millions of immigrants entering our country and putting catastrophic stress on services such as hospitals, schools and housing in sanctuary cities.”
The “spillover” will happen anyway, experts say, and while there are no migrant encampments or shelter hotels in Colorado Springs, there is evidence that newcomers who traveled from South America are quietly settling in the city.
The proof is in school district enrollment, The Sun found. The largest district in the county, District 11, said it has about 50 migrant children, up from eight at the start of the school year. That’s nothing compared with Denver, though, where Denver Public Schools estimates it has enrolled 3,000 new students as the city has been overwhelmed with families who journeyed from South America.
Geitner, the El Paso County commissioner, said there are about 400 new immigrant children in districts across the county.
She checked on school enrollment numbers after seeing recent signs that migrants are moving to Colorado Springs from Denver, which has been welcoming people by the busload since December 2022. Geitner also pointed to reports that UCHealth has spent $17 million in the past three months caring for patients who are migrants, including at Memorial Hospital Central in Colorado Springs.
“We are starting to see a couple of things that are concerning,” she said in an interview. “It’s very difficult for us to tell how many are out there. They are not showing up at the county commissioners office and saying, ‘Here we are.’”
Geitner said she believes that pronouncing a city a sanctuary — or not — has profound effects. It’s why Denver has received more migrants per capita than any other city in the nation. Most of the buses have come from Texas and some were sent directly by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who said he is targeting Denver along with other sanctuary cities, including Chicago and New York.
“That is creating a magnet and incentivizing folks,” Geitner said. “We do not intend to erect shelters or put people up in hotels or do anything that Denver is doing, which I think is making this crisis worse.”
Geitner argued that it’s inhumane to invite new immigrants without having enough resources to keep them all housed. In El Paso County, she said, residents are struggling to make ends meet during a tough economy and the local government’s priority is to them. It’s why she told local nonprofits to refuse to help migrants.
“It is not compassionate to signal to people, ‘You’re welcome here. Please come here,’ if we truly do not have the resources,” she said. “I encourage (nonprofits) to not welcome this crisis into our community.
“They may be sheltered temporarily or fed temporarily, but there is still that hospital piece. They are putting huge impacts on our hospital system and our school system.”
Salvation Army says it’s meeting “human need without discrimination”
While rumors are flying about who sent migrants from Denver to the Colorado Springs Salvation Army, the nonprofit’s Captain Doug Hanson, divisional secretary for El Paso County, said it had no “information about the bus type, how many buses or where the buses dropped off families, and this was relayed to the mayor.”
The issue is so touchy that the Salvation Army would only answer questions from The Sun via email. Hanson said he notified Colorado Springs Mayor Yemi Mobolade, a Nigerian immigrant who said the city will “not invite this crisis into our city,” about the recent influx in arrivals. He hoped it would “facilitate a more thorough discussion with city officials.”
At the time, the shelter was nearing capacity, sheltering 10 migrant families on the busiest nights, Hanson said. “To date, we have only served 24 immigrant families, and they have moved through our shelter quickly,” he said.
That’s a tiny fraction of the 40,000 people the Colorado Springs Salvation Army provided with food, shelter and other services over the year, Hanson said. Asked whether the nonprofit would stop serving recent immigrants at local officials’ request, he said the Salvation Army is “nonpartisan” and “responding to the needs and crises of our communities with a ministry motivated by the love of God.”
“The Salvation Army is operating in accordance with our long-standing mission to meet human need without discrimination and to work with the local and state agencies in which we serve,” Hanson said.
Declarations are “performative,” but they matter
There is no single definition of a sanctuary city, and the label is used broadly — ranging from cities that simply adopt a welcoming motto, to those that pass laws stating that local law enforcement will not turn people over to immigration authorities, to those that make it a policy not to ask for documentation when providing services. The term evolved from a San Francisco declaration in the late 1980s that it was a welcoming place for immigrants.
Denver is on the far left end of the definition, along with San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, Chicago and New York. Denver not only does not cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, it has taken actions to promote integration of immigrants into the community, said Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a professor of constitutional and immigration law at the University of Colorado.
Whether or not the governor declares Colorado a “sanctuary state,” Colorado has laws that fit the definition.
The state legislature in 2019 passed a law that prevents local sheriff’s offices and police officers from detaining people solely based on their immigration status. It also prohibits a probation officer from giving personal information, such as a home or work address, to federal immigration authorities.
The Immigrant Legal Resource Center, which analyzes and maps how friendly states are to immigrants, put Colorado in its top nine states as “most protective” of immigrants. The organization lists Denver, Aurora, Boulder County and a handful of other Colorado counties as sanctuaries.
The declaration that a city is a sanctuary or not, no matter how loudly local officials say it, is only part of the equation in determining how many migrants arrive, Gulasekaram said. The recent pronouncements in El Paso County have no legal bearing, though they might make immigrants who are listening stay away.
“They are performative,” Gulasekaram said. “People might see that, and especially if you are a migrant, decide that this city is not a place for you. If people actually read that, see that, perceive that. That’s a lot of ifs.
“Colorado Springs and El Paso County can say what they want, but Colorado law at the state level is going to limit the types of interactions they can have with ICE.”
And local officials have no legal authority to tell nonprofits not to help migrants, Gulasekaram said. “The Salvation Army is not a state-run or a city-controlled enterprise,” he said. “The city doesn’t have a significant role in stopping businesses from operating or saying who they can serve. The most power the city has is over its own employees.”
Colorado Springs has avoided the humanitarian crisis happening in Denver’s makeshift shelters and encampments, but it will not avoid migrants assimilating into the community, Gulasekaram said.
“You cannot legally stop people from moving from one place to another,” he said. “Could you be as loud as you possibly can to say that our feeling, as the majority of people in this jurisdiction, is that we would not want you to come? Sure.”
But as long as there is work on ranches, farms, meat-packing plants, hotels and other industries, Gulasekaram said, people will come.
“The most they can do is address that they are not interested in being hospitable,” he said.
Immigrants form networks, and word spreads in their home countries about which cities are friendly. It’s the reason Minneapolis-St. Paul has the largest concentration of Somali immigrants in the United States, Gulasekaram said. Denver is clearly on the list now for South Americans.
The main reason Denver has seen tens of thousands of migrants and Colorado Springs counts only 24 families is much more basic, however. The cities’ values do not align.
One leans blue, the other red. Denver is much larger, with a population of 737,800 in the city but nearly 3 million in the metro area, while Colorado Springs is home to about 480,000. Denver is nearly 50% nonwhite, and about 30% of its residents are Latino. The population of Colorado Springs is about 70% white.
Denver’s annual city budget is about $4 billion. In the Springs, city spending totals $428 million.
“Larger cities tend to have many more people in general and many more undocumented noncitizens,” Gulasekaram said, noting that Denver’s network of migrants leads to more immigration. “It’s more comfortable for people.”