On Thursday’s broadcast of “CNN Tonight,” Denver Mayor Michael Hancock said that Denver, which is a sanctuary city, has had to declare an emergency over the influx of migrants it has received that is straining the city’s resources.
Hancock stated, “I issued the declaration of emergency earlier today because we’ve seen a steady stream, really over the last six days, we’ve seen over 472 people come to our city as we start to track the migrants after I activated our emergency operations center, just beginning to really stress our systems and really stress our financial condition in the city of Denver.”
He added that the 472 number is “just where we had the surge and that’s where we just started counting because we activated the emergency operations center.”
Hancock continued, “The reality is that we have over 700 migrants that have — and asylum-seekers that have come to our city over the last several months. And the reality is that while we are trying to take care of those who are unhoused, and by the way, we know this is a challenge in cities all over the country in terms of our neighbors being unhoused, and we’re also trying to house those who are coming to our transportation station in the city of Denver. We simply can’t do both. It’s stressing our system, it’s stressing our shelters in the city of Denver, and so we’ve had to open up two of our recreation centers — actually, three, take them offline to our taxpaying citizens to help those who are coming to our city as migrants and asylum-seekers, as well as to make public calls for assistance with our partners, our nonprofits, and our faith leaders. So, it is stressing our system. It is a challenged time. But what we saw was not the continued trickle, we saw a surge happen where we saw anywhere from 60 to 110 people show up at one time in one night, and that becomes a problem when we’re trying to provide services to them.”
He also stated that the surge is due to a couple of causes, “One, we are learning from the migrants and asylum-seekers themselves that they organized themselves through social media to come to a destination outside of their normal entry spot — or their entry spot in El Paso, TX and they decided to come to Denver. But they also told us that there were some folks on the ground who suggested they come to Denver. And so, as they boarded buses to come to Denver, they came and we started seeing them come in droves, again, 60, 70, 110 at a time, and that just becomes a little too much.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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