During an interview aired on Friday’s broadcast of Colorado Public Radio’s “Colorado Matters,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston responded to frustration that people enter the United States illegally and stay by saying that “I think when you know enough people who share the stories of how they got here, you realize that it is an eminently human thing that any one of us would do.” And “I don’t think any of us in most of those circumstances would do anything different.” He also acknowledged that the city sometimes has to take resources away from residents, like shutting down rec centers or gyms for a time to help those in the country illegally.
Co-host Ryan Warner said, [relevant exchange begins around 4:45] “There are people who are disturbed by the idea that someone crosses illegally, that someone stays in this country who doesn’t have status. It doesn’t sound like you share any of that frustration or anger that folks are present here.”
Johnston responded, “I think when you know enough people who share the stories of how they got here, you realize that it is an eminently human thing that any one of us would do. I was a school principal before this. I had a lot of students who had this experience, and they were kids who were 17 and would tell me, a student of mine…when he was three years old, when his dad was one of the people in his town who spoke out against the local cartels and the cartels came in the middle of the night and murdered his dad. And so, his mom put him in a car that morning and just drove and drove and drove and drove until they got to Denver. That’s where he’s been since then, and when he came through high school and wanted to go to college, he wasn’t documented, went back to Mexico, the only way he could do it was go back and apply. So, he’d spent months hiding from the cartels who were still looking for him to become a citizen, and the first thing he does when he gets his papers is come back home and enlist in the U.S. Army because he wants to give something back to the country that’s given him so much. I think these are the stories of families that come here, and I don’t think any of us in most of those circumstances would do anything different.”
Johnston continued, “But yes, of course we want them to play by the rules, to apply for work authorization, to pay taxes, and they want the same thing. Our focus has really been on connecting them with jobs and with housing so they can contribute to the community, which is what they want to do.”
Later, Warner stated, “You might shut down someone’s gym or rec center for a time to make a space for that person, leading to some frustration in your city.”
Johnston responded, “Yeah, I think we have to make hard decisions in these moments, and I never met a Denverite who said, I would let a child freeze to death on the street to keep my rec center open another hour at night. And, obviously, our preference would be to do both, to keep all those rec centers open all the hours and make sure no kids freeze to death on the streets. We didn’t create this crisis. We didn’t ask for this crisis, but when you have two or three hundred people a day arriving in your city with no services and no support and no warm clothes, I think the humanitarian thing to do is to make sure that they’re safe and then help them do what they want to do, which is to work and support themselves. Almost every newcomer that I talked to would say to me the same thing, like, thank you Mr. Mayor. I don’t want any help. I don’t want any charity. All I want is a job.”
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