DENVER (KDVR) — Sunday was two years since Denver’s mayor made an emergency declaration in response to a massive influx of migrants into the city in a short time.
Since then, the city says things are much better, but activists told FOX31 there is more work to do.
On Dec. 15, 2022, then-mayor Michael Hancock declared a state of emergency due to hundreds of migrants entering the city in a single week.
“It wasn’t the first bus,” said Jon Ewing with the Denver mayor’s office. “It was, then there was a second bus and then there was a third bus and then there was a fourth bus.”
Ewing said the city felt unprepared.
“No one knew where it was gonna end up, where it was gonna go,” he said.
Those arrivals reached a peak late last year, hitting 6,000 arrivals in a single month. In January of this year, 5,000 people were in the city’s shelters at one time.
But the city said arrivals have drastically lowered in recent months thanks to help from the Biden administration.
“We haven’t received a bus from Texas since early June,” said Ewing.
And its lone remaining migrant shelter, Mullen House, just shut its doors.
Amy Beck, a migrant activist with Together Denver, said the shelter closures haven’t helped, with migrants now looking elsewhere for aid.
“You’ll find that a lot of the shelters are full of migrants as well as our existing unhoused community,” said Beck.
She said the homeless shelters can’t handle the extra stress.
“We don’t have the bandwidth in our shelter system to accommodate all of them,” said Beck.
Beck said that finding jobs is still the biggest hurdle for migrants looking to afford housing and suggests the city offers volunteer opportunities to help get them that experience.
“So that they get integrated, they get out and meet people,” she said.
But with two years of the migrant crisis behind it, Ewing said the city is now better prepared for the next two.
“We’ve learned from things,” he said. “We’ve learned from the things we wish we’d done better, we’ve learned from the things that caught us by surprise.”
