A Denver church is closing its overnight shelter to immigrants just two months after it opened, claiming its volunteers and resources are stretched too thin and cannot continue to provide a safe space for immigrants making the long trek to Colorado.
More than 40,000 immigrants arrived in the city in less than a year in desperate need of basic services and housing. City officials have been struggling to help the new arrivals but say it’s coming at the expense of taxpayers who are also dealing with a housing shortage and sky-high rents.
Keith Reeser, the senior pastor at Denver Friends Church, said 200 immigrants have stayed in the church’s makeshift shelter since it opened in January. At least one volunteer is required to stay away at all times for emergency purposes but the around-the-clock monitoring has taken its toll.
“If you’re in the church world, it feels like the never-ending lock-in is what I call it,” he told Denver 7.
The decision to shut down wasn’t an easy one, he said.
“It’s a hard thing when the date approaches,” he added “You think about all the stories, all the people that we’ve been able to serve. And where will they go? What will they do? Will they be safe?”
Reeser said he hopes to help the immigrants transition to a tiny town across the state border, which has a population of 672.
For immigrants who have work permits, Resser is hoping to get them to Haviland, Kansas.
“I was looking specifically for families that had all this stuff in order that they could move to a small town that has some farm work, some ranch work … when they’ve told me their story is that they came from small towns in Venezuela or Colombia and they actually have some of that similar type of work experience,” Reeser said.
But several small towns and communities on the outskirts of town “just aren’t interested,” he said.
To date, Denver, which has a population of about 700,000, has received almost 40,000 immigrants, the most per capita of any city in the country.
The arrivals have forced Mayor Mike Johnston to make some tough decisions, including reinstating limits on how long they can stay in shelters as well as cuts to the city’s services to balance the budget. He’s also been forced to walk a thin line on being a self-described sanctuary city and one that needs to focus on the needs of its legal residents.
“I want it to be clear to Denverites who is not responsible for this crisis that we’re in,” he said during a press conference last month. “The folks who have walked 3,000 miles to get to this city.”
Still, the sheer number of immigrants arriving in Denver has forced Johnston to make pragmatic but severe decisions. He reinstated limits on how long immigrants can stay in shelters and announced cuts to the city’s services to balance the budget. Despite this, Johnston still remains optimistic for now.
“We think Denver can not just survive but thrive with these newcomers arriving,” he told Mother Jones. “We just need a couple of key components. That’s what we pushed the federal government for. We need more work authorization. The biggest problem we have is folks who arrive in the city and tell me, ‘Mr. Mayor, I don’t want any help, I just want to work.’ At the same time, CEOs will call me and say that they have open jobs every day that they can’t fill, and they want to be able to hire the immigrants that are here.”
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Johnston added that the “only problem is we have the federal government standing in the way of hard-working employees who want to work and employers who want to hire them, and the government’s refusing to let them do that.”
“We need federal resources to help us support people,” he said.