Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a Democrat, has joined other mayors in promising to protect illegal immigrants from mass deportation efforts.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to use local authorities and possibly the military to carry out a mass deportation effort of illegal immigrants across the country.
“The short answer is we won’t change that because those are one of our core values,” Johnston said in an interview, referencing the city’s acceptance of immigrants. “And we’re not going to sell out those values to anyone. We’re not going to be bullied into changing them.
“I think we are going to continue to be a welcoming, open, big-hearted city that’s gonna stand by our values,” Johnston said.
Trump has tried to use cases such as the Laken Riley killing to justify securing the border and conducting deportations of illegal immigrants.
“We love you, Laken, and our hearts will always be with you,” Trump wrote Wednesday on Truth Social after her killer was convicted of murder. “It is time to secure our Border, and remove these criminals and thugs from our Country, so nothing like this can happen again!”
In turn, Democratic-led cities such as Denver and Los Angeles have pledged not to use their police forces to help federal immigration authorities, reinstating themselves as “sanctuary cities.” Trump previously threatened to cut federal funding to such cities.
Johnston said he would mobilize the city police department and other resistance if Trump used other states’ National Guards to help with the mass deportation of illegal immigrants there. “And that seems to me like a very, very bad idea from start to finish that no reasonable American would support,” he said.
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He says it would be like a “Tiananmen Square moment.”
“More than us having DPD stationed at the county line to keep them out, you would have 50,000 Denverites there,” Johnston said. “It’s like the Tiananmen Square moment with the rose and the gun, right? You’d have every one of those Highland moms who came out for the migrants. And you do not want to mess with them.”