City of Denver officials began having discussions in 2022 about accommodating a potential influx of immigrants, amid reports of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott busing them out of his border state to Democratic cities.

Abbott's chartered buses didn't arrive in Denver until May 2023, but six months before that and before the city was properly prepared, a busload of about 100 self-organized immigrants disembarked in the Mile High City, unprepared for the December icy temperatures that hovered around 14 degrees and dipped down to -24 degrees that month.

It hit us "like an anvil," said Jon Ewing, a communications specialist with Denver Mayor Mike Johnston's office.

"Someone from a community shelter notified us, and we immediately had to set up a space of our own to accommodate them," Ewing said. "It was freezing outside and people were arriving in flip-flops and T-shirts with no resources and sometimes no plan of action."

Bus after bus arrived after that initial scramble, and once Abbott's chartered buses started rolling in, the number of newly arrived migrants in Denver rose to more than 15,700. About 6,000 migrants arrived in December 2023 alone, and the city reached a near breaking point with shelter spaces almost maxed out, nonprofits struggling to keep up with demand, food banks running out of supplies and city staff working their regular shifts before managing shelters overnight.

The city contemplated having to turn the migrants away, but were dealt a lucky break when the buses stopped for a week, giving city officials time to regroup and hash out a more concrete plan — and a novel endeavor dubbed the Denver Asylum Seeker Program — to figure out how to help immigrants without work authorization. The initial phase of the plan is set to wind down this month, but could be reactivated if the need arises.

Ewing recalled a sense of excitement as they tried to figure out how the program would actually work. 

"We sat in a room staring at one another arguing for many days about how something like this would work. And somehow we all still have our hair — most of us — and we came up with this process that would cover six months of housing, six months of food and six months of transportation," Ewing said.

But in exchange for that financial assistance, Denver required migrant adults to apply for asylum and work authorization. To assist asylum-seekers with that paperwork, the city partnered with Colorado Asylum Center to offer pro bono legal services.

The program, which also requires one adult per family to get job training in industries with labor shortages, including construction, childcare, healthcare and hospitality, has about 865 participants now, including roughly 350 adults who were in the city's shelter system by April 10 and who represent the last batch — for now — of migrants to enter Denver's program.

Christina Brown, Colorado Asylum Center's founder and executive director, said the idea for the pro bono clinics, where volunteers help asylum-seekers fill out their applications, originally came in 2018 as a way to help prevent noncitizens from getting deported for failing to meet immigration court-ordered deadlines to file asylum applications, especially those placed in accelerated immigration proceedings.

And as Denver found out, the model proved useful for handling large numbers of asylum-seekers all at once.

"It's too much for individual attorneys to be able to take on all of the volume of people who are coming. And the clinic model has been really successful because it helps us serve a much larger number of people in one day than an individual attorney can serve in a month," Brown said.

Without the asylum clinics, many of the program's participants would have missed the one-year deadline to file for asylum after entering the U.S., and would have missed the opportunity to apply for work authorization, according to immigration attorney Sarah Plastino, the director of Denver's program for new immigrant arrivals.

Plastino said a lack of legal services available to large numbers of people all at once necessitated the clinic model.

"In order to become economically self-sufficient and sustainable, we really needed to help them get on that path to work authorization," Plastino said.

None of the program's participants have work authorization yet, but they are making their way through WorkReady, the job training program put in place for the migrants, having moved on from the first phase, which largely involves English and computer classes, to the second phase — acquiring industry certifications. After that, the participants will move on to unpaid internships and job shadowing.

Denver contracted with Centro de los Trabajadores, a day laborer center that offers job training and workforce development, to head up the WorkReady program. The idea behind the program was to make the most use of the 150-day period asylum-seekers must wait before they can apply for work permits to prepare them to get better jobs, according to the nonprofit's executive director, Mayra Juárez-Denis.

Work authorization may come as soon as 30 days after application.

The innovative program also includes partnerships with well-established city institutions, including Metro State University and Mile High Early Learning, to develop WorkReady's training programs, according to Juárez-Denis. And the program is also providing training to some of the employers who may hire the immigrants at the end of the program, after they get work authorization.

The benefits of the program stretch beyond just "doing the right thing," Juárez-Denis said, calling it an investment with a return that will be multiplied. Not only will the immigrants be self-sufficient and boost the economy, they will also become well-established, she said.

"It's not just charity. It's not just a workforce for the employers. It's really a tapestry of all of our work together as institutions to make something good out of this crisis, and it becomes an opportunity where all of these sectors are coming together," Juárez-Denis said.

The last asylum clinic for the program is scheduled at the end of this month now that the number of migrants arriving on buses has decreased significantly following President Joe Biden's extensive asylum restrictions implemented in June.

But if things change and the buses start coming again, the city has a blueprint and can quickly spring into action again, according to Plastino, Denver's newcomer director.

In the meantime, Plastino said Denver's approach — especially the asylum clinics — is one that other cities could adopt.

"It's the first step, everyone needs it. And I think that focusing on serving large numbers of people is very needed," she said. "There are 40,000 plus newcomers who have passed through Denver since December 2022, and so there is a very large number of people who need legal services."

--Editing by Michael Watanabe.

Update: This story has been changed to more precisely characterize a quote.

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