Somewhere in the jungle, between Colombia and Panama, Lili began to pray. It was September 2023, and the then 33-year-old mother of two young sons was about two weeks into one of the most perilous migration routes in the world: the 3,000-mile journey by bus, boat, foot, and train from Venezuela to the United States.

Life under President Nicolás Maduro had become increasingly untenable. Elected in 2013, the autocratic ruler’s fiscal policies and political cronyism had destroyed Venezuela’s democratic institutions and economy, creating a country racked by corruption, unemployment, hyperinflation, and violent crime. In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice charged his government with international drug trafficking, and the United Nations has accused Maduro’s administration of using sexual violence and torture to stay in power. Ninety-one percent of the population lives in poverty, and more than a quarter of children are malnourished. Since 2014, more than seven million Venezuelans have fled its borders, fueling one of the biggest migrant crises in history.

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Living in Valencia, the country’s third-largest city, Lili (who asked that her last name be withheld for her family’s protection) worked odd jobs. Her husband, 36, labored in construction. Together, they earned about $200 per month, barely enough to feed their boys, ages 10 and six. “There was no future for my children,” Lili says. She hoped there would be one in the United States—and, specifically, in Denver, where a friend had said there was plenty of work.

Lili and her husband sold their refrigerator and washing machine and spent a month in Colombia working to help fund their journey north. They then paid a guide about $500 to navigate their family through the Darién Gap, a notoriously inhospitable 60-mile slip of rainforest that connects Central America and South America and teems with poisonous snakes, armed bandits, and disease. With the six-year-old on her husband’s back and a pack—stuffed with little more than a change of clothes, 17 tins of tuna, and some sweets—on hers, they walked from dawn until dusk for three days, up and down mud-slicked hills. They watched as rivers, swollen by wet-season rains, swept children away when their families tried to cross. At night, Lili and her husband took turns sleeping with the boys sandwiched between them, listening for animals and thieves outside their tent. She’d never been religious, but throughout the journey—when her knees throbbed from hiking, when she passed rotting corpses and injured travelers left to die—Lili began to offer up both a prayer and a plea: “Please, God, let my family get through this.” Soon, her younger son began to parrot her.

Finally, on November 5, after traveling through Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, the family arrived in El Paso, Texas. Skinny and dark from the sun, they turned themselves in to a border patrol agent and declared their intention to file for asylum. Following one night in a detention center and another in a shelter, Lili heard from a nonprofit volunteer about a free bus headed to Colorado. Like many on the 36-person motor coach, Lili and her family didn’t have much cash or a place to stay once they arrived in Denver. At least we are in the United States, thought Lili, whose coffee-colored eyes brim with optimism. We made it. About two hours south of Denver, the bus stopped for gas. Under a waning moon, an older man with white hair approached. “Are you guys migrants?” he asked in broken Spanish. “Are you from Venezuela?” He bought them chicken to eat, and Lili began to feel something like hope.

Illustration by Hokyoung Kim

In 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, a controversial program enacted to counter a surge in border crossings in his state. As part of that effort, he began busing migrants to left-leaning cities across the country. The political stunt, which was also performed by the governors of Florida and Arizona, was both inhumane and genius. By transporting migrants—ultimately more than 100,000 people—to sanctuary cities, Abbott hefted the very real burden of immigration onto the communities who professed to care so much about the issue. Denver, almost a straight shot on I-25 from El Paso and controlled by Democrats, was a natural target.

The first bus of “newcomers,” as the city of Denver prefers to call migrants, disembarked in December 2022. “It was staggering,” says Evan Dreyer, deputy chief of staff for Mayor Michael Hancock, who left office in July 2023, and current Mayor Mike Johnston. “Not only in terms of the number of people who were arriving, but that they were arriving in nothing more than T-shirts, shorts, and flip-flops. It was the dead of winter.” They were only portents of what was to come.

Lili and her family are among the more than 40,000 migrants, most of them Venezuelan, who have made their ways to Denver over the past two years—more per capita than any other city in the nation. In the absence of significant federal aid, Denver was forced to come up with ad hoc solutions. Johnston forecasted spending $180 million (10 to 15 percent of the city’s annual budget) on immigrant services in 2024, an unexpected outlay that required the city to slash recreation center and Department of Motor Vehicle hours, cut millions of dollars from the police and fire departments, and forgo planting spring flowers in city parks. Some 200 new students enrolled in Denver Public Schools each week, and hospitals bowed under the weight of new patients. Meanwhile, immigration emerged as the centerpiece of the 2024 presidential election, and no place, according to President-elect Donald Trump, illustrated the Biden-Harris administration’s failed policies better than Colorado, where, he alleged, violent Venezuelan gangs had taken control of Aurora.

Immigration surged under President Joe Biden, whose sweeping policy changes expanded legal pathways to enter, live, and work in the United States and also narrowed enforcement priorities, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. At the same time, pandemic travel restrictions loosened, the American economy began to recover from COVID-19, and conditions in immigrants’ home countries—places like Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Guatemala—deteriorated. All of this sparked a mass migration north. Illegal crossings from Mexico spiked between 2021 and 2023, averaging two million per year, up from 1.4 million in 2019, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol.

Rebecca Galemba and Lisa Martinez, co-directors of the University of Denver’s Center for Immigration Policy and Research, caution that the surge must be understood in context: The Biden administration added border patrol agents and initiated new accounting methods that might count an illegal border crosser multiple times, factors that may have contributed to the ballooning numbers. In addition, Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies during his first term, including separating families and criminally prosecuting those who crossed illegally, had caused “a sharp decline in admissions,” Martinez says. Denver simply wasn’t ready for the rebound.

Read More: The 6 Best Ways to Help Migrants in Denver

On November 5, 2023, 12 hours after leaving El Paso, Lili’s bus abruptly pulled over at a desolate corner. The driver opened the doors and said, “Welcome to Denver.”

The family used the last of its funds to take a taxi to an immigrant welcome center, which in turn sent them to a Quality Inn in northwest Denver that the city had turned into a shelter for immigrants. Lili and her husband said they were asked to leave after 18 days, even though the limit for families was 37 days. They then connected with Amanda, a fortysomething Denverite who was looking for ways to help incoming immigrants. (Amanda also asked that her last name be withheld for her family’s protection.) “No one leaves their home and family, walks through jungles and deserts, and puts their life on the line if things are OK where they come from,” Amanda says. “I saw the news reports and thought, OK, let’s do this.” A friend involved in migrant outreach introduced her to Lili.

On December 1, 2023, Lili and her family moved into Amanda’s basement apartment in Cheesman Park. Amanda got straight to work helping her guests establish a life in Denver: She took them to a doctor, arranged under-the-table jobs, set them up on Venmo, and got them bus passes. Colorado public schools cannot deny students admission based on immigration status, so Amanda enrolled the boys in local schools. Lili liked Denver and said she found it peaceful. While she was surprised there wasn’t more work, she remained hopeful.

Thousands of other immigrants, however, struggled to find stable housing. On a frigid morning in January 2024, I visited a migrant encampment near the Quality Inn that had first sheltered Lili, her husband, and their sons. About 300 Venezuelans filled a blockslong sea of tents: Babies snuggled on mattresses under heaps of blankets; young men kicked a soccer ball around; a mother with a fever-stricken toddler pleaded for help from volunteers. Around 9 a.m., a tent burst into flames, the fire consuming all of someone’s worldly possessions.

This was at the height of the immigration crisis, when more than 200 people arrived in Denver each day and some 5,000 migrants crammed into the 10 hotels the city used as temporary shelters, which spilled over into encampments like this one. During the previous month, U.S. Customs and Border Control had recorded 250,000 migrant encounters at the United States–Mexico border, the highest ever, and 144 buses of newcomers had arrived in Denver. “We were totally full,” Mayor Johnston told me this past October.

Like Lili, many of the immigrants I spoke to at the encampment had survived unthinkable things on their ways to the United States—seeing kids starve to death in the jungle and parents who were forced to abandon children who refused to go on. They’d also been touched by the generosity of Denverites, who showed up daily at the encampment to give them food, clothes, and jobs. “Denver, Colorado, has been a huge blessing,” one migrant said, even as they were being forced to move again.

On the day of my visit, the city was preparing to clear the encampment. A convoy of idling buses waited to ferry families to shelters or leased units the city would help pay for. Denver also offered to cover the cost of bus tickets to municipalities farther afield that weren’t so strained or where migrants might have intended to go before being dropped in Denver. (Ultimately, the city purchased 22,000 tickets for onward travel at a cost of $7.5 million. While Johnston’s staff says it simply helped migrants get where they had intended to go or might be better served, Utah Governor Spencer Cox slammed the practice. “We recently learned that the Democrat mayor of Denver has been sending illegal immigrants to Utah without proper notification or approval,” Cox posted on X this past June. “This is completely unacceptable.”)

City workers, volunteers, and activists fanned out across the camp to tell the migrants that they had to vacate the property. Some were scared. Many couldn’t leave Denver because they had immigration court dates here and changing venues is extremely burdensome. Some simply wanted to stay in their makeshift homes with the many items—bikes, toys, kitchen supplies, mattresses—they had collected since arriving in the States. A group of about a half-dozen Venezuelans gathered around a volunteer. Where will they take us? they asked. Can we bring our things? The volunteer explained that they would go to a shelter and could only bring two bags of belongings with them. Can we stay together? It was a query the volunteer couldn’t answer. If we are going to be separated in the shelters, they said, we would rather stay together on the streets.

Illustration by Hokyoung Kim

On December 22, 2023, Colorado Democrats, including U.S. senators Michael Bennett and John Hickenlooper, penned a letter to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) asking for funding for the communities in the state absorbing the inflow of migrants. FEMA ultimately awarded Denver $37 million—a fraction of the $5 billion that Johnston and the mayors of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston had collectively requested in an October 2023 letter to Biden.

The situation here reflected the frustrating reality that cities and states bear the costs of the immigration crisis but have little say over federal policy. A few weeks later, Johnston visited Washington, D.C., where he marshaled a coalition of mayors in lobbying Congress for aid. They wanted three things: more federal money, expedited work authorization, and a coordinated entry plan that would thoughtfully distribute migrants to cities around the country. “Any one of those things would have been enough,” Johnston says.

At that point, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators was working to hammer out the most sweeping immigration reform in decades. The $118 billion bill proposed building additional border barriers, beefing up the ranks of border patrol agents, and adding more immigration court judges to tackle the yearslong backlog of asylum cases. This past February, Johnston heard that the deal had died, largely due to Trump, who called on his congressional allies to torpedo it. “They knew that it would fundamentally address the crisis,” Johnston says, “and you wouldn’t have a campaign issue for 2024.” The mayor says he was terrified. “We realized,” he says, “no one’s coming to save us.”

Throughout the crisis, Johnston says, local CEOs had been telling him, “Mike, I have 50 open jobs. Why can’t I hire any of these folks who have arrived?” And the mayor heard weekly from immigrants who said, “I don’t want any charity. All I want is a job.” Most of the migrants in Denver were asylum-seekers, a status that meant they would be eligible to work six months after submitting their immigration paperwork. Applying for asylum is a complicated and expensive process that can take 20 to 40 hours of legal work, though, and the six-month clock doesn’t begin ticking until the documents are filed correctly. Frustrated by the federal government’s inaction, Johnston began talking to constitutional law scholars and officials from the departments of Homeland Security and Justice to find a way to legally bypass the country’s cumbersome immigration system. “For us,” Johnston says, “the fundamental strategy was, ‘How do you get people to work as regularly and early and often as possible?’ ”

After weeks of hashing out a plan with his team, Johnston, dressed in a gray suit and crisp white shirt, announced his ambitious new vision during a press conference on April 10, 2024. “We think we’ve now cracked the code on how to help people,” Johnston said. His Denver Asylum Seekers Program (DASP) promised to partner with select nonprofits to offer a total of about 850 migrants housing support, workforce training, and legal assistance in applying for asylum and work permits—at an approximate cost to the city of $1,700 per person. By pivoting from a short-term emergency response that offered thousands of people food and shelter indefinitely, Johnston estimated that Denver would save $90 million and avoid cuts to essential public services.

DASP was both simple and innovative: Johnston’s team would enlist an army of pro bono immigration lawyers to help immigrants file their asylum and work authorization paperwork, avoiding errors in the process and, therefore, completing the necessary documentation more expeditiously. Then, instead of viewing the six-month waiting period as dead time, Denver would use the interlude to “train up a new fleet of workers and help families find their footing,” city spokesperson Jon Ewing says.

In practice, the city and its nonprofit partners would help migrants secure their own apartments, offer them courses in English and financial and digital literacy, and give them cell phones, food stamps, laptops, and bus passes—all on Denver’s dime. As part of the Work Ready arm of DASP, immigrants would receive guidance from career coaches and undergo 20 hours per week of workforce training in one of four industries the city had identified as short-staffed: hospitality, construction, health care, and early childhood education. At the end of the six-month program, migrants would, in theory, receive a temporary work permit and be directed to partner organizations such as the nonprofit El Centro de los Trabajadores for help finding a job. “We have had a terrific experience with these newcomers working for us,” says Mark Berzins, the CEO of Little Pub Company, which owns 17 Denver-area bars and restaurants, including the British Bulldog, and employs a dozen or so DASP participants, with plans to add more. For migrants not selected for DASP, Denver intended to organize clinics during which pro bono immigration lawyers would provide legal aid for asylum and work authorization. To qualify for DASP, applicants had to be eligible for asylum, had to not have entered the country via the CBP One app (an online immigration tool whose users are already fast-tracked for work authorization), and had to be staying in the city’s shelter system or receiving housing support from one of its nonprofit partners on April 10, 2024 (not one day before or after).

Studies back Johnston’s hypothesis that investing in immigrants up front can have long-term benefits. According to a 2016 paper by the National Academies of Science, it costs $1,600 per year to welcome a first-generation immigrant, but the children of immigrants are “among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the U.S. population,” the study says, contributing more in taxes per capita than the native-born population. Here in Colorado, undocumented immigrants added $436.5 million in state and local taxes in 2022, a number that would climb to more than $500 million if they were granted work authorization, according to the Colorado Fiscal Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit.

Johnston’s announcement was gilded in optimism—by helping a smaller group of migrants, the city was investing in them and the city’s future—but that sentiment obscured a more immediate reality. Denver would begin closing its long-term migrant shelters the day after the press conference. From then on, immigrants could count on only 72 hours of temporary housing and, for those who did not qualify for DASP, free fares to other cities. The city encouraged migrants to take advantage of nonprofits around town. In short, Johnston planned to save most of that $90 million by curtailing services. The city even dispatched employees to El Paso to spread the word to immigrants that Denver couldn’t offer much help should they choose to settle here.

Jennifer Piper, of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Philadelphia-based social justice nonprofit, works on immigrants’ rights in Denver and believes that DASP—and its rollout—was poorly conceived, disorganized, and badly executed. The city gave local nonprofits, which had been critical to the migrant response, little notice about DASP and the long-term shelters closing. As a result, nonprofits had to scramble to help migrants find housing. “There was no grace period while they stood the program up,” Piper says. “The 800 people in the program had nowhere to go.” She also says the criteria for DASP were too restrictive and that there was never any clear information about where and how to enroll. (A city spokesperson said that it held an informational session where prospective asylum-seekers could sign up.) And while Piper believes the bones of the program are good, the idea that work authorizations for asylum-seekers would be efficiently processed by the end of the six-month training period was a pipe dream. She also alleges that a city employee is still in El Paso, discouraging migrants from traveling to Denver. (Ewing acknowledges that a part-time employee is there but says their job is to provide accurate information to newcomers about Denver’s “available resources.”)

Housekeys Action Network Denver, an advocacy group for Denver’s houseless population, is even more damning in its condemnation. In an April statement, the nonprofit demanded that the mayor “own up to his blatant and damaging lies regarding migrant support and offer an actual solution for people who are desperate for chances to work and opportunities to build a life for themselves and their families.”

This past fall, seven Venezuelans sat under a tree near the intersection of East Alameda Avenue and South Colorado Boulevard. Ranging in age from 20 to 30, they were fathers and laborers; one said that he was a former professional baseball player. When asked about DASP, one said that you had to “have connections” to access the program. So, instead, they were washing car windows on this corner, each making about $50 per day in a city where rent for a one-bedroom apartment averages almost $1,700 a month.

On a bluebird day in October, an army of red MAGA hats assembled in north Aurora, where Trump held a sold-out rally at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center’s sprawling property near Denver International Airport. Ten thousand people gathered inside the Gaylord’s exhibition hall, and thousands more watched a livestream of the event on a screen outside the hotel, pumping their fists to the Lee Greenwood anthem “God Bless the U.S.A.” Rooftop snipers and drones surveilled the crowd, who roared and chanted Trump’s name when he walked onstage.

After greeting the crowd, Trump began his nearly 90-minute-long stump speech. “[Kamala Harris] has imported an army of illegal gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the Third World… prisons, jails, insane asylums, mental institutions. She has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens,” he said from behind a lectern flanked by two poster-size mug shots of members of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang Trump claimed had taken over Aurora during September’s presidential debate. “And no place is it more evident than right here.”

Rumors that Venezuelan gangs were terrorizing Aurora began widely circulating this past summer, when a video showing several armed men entering an apartment in a northwest Aurora complex started making the rounds in the news and on social media. Trump leaned on the episode throughout the fall. After the debate, Aurora exploded into the national consciousness as the poster child of Biden’s failed immigration policies.

In advance of Trump’s visit, Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman issued a denial, stating that “the concerns about Venezuelan gang activity have been grossly exaggerated.” While Venezuelan gangs are active in Aurora, they aren’t any more of an issue than American gangs, says Marc Sears, a sergeant with the Aurora Police Department. And, when it comes to crime in general, studies show that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born citizens or documented immigrants. However, Coffman’s denial didn’t sit right with Danielle Jurinsky. The Republican, who serves on the Aurora City Council, had seen—and subsequently released on X—an email in which an Aurora police officer claimed a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent had told him that Tren de Aragua had “decided to make Denver its headquarters due to sanctuary policies and location.”

Jurinsky has been extremely critical of Denver’s response to the immigration crisis. “This mass influx of tens of thousands of migrants all at once—I don’t know how we possibly absorb that into society and say that it benefits Colorado,” she says. “We are going to have to pay millions.” She’s not wrong about the money. According to the Colorado Department of Education, 8,000 migrant children enrolled in the state’s public schools between October 2023 and February 2024, at a cost of $24 million to taxpayers. To fund its emergency response, Denver had to enact budget cuts of $45 million, $8.4 million of which came from the police department and $2.5 million of which came from the fire department. “In my opinion,” Jurinsky says, “Americans are being put last.”

Jurinsky isn’t the only one upset. Officials in Castle Rock and Parker have threatened to sue Denver. “This isn’t just a decision that Denver gets to make, because it’s impacting the rest of the Front Range,” Max Brooks, a conservative Castle Rock town councilman, told CBS Colorado. Six counties, including Douglas, Mesa, and Garfield, are suing Governor Jared Polis and Colorado over migrant-friendly state laws, such as a 2019 statute that bans detainment and arrest based on an individual’s immigration status.

In the early days following Trump’s electoral victory, he promised to make good on his key campaign promise to carry out “the largest mass deportation in the history of our country,” a presidential order he’s dubbed “Operation Aurora.” To do so, he plans to declare a national emergency and invoke the National Insurrection Act, allowing him to deploy the military to aid the effort. Trump has also vowed to go after sanctuary cities, such as Denver, first. The cost of a one-time mass deportation of the nearly 12 million immigrants living in the country illegally? A staggering $315 billion, according to the American Immigration Council.

To meet Trump’s aggressive quota of deportations, DU’s Galemba suspects the government will go after not just criminals but also “newcomers who entered on various parole programs or those who received other forms of temporary status, permission, or protection under the Biden administration.” That means Denver may see an increase in ICE activity and workplace raids. Thousands of immigrants may be deported, which, Galemba says, will have “broader social, human, and economic consequences,” such as costlier goods, a dearth of workers, and families being ripped apart. Johnston maintains that solving the immigration crisis will require more than draconian roundups and will instead necessitate a combination of sweeping policy reform and beefed up border security.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser is already preparing legal challenges to the president’s plans. Meanwhile, the mayor’s office says it will resist Trump’s deportation efforts and is looking into enhancing protections for immigrants. The Denver Police Department won’t participate in immigration enforcement initiatives; in fact, the mayor at one point said he might deploy the police to stymie federal forces (though he later backtracked). Johnston’s comments drew the ire of Trump’s new border czar, Tom Homan, who threatened to throw Johnston in jail if he contested the new administration’s immigration tactics and has vowed to defund sanctuary cities that don’t comply with them. Despite the threats, Johnston says he remains firmly committed to Denver’s migrants. “We will always remain a welcoming city that supports our neighbors,” Johnston says, “whether you were born and raised here or recently arrived.”

In July, a few days before Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election, I again met up with Lili. She had recently filed her asylum paperwork and was awaiting her work authorization, which she expects this month. Over the previous seven months, she had begun cooking and selling arepas and once made $500 in a day, a sum that would have taken her at least six months to earn in Venezuela. Her husband took odd jobs working construction, shoveling snow, and sorting donations at a church. Within two months of arriving in Denver, they’d saved $1,500 and purchased a 1990 Honda Accord. By July, they’d banked $4,000, which they used to buy a modest three-bedroom home in Venezuela, in hopes of returning to it someday. When I asked her if the American dream was a myth or something obtainable, her eyes welled up for the first time in our seven months of conversations. “I can tell my children now that we have our own roof,” she said.

It’s unclear when they will be able to see it. Lili was hopeful that Maduro would be ousted in the July 28 contest, enabling her to go back to Venezuela. But despite overwhelming evidence that the opposition had prevailed, Venezuela’s election authorities announced Maduro as the winner. Lili cried when she heard the news. Violence immediately erupted in the streets, and law enforcement arrested thousands of dissidents—and killed more than 20. A survey from the Venezuelan polling company Meganalisis estimated that 43 percent of Venezuelans are thinking about fleeing the country. Most are not likely to find sanctuary in the United States.

This past June, Biden issued an executive order that made it more difficult for unauthorized migrants to enter the United States. Border encounters plummeted by 77 percent in August 2024, according to the Pew Research Center, eliminating the need for Abbott to bus immigrants outside the state. The last charter from Texas to Denver arrived in June. By late summer, no migrants lived in Denver shelters.

The city estimates that approximately 20,000 of the 42,000 migrants who arrived in Denver between December 2022 and December 2024 are still here. As of late October, more than 3,400 people had gone through work authorization clinics and more than 800 people had participated in DASP; many of these immigrants can now legally work anywhere in the United States, the city’s Ewing says. But because the first cohort didn’t complete the program until the end of November, it’s too soon to gauge DASP’s ultimate success or know how many graduates will find jobs.

By November 1, Denver had spent more than $78 million on migrants—significantly less than the $180 million forecasted at the beginning of 2024, largely because of the mayor ending long-term aid. The city has earmarked $12.5 million for immigrant services in 2025, but DASP is not part of that number: Johnston ended the program in December, though its job-training arm and the legal clinics will likely continue, Ewing says.

Johnston says he believes that Denver emerged as a leader on immigration over the course of the crisis. In September, he delivered a keynote speech at the 21st Annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference in Washington, D.C. “We’ve figured out solutions that no one else has figured out,” Johnston says. “I think a lot of the rest of the country looks to Denver now as a model, which we’re very proud of.” In response to queries Denver received from other municipal leaders, such as those in Kansas City, Johnston’s office this past spring released the Newcomers Playbook, a how-to guide for welcoming migrants.

Yet, immigrant rights groups aren’t as eager as Johnston to praise Denver’s performance. Rather than invent revolutionary programs to handle the influx of immigrants, AFSC’s Piper says, the city simply stopped offering services to migrants, bused them elsewhere, and flat out told them not to come—all of which stemmed the flow. Beneath the city’s spin, Piper says, the reality is that thousands of migrants in Denver still need help. “The main thing I take issue with is the impression that [DASP] is serving hundreds of people, and the impression that we’re continuing to welcome people,” Piper says. “We’re not.” She wishes Johnston would be more transparent: “In order for other cities to learn from us and us from them, we have to be honest about the choices we’re making,” she says.

Denver’s experiment also produced mixed results for Lili, who celebrated her 34th birthday in September. A year before, she had emerged from the Darién Gap full of hope and relief, but life in Denver had not worked out. Lili and her husband couldn’t find consistent work here, and Lili had a sister in Texas who landed her a job. In August, they set off for a suburb outside of Dallas, where Lili started working under the table at a fulfillment center while waiting for her asylum case to be heard in March. She says she misses Denver. “There are many good people there,” Lili wrote to me on WhatsApp. Leaving Colorado, she says, “has hit us hard,” and she plans to move back in with Amanda very soon. With her signature optimism, Lili was determined to press ahead: “It’s time to move forward.”

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