Aurora resident Joe Sauceda was living with his dog and partner in a hotel in Aurora for about a year when he learned he could no longer renew his lease for the next week.

With nowhere else to go, Sauceda moved his family into a car and turned the ignition on in the middle of the night to stay warm.

“It was hard,” Sauceda told The Denver Gazette. “I had my partner and my dog, my family, living in a car.”

It turned out Denver wanted the hotel’s rooms to house an influx of immigrants who arrived in the city just as temperatures plummeted. The latest surge of immigrants is straining city resources, forcing Denver to pause discharging people from shelters and to allow families to stay longer under the city’s care.

Sauceda’s story offers yet another dimension to the border crisis that has been spilling into America’s interior cities, such as Denver. Under pressure to provide humanitarian care, Aurora’s neighbor is scrambling to find places to house the immigrants – at the expense, it appears, of people like Sauceda.

Sauceda said what frustrated him was the hotel’s previous residents were not informed earlier they would have to move out.

Aurora and Denver officials knew about the arrangement.  

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston had met with Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman about the arrangement. Coffman said he agreed to let Denver house some immigrants at the hotel. 

But the two mayors seemed to have very different ideas of what that arrangement would look like.

Coffman is frustrated by the situation, while Johnston described the two cities as “great partners” in tackling the unfolding crisis. 

In an interview with The Denver Gazette, Coffman said he did not realize the neighboring government would need the entire hotel, thereby kicking current residents out in the process.

On Monday, Coffman asked Johnston to pick up the immigrants once their vouchers ended. The Aurora mayor said he made Johnston agree not to bring more immigrants to the Aurora hotel.

Coffman also called the ordeal “poorly planned” and accused Johnston’s administration of having no plan for what happens when the immigrants’ vouchers expire.

The Aurora mayor said the Denver mayor initially asked to house homeless people at the hotel in Aurora due to a lack of space in Denver. Coffman said he told Johnston that would “not be appropriate.”

Johnston then asked if he could house immigrants in the Aurora hotel instead, Coffman said.

Coffman said he accepted that request and told Johnston that’s an agreement between Denver and the hotel operator.

What he didn’t know during their initial conversation was how many rooms Johnston needed, Coffman said.

“I thought it was some rooms,” Coffman told The Denver Gazette on Thursday. “What I didn’t know is that it was all of them.”

Coffman said he also didn’t realize that the people moving into the Aurora hotel were given vouchers from the city, which means adults could stay for 14 days and families with children 37 days.

Coffman surmised that, once the vouchers expire, the immigrants would find themselves in Aurora’s streets, adding to his city’s already significant challenge with homelessness.

“I assumed they would take responsibility for them, and then all of the sudden I became very alarmed because it appeared that they were not,” Coffman said.

Notably, he did not realize the hotel had kicked previous residents to make room for the immigrants.

He learned about the situation through Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky. As it happens, Sauceda works for a sports bar and restaurant in Aurora that Jurinsky owns. Sauceda had been leasing his room at the hotel on a week-to-week basis. 

That’s when he realized the “magnitude of the issue” and reached out to Johnston, Coffman said. 

Adding to his frustration, Coffman said, is that Denver, as both a city and a county, gets federal money that Aurora does not.

“We’re using our general fund revenue to pay for what limited homeless services we have,” Coffman said.

Meanwhile, Johnston called Aurora a “great partner” in an interview with The Denver Gazette. Johnston confirmed the arrangement, saying it was done so “with the partnership and approval of the mayor.”

Denver never knows how many immigrants would arrive in any given day or how big the surge would be, he said. Having hotel options is necessary to house them, he added. 

“We’re really grateful for Aurora’s partnership on that and we are looking to do more of these in 2024 with more partnerships with other cities or counties,” Johnston said.

As of early this week, more than 3,100 immigrants were staying in shelters. Denver officials are so concerned about the freezing temperatures they told families that had already timed out to return to one of the city’s five shelters, according to a city spokesperson. 

In the 12 months since 90 immigrants were dropped off downtown at Union Station last December, Denver has spent more than $33 million responding to the humanitarian crisis that has seen more than 31,000 immigrants cross the U.S. border with Mexico and arrive at Colorado’s most populous city.

The cost to temporarily house, feed and transport the immigrants has largely fallen on Denver taxpayers, who have assumed roughly $6 out of every $10 spent.

Many of the new arrivals are from South and Central America. They have arrived in Denver with little more than the clothes on their back. Their arrival has strained an already taxed system addressing Denver’s homeless problem.

Jurinsky said she, too, had no knowledge of Johnston’s plan to fill a hotel with immigrants until Sauceda informed her that he had been kicked out to make room for the new arrivals.

“There were several families living there, some elderly people, people with children, some of them living there for up to three years,” Jurinsky said. “They were thrown out to make room for immigrants.”

A spokesperson for a hotel chain associated with the place where immigrants are staying said the hotels in Aurora are independently owned and “responsible for their own room inventory decisions.”

On Monday, the hotel’s regional manager called Sauceda and told him he and his family could come back to the hotel and stay as long as they wanted, Sauceda said, adding the hotel management also offered them a free week’s stay.

Sauceda said five of the people previously living there took the offer.