A crew from Denver on Wednesday began tearing down roughly 150 tents that immigrants had set up after crossing the southern border illegally and arriving in the city.

Trucks started moving in at the crack of dawn, putting up the barricades and beginning the work of dismantling the tents at the makeshift encampment, which had been home to about 300 homeless immigrants.

The encampment off Speer Boulevard and Zuni Street sprung up about three months ago when the immigrants, who had been sheltered, exhausted their city shelter voucher and moved onto the streets.

A small fire also broke out at the camp, and firefighters responded to put it out. No injuries were reported. 

Tents catch fire while sweep of immigrant camp in LoHi underwayTom Hellauer
tom.hellauer@denvergazette.comTomHellauer
tom.hellauer@denvergazette.com
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While there are other migrant encampments, the one on Zuni is the largest, said Jon Ewing, a Denver Human Services spokesperson.

Denver Human Services has been managing the city’s response since the city lifted its emergency declarations. The encampment on Zuni Street has roughly 150 tents and about 300 immigrants, mostly from Venezuela.

The plan for the encampment sweep was hatched to clean up the encampment and relocate its residents when the Denver City Council scrimped together an extra $330,000 to respond to the crisis.

For the past week, city officials have been holding workshops with immigrants at the Zuni encampment to place them, if they’re working, in an apartment or, if they’re still looking for work, in a shelter for up to 30 days, Ewing said.

Spanish flyers said city officials would remove and hold any property for 30 days.

Ewing said the city has enough shelter space for about 300 people.

“I’m hopeful that we’ll have enough,” Ewing said.

Roughly 4,500 immigrants were being sheltered in Denver as of Tuesday.

About 100 immigrants, Ewing said, have already signed leases.

The sweep came as Mayor Mike Johnston declared victory over the city’s homeless problem by getting – as he promised in July – to place 1,000 homeless people indoors by the end of the year.

Johnston accomplished this by spending $45 million to acquire or lease units at hotels and purchase “tiny” shelters for “micro-communities” his administration is building across the city.

He plans to do it again this year with $50 million earmarked for the project.

The immigrant crisis offers a more obstinate challenge because most – if not all – of these immigrants cannot legally work in the U.S. For those with a path to work legally, obtaining work authorization can still take months.

“We know that people are going to work whether they are authorized to or not,” Ewing said. “We really need to expand work authorization.”

This has huge implications for the city.

Johnston has maintained that the issues immigrants face are uniquely different than those of the unhoused.

And this is because address the immigrant crisis will not be as simple as providing services to ease them into work and self-sufficiency. If these newly arriving immigrants are unable to obtain work, they won’t be able to house and feed themselves without public assistance.

As of Tuesday night, Denver had welcomed 35, 952 immigrants from South and Central America, primarily Venezuela.

Last month, Denver marked its one-year anniversary since 90 immigrants were dropped off downtown at Union Station, left to wander in the cold looking for shelter. Officials have scrambled ever since to respond to the growing humanitarian crisis.

The response to the unfolding calamity at the U.S. border with Mexico and in Colorado’s most populous city has cost a staggering $36 million. Despite federal and state grants, the brunt of these costs have fallen to Denver taxpayers.

Early in the humanitarian crisis, officials determined the city would pay to temporarily house the arriving immigrants as well as provide transportation to the city of their choice, for those not wanting to stay in Denver.

Once predominantly confined to states that border Mexico or gateway cities such as New York and Chicago, the crisis has now spilled over into interior cities like Denver, which is more than 600 miles from the closest U.S. border.