Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman effectively blamed Denver Mayor Mike Johnston for the “national embarrassment” that his city suffered following reports of violence by a Venezuelan gang amid the national debate over how best to confront America’s illegal immigration crisis.

In an opinion piece that ran in The Denver Gazette on Monday, Coffman said the Johnston administration “placed” immigrants in Aurora, refused to tell him where they were housed and how many — and drew up contracts with nonprofits that gave the Denver mayor plausible deniability.

“It gives Johnston cover, should it become public, by allowing him to say that it wasn’t his decision to put them in Aurora; it was the nonprofits who made the decision,” Coffman wrote. 

The Aurora mayor also disclosed that Aurora sought records from Denver via a channel typically employed by journalists to obtain documents from a government entity — the Colorado Open Records Act.

Johnston rejected Coffman’s assertions.  

“I simply don’t know what he’s referring to,” Johnston told The Denver Gazette when asked about Coffman’s column, which accused the Denver mayor of being less than transparent on the movement of immigrants from Denver to Aurora.

“It’s simply not accurate that we haven’t been transparent about what our process is,” Johnston said.  

Coffman’s charge against Johnston is not new. Months ago, he claimed that Johnston “placed” immigrants into Aurora without his consent, a move that he said also played a role in Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua’s violence that pushed Aurora into the national spotlight.

Since December 2022, roughly 43,000 immigrants — mostly from South and Central America who crossed the southern border illegally — have come to Denver, according to previous Denver Gazette reporting. Many of them are from Venezuela, which has been in the throes of economic and political chaos since President Nicolás Maduro assumed power.

In Venezuela, “criminality is rampant” due to the role of law enforcement in protecting the Maduro regime rather than the people, Coffman said in his column. He blamed this for the TdA violence in Aurora, writing, “Where there is a concentration of Venezuelans here, the criminal elements sometimes follows and superimposes itself on the Venezuelans to exploit them.”

The conflict between the mayors on the matter goes back to November 2023, according to Coffman. At the time, Johnston asked for permission to use an extended-stay Quality Inn hotel in Aurora to temporarily house some of the busloads of immigrants coming into Denver.

“I initially said yes, but it soon became apparent that beyond giving the newly arrived migrants a 30-day hotel voucher, he had no plan for them other than leaving them homeless in Aurora,” Coffman wrote.

Moving the immigrants into the extended-stay hotel also forced the current residents out, Coffman said. When he found out about this, he said, he demanded that Johnston take the immigrants back to Denver as soon as their vouchers expired.

Johnston did as Coffman asked, and Coffman turned down requests for further assistance, the Aurora mayor said.

Then in September, Coffman read a news article from the City Journal saying Johnston “moved migrants from Denver to Aurora” via the cover of two nonprofit organizations, ViVe Wellness and Papagayo, he said.

Coffman said the article noted that Papagayo “worked with a landlord called CBZ Management, a property management company that operates the three apartment buildings at the center of the current controversy: Edge of Lowry, Whispering Pines, and Fitzsimons Place, also known as Aspen Grove.”

When he confronted Johnston about it, Johnston “affirmed that Denver had contracts with nonprofits that ‘have’ placed migrants from Denver to Aurora,” Coffman said in his column.

But Johnston would not say how many, where the immigrants were housed or what resources they were given, “defensively” saying that information wasn’t available, Coffman wrote.

In October, Aurora councilmembers approved a resolution launching an investigation into claims that the Colorado government and Denver “placed” immigrants into Aurora without the city’s consent. 

Aurora City Attorney Pete Schulte obtained the contracts between Denver and the nonprofits via the Colorado Open Records Act. Coffman said the clause “in Denver or the surrounding communities” was “quietly inserted into these contracts to allow these nonprofits to put the migrants in Aurora without notifying us.”

Aurora also learned, Coffman said, that the records “contradicted” Johnston’s statement that the information wasn’t available because the compliance provision in the contracts “required the nonprofit organizations to provide the information about how many migrants were sent to Aurora and where they were housed.”

When Schulte followed up with a CORA request for information about the number of immigrants and where they were housed, a Denver city attorney replied that records could not be released since they contained personal identifiers, such as names, Coffman wrote.

“Then, Denver should redact the names and send us the information,” the Aurora mayor wrote. 

In an interview on Monday, Johnston said the city of Denver has been transparent about its process. 

“In the city, we have nonprofit partners that we partner with to do mental health support, workforce support, do housing support and those nonprofits help identify and place these folks into housing and they report directly to those cities if they want information on who gets houses and where,” the Denver mayor said. 

“The city doesn’t place people in housing, the nonprofit partners do,” Johnston said, adding, “None of that has changed other than maybe Mayor Coffman feels increased political pressure for some reason.”

Johnston also said he was “surprised” by Coffman’s article in The Denver Gazette, adding that he considers Coffman a “confidant and friend.” 

“We’re colleagues working together closely and we reach out regularly on the phone if he has concerns,” Johnston said. “I’m surprised he didn’t reach out to me, but I understand that he has a lot to try and manage in his city.”

Johnston said any of the data Coffman wants “has always been available through those nonprofit partners.”

Denver has built a method of responding to immigrants that has been “very successful for us,” Johnston said.

“We provided a combination of services and accountability, and that’s meant we have people at work and supporting themselves and we don’t see increased levels of crime, so we are very happy for how this has turned out for Denver,” he said. “But we’re always happy to talk to others that are seeing different challenges.”

In his column, Coffman sought to tie Denver’s actions to the TdA gang’s tentacles in Aurora. 

“Aurora has suffered from a national embarrassment that has harmed the image of our city in a way that could have lasting economic consequences. As the mayor of Aurora, I’m asking that Mayor Mike Johnston be transparent and tell the truth about what he did,” he wrote. 

Denver Gazette reporters Nico Brambila and Deborah Grigsby contributed to this article.