It is no surprise Denver saw large protests against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies last week, but protesters did themselves no favors by prominently flying the Mexican flag as seen in media reports.

There is a legitimate debate about President Trump’s sweeping actions to remove illegal immigrants after former President Joe Biden essentially opened up the southern border to millions of illegal crossings during his four failed years as president. 

Colorado U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper meekly stayed on the sidelines for the past four years and quietly acquiesced to Biden’s irresponsible and dangerous immigration policies that created today’s crisis. Only recently have the two senators suddenly decided criminals who are illegally in the United States should be removed.

But Hickenlooper apparently wants to go beyond peaceful protests against Trump’s policies. He released a video calling for protesters to “use every tool to disrupt the chaotic actions of the Trump administration” which seems to suggest he supports active interference against law enforcement.

As repulsed as the nation clearly was by Biden when they gave Trump a solid election victory this past November with illegal immigration a dominant issue in that national debate, I think most Americans have a more nuanced view about immigration overall.

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There is no doubt thousands of criminals have come into the U.S. and many have committed crimes here. The Republican-controlled Congress recently passed and Trump signed into law the Laken Riley Act after Senate Democrats refused to pass it before they lost their majority in 2024. Laken Riley was a Georgia nursing student murdered by a criminal who was here illegally.

But major sectors of our economy are dependent on immigrant workers, many of whom are here illegally, such as agriculture, hospitality and construction. The vast majority of these workers who are here illegally are otherwise law-abiding and work in jobs difficult, if not impossible, to fill with American workers.

Somewhere between the open-borders liberals and the “deport them all!” conservatives is an elusive national consensus both parties have failed to acknowledge and act upon. 

I was raised on a farm in Bent County in rural southeastern Colorado where my family has been since the 1880s. About 40% of my classmates at Las Animas High School in 1973 were Hispanic whose grandparents and great-grandparents came from Mexico just as mine came from Sweden.

Growing up I cultivated sugar beets, stacked hay and helped irrigate crops. Our neighbor raised watermelons and cantaloupes, which are highly perishable during their peak in late summer. He hired migrant laborers, many of whom were from Mexico, to pick the melons in the fields and load them on a truck to take to a Denver grocery store chain. At the height of this harvest, I helped our neighbor by working side by side with those farm workers doing the back-breaking work of picking those melons during 90-degree days in August.

Many of them could not speak English but in talking with those that could, I learned they were in the United States as seasonal laborers making more money than they could in Mexico to support their families back home. They were good people who were absolutely necessary to getting those melons to market rather than rotting in the fields.

Looking back, it was probably one of the most formative experiences I had growing up. I have a feeling not many of the open-borders liberals or “deport them all!” conservatives ever worked in a field picking melons with migrant laborers.

Heated rhetoric is to be expected at a large protest against Trump’s immigration policies but openly flying the Mexican flag is strategically unwise and just plain wrong and inappropriate.

It begs the question: if they think Mexico is preferable to the United States as suggested by waving the Mexican flag at the protests, why do those protesters want to live and work here?

Ruben Navarrette, a self-described Mexican American, is the most widely read Latino columnist in the country who has been highly critical of the failures of both Republicans and Democrats on immigration issues. He wrote a column in the Denver Gazette last week entitled, “Mexican flags at immigration protests are cringeworthy.”

Navarrette said this: “Those who choose to participate in demonstrations should do themselves, and their allies, a favor and leave one prop at home, since it has no place in a protest: the Mexican flag. It’s bad manners, and even worse civics, to wave the flag of one country while demanding rights, privileges and accommodation from another.”

Hopefully, out of this tumultuous immigration debate there will be a national consensus that seems terribly elusive right now.

Dick Wadhams is a former Colorado Republican state chairman who managed campaigns for U.S. Sens. Hank Brown and Wayne Allard, and Gov. Bill Owens.