Denver’s far left-wing Democrat mayor is in the national spotlight for his generous support for President Joe Biden’s illegal migrants, but as the tab for caring for them soars, local homeless citizens are left abandoned.
Mayor Mike Johnston recently pumped up his level of bravado to full blast and promised to use the city’s police department to physically oppose the efforts of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to fulfill Donald Trump’s repatriation mandate. However, he found himself trying to backtrack only a day later.
The turnabout came after incoming border czar Tom Homan promised to overcome any resistance from deep blue, sanctuary cities and states to court-ordered repatriations.
After Johnston pumped himself up as a “fighter” by warning President-elect Donald Trump that he would use the Denver Police Department (DPD) to oppose ICE, Homan warned that standing in the way of ICE was actually against the law and said, “It is a felony to harbor or conceal an illegal alien from ICE. Read the statute. Don’t cross that line.”
The next day, Johnston sheepishly claimed he had presented the “wrong image” with his previous bombastic rant about using the DPD and tried to walk it back to a degree.
“Would I have taken it back if I could? Yes, I probably wouldn’t have used that image,” Johnston said, according to WKUSA-TV.
“That’s the image I hope we can avoid. What I was trying to say is this is an outcome I hope we can avoid in this country. I think none of us want that.”
Meanwhile, sidelined Americans in Denver say that they have been left behind as Johnston steers taxpayer resources to migrants.
Denver native Tim Rogers, for one, says that he has been waiting for housing assistance for years as migrants who do not even belong in this country have been pushed ahead of him.
“It ain’t fair,” he told ProPublica. “We got guys doing what they’re supposed to do, seeing their case managers and trying to get housing. If they ask to get a pair of shoes they get a big runaround.”
“I’m sorry to say it, I know we’re all human, but to me it ain’t fair,” he continued. “Back in our day, you’d go up to a cop and he’d say, ‘We got a place for you,” meaning jail, Rogers said. “They never threw us on a bus and took us to a motel.”
Citizens like Rogers are in need of jobs, too. But in June, Johnston’s administration celebrated a program to push illegals into jobs ahead of local citizens.
“Our goal was to take what people saw as a crisis and turn it into an opportunity,” Denver Mayor Mike Johnston told the media, adding:
We have people arriving in the city who desperately want to work, who have skills and talent and discipline. We have employers in the city who are starving to find employees, and they desperately want to hire them. What we wanted to do was to take those people that are looking to work and connect them to the training and the skills centered on jobs where we have the greatest need. So, what we did is create this first-of-its-kind program in the country, which is this asylum-seeker program.
But even as actual citizens are feeling ignored and uncared for, Johnston continues to push his face before national news cameras to burnish his pro-illegals bona fides. For instance, even as he walked back his talk of using the police to oppose Trump, Johnston said he will gladly face the possibility of being arrested for breaking the law.
“Yeah, I’m not afraid of that, and I’m also not seeking that,” Johnston told the media. “I think the goal is we want to be able to negotiate with reasonable people how to solve hard problems”:
Denver has been welcoming Biden’s border crossers for nearly two years, when the first busload of them arrived in December 2022. Since that time, Johnston has diverted upwards of $100 million to provide for free housing, medical care, food, education, clothing, legal advice, and other services for migrants. And Johnston has projected that the city may be on track to spending more than $180 million by the end of 2024.
As more and more migrants streamed into the Mile High City and spending continued to rise, resources began shifting from citizens to migrants. Johnston even began pulling budget money from essential services — including police and firefighters — so he could throw more cash at migrants.
But the Johnston administration’s shifting priorities left actual citizens of the city out in the cold, in some cases, literally.
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