Dilemma in Denver

By Nick Tabor

At the beginning of his presidency, Joe Biden vowed to make the United States a more hospitable country for refugees. One need only look to Colorado to see just how fully he broke his promise.

DENVER WAS STILL RECOVERING FROM a heavy spring storm when Maria Chavez and Adrian Rivero arrived in town. Their bus rolled in on a cloudy evening in May 2023, dropping them off near a Latino neighborhood beside Federal Boulevard. After two full days of travel, the Venezuelan couple were glad for the chance to get out and move.

They had been in the United States for only a week, but Denver was their third American city. After crossing the border in El Paso, they had taken a bus to New York, where a friend had promised they’d be able to find jobs and an apartment. These assurances turned out to be wrong. The couple stayed at a shelter near Madison Square Garden and spent several days roaming Manhattan, looking for food pantries and work. Most people they encountered seemed curt, if not bigoted. Someone at a church suggested they try Denver instead; she thought they might have an easier time there.

They immediately felt more at ease in the Colorado city than they had in months. Denver seemed lively but not hectic like New York. Tranquilo is how Chavez describes her first impression. (Names and other identifying details have been changed.) They had no friends in town, no tips about where to spend their first night. But finding Spanish speakers was easy. A stranger told them about a Spanish-speaking church that rented out bunk beds. It took them several hours to find the place, but when they arrived sometime after midnight, they were welcomed inside.

“Midway through his presidency, however, Biden was not championing these arrivals.”

Chavez and Rivero had left their homes in rural Venezuela because they feared for their lives. Rivero had become a target because of his involvement in protests against Nicolás Maduro’s government; Chavez was fleeing police persecution. They were the kind of people President Joe Biden had described on the campaign trail in 2019 when he called for the United States to accept more refugees. “We could afford to take in a heartbeat another two million,” he said during an event that year in Iowa. “The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre.” During a September debate, he called for a “surge” of asylum seekers to the southern border.

In 2023, that surge was happening. Chavez and Rivero say they weren’t thinking about American politics when they decided when to cross. Before approaching the border, they had spent a year in Colombia, working cash jobs and saving up. Once they had set aside $1,000, they started their passage through the Darién Gap. But tens of thousands of others were making the same journey at that time, and for them, Biden certainly played a role. His rhetoric while campaigning—if not all his policies once in office—led many to believe they’d “get a better deal” under his administration, immigration scholar Charles Kamasaki said in a phone interview. “That was just a rational thing to think.” It helped that the U.S. economy was recovering rapidly from its pandemic-era slump and that American businesses were desperate to hire.

Midway through his presidency, however, Biden was not championing these arrivals. In his 2023 State of the Union address, he briefly mentioned immigration to claim credit for increasing border security and called for a pathway to citizenship for those with temporary legal status and essential workers. Yet his administration was doing little to manage the flow of all the new arrivals: there was no plan to determine where they should go or to make sure they landed in communities with enough housing and jobs.

Continue reading “Dilemma in Denver,” an essay by Nick Tabor, on our site.

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