Mountain of Expenses: Denver’s Fiscal Woes Climb as Illegal Aliens Overwhelm City

Migrants rest at a makeshift shelter in Denver on Jan. 6, 2023. Over the past month, nearly 4,000 immigrants, almost all Venezuelans, have arrived unannounced in the frigid city, with nowhere to stay and sometimes wearing T-shirts and flip-flops. In response, Denver converted three recreation centers into emergency shelters for migrants and paid for families with children to stay at hotels, allocating $3 million to deal with the influx. Thomas Peipert/AP Photo

Commentary

Denver is buckling under a financial crisis caused by illegal immigration. But the fault lies not in the stars, but with the city itself.

“Denver will cut hours at recreation centers, end in-person vehicle-registration renewals and eliminate spring flower beds to save $5 million this year, a response to the migrant crisis that is expected to cost the city $180 million,” the Colorado Sun reported.

But the city isn’t just cutting corners on niche city services.

According to KUSA-TV, the local NBC News affiliate, the city is asking nearly every city department—from animal shelters to the police department—to make budget cuts so they can meet the cost of the new arrivals.

City officials are also asking for the department that oversees elections to cut nearly a million dollars in an election year.

The District Attorney’s Office has been asked to make a 5 percent cut, despite the fact that the city has been racked by violent crime.

Like many other jurisdictions, Denver is paying the price for President Joe Biden’s border crisis—and for its own status as a sanctuary city. In 2017, the city passed an ordinance codifying its resistance to federal immigration enforcement. Then-Mayor Michael Hancock, a Democrat, said of illegal immigrants at the time: “We’ve got your backs.”

Since Mr. Biden has been in office, we see what it’s like when local and federal authorities are equally lawless: Unchecked catastrophic chaos and financial implosion.

Denver’s current mayor, Democrat Mike Johnston, perhaps not surprisingly, is pointing the finger at former President Donald Trump and Republicans for the mess his city is in.

He blamed them because they refused to support the so-called Senate border bill—probably better described as a massive foreign aid and nonprofit organization slush fund bill—that would have helped codify illegal immigration and bogus asylum-seeking, rather than stop them.

“The choice by Republicans in Congress to purposefully kill a historic, bipartisan border deal ... will have a devastating impact in Denver,” Johnston said after Republicans blocked the deal, Fox News reported.

Of course, Johnston insisted that the problem is in no way caused by the tens of thousands of illegal immigrants who have come to the Colorado city. In one sense, I agree: If he’s looking for blame, he should look in the mirror and at his friends running the White House.

Democrats and left-wing activists have no desire to halt the unprecedented spike in illegal immigration. They just want it to look less chaotic so voters won’t be quite as angry about the disaster. And sanctuary city and sanctuary state leaders want a big federal bailout funded by the American taxpayer to deal with the massive holes in their budgets.

They want you to pay for their mess. We borrow and spend so much money these days, nobody will know the difference, they must think.

Denver has tried to shunt their problem onto other Colorado communities. This testimony from a Lakewood, Colorado, resident on Tuesday, Feb. 13, sums up the dynamic. It was posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, by Libs of TikTok.

Libs of TikTok/X

Typical.

If we, the people, want any control over this situation, then we have to make sure that Denver, New York City, and other besieged blue cities pay for their own self-inflicted problems. Don’t let them shift the burden, financial and otherwise, elsewhere.

I’ll add that the sheer cost of the border crisis isn’t even the worst part of this whole disaster. They want you to pay while they hack away at the foundation of our free society.

The complete evaporation of border enforcement portends something much worse than just the immediate effects of bloated budgets, cut services, dysfunctional cities, and increased crime, as bad as all those things are.

What it signals is a demolition of even the concept of citizenship.

Denver gives us another glimpse into the next stage of this farce. While Colorado has a law on the books preventing noncitizens from voting, Denver is potentially throwing open the door for noncitizens to become police officers and firefighters.

I wish I were joking.

According to Axios, two City Council members proposed on Monday, Feb. 12 “striking language from the city charter preventing the city’s police and fire departments from hiring noncitizens.”

Keep in mind, this is the same City Council that has tried several times to defund the police as crime spun out of control. Yet, the Left wants to make it so people who have broken our laws and who have demonstrated no loyalty to the United States can be the police officers of the future.

This police and fire proposal is nearly as perverse as a proposal from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) to allow illegal immigrants join the military. They really just want troops and members of our protective services to be loyal to their regime, don’t they?

This is end-stage Roman Empire stuff, brought to you by the Democratic Party. For people who obsess over the destruction of “our democracy,” the Left sure seems to have little regard for, well, democracy.

The Biden-caused border crisis isn’t just an economic or law enforcement problem; it’s a direct attack on self-government. It’s an effective tool to water down and obliterate the meaning of citizenship. It’s an attempt to transform the United States from a free republic based on deliberation and consent of the governed into a vast economic zone of farcical ballot-harvesting and technocratic rule from on high.

Denver sowed the seeds for this illegal immigration crisis years ago, just as many other big, blue cities have done. Federal policies exposed the reality of the problem. They are now paying a price for their decisions—as they must, if we as a nation have any hope of pulling out of this catastrophe.

Reprinted by permission from The Daily Signal, a publication of The Heritage Foundation.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.