(NewsNation) — A new initiative in Denver is designed to help put migrants and asylum-seekers to work faster, and city leaders believe it could provide a playbook for other sanctuary cities hoping to provide sustainable solutions after newcomers leave city-run shelters.
Mayor Mike Johnston recently announced the Asylum Seekers Program will provide migrants enrolled with six months of paid rent in an apartment to cover the 180 days before they become authorized to work.
Denver city officials spent February and March getting about 1,500 people through work authorization clinics before the new program was announced last week.
Johnston said all of the 838 migrants currently living in shelters will be enrolled in the Asylum Seekers Program, which will cap at 1,000 participants and will fill spots as they open up, the mayor said.
It’s a much shorter wait than migrants who were bused to places like Chicago and New York and face a yearslong delay before they have a scheduled immigration hearing.
In addition to work authorizations, the Denver program offers job training, access to work certifications and unpaid work experience and food assistance, the mayor announced. Johnston characterized the program as one that “we think 100% sets people up for success.”
Although the initiative will start small, it addresses a larger need experienced by many migrants across the country.
“We are going to share this playbook with all cities around the country,” Johnston said at a news conference last week. “We think we have now cracked the code on how to help people.”
A migrant numbers game
In Chicago, more than 16,000 migrants have been resettled from city-run shelters, many of whom are unable to cover their rent because they are not authorized to work.
As of Friday, nearly 9,400 people remain in city-run shelters, down significantly since the city announced evictions would begin last month.
Yet with more migrants scheduled to leave Chicago shelters this spring — including an estimated 1,700 by the end of April — the question is how new arrivals who are not eligible for work authorizations will pay for places to live.
A spokesperson for the state agency in charge of rental assistance did not return an email seeking comment on the concern over migrants’ ability to pay their rent once their state rental assistance ran out.
In New York, the city estimates it will devote more than $12 billion to the migrant crisis by July 2025. Mayor Eric Adams said the city spends an average of $383 a night to provide food, shelter, medical care and social services to each family seeking asylum within the city, Bloomberg reported.
As of March 10, around 22,400 of those migrants had reached the end of their shelter stay, according to data provided to NewsNation by the city’s comptroller’s office.
Denver’s change of plans
The path toward self-sustainability is one that migrants being sent to sanctuary cities face regularly. While statewide programs in Colorado, Illinois, and New York have all provided millions in rental assistance, the financial assistance is limited to a security deposit and perhaps to a few months of rent.
Jon Ewing, the spokesman for the Denver Department of Human Services, told NewsNation the city has had the highest number of migrants per capita sent to the city from the southern border by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
However, after the city spent $15 million on the migrant crisis alone in December, when 144 buses arrived from Texas, officials feared they could face a budget shortfall of $180 million by the end of 2024.
That prompted Johnson and other city leaders to begin formulating a plan that could be a win-win for new arrivals and the city as well as the Colorado companies that currently have hundreds of thousands of jobs open and no one to fill them.
“This is a plan that is going to better serve migrants who arrive in the city and better allow them to get to work to actually support the city, to support themselves, and to support the industries that have open jobs,” Johnston said.
Ewing said that the new program will allow the city to continue providing travel options to those who want to reconnect with family and friends in other parts of the country.
Denver and other Democratic-led cities had asked the Biden administration for help in dealing with the influx of migrants into their communities. President Joe Biden asked Congress for $1.4 billion in funding for the effort as part of his budget.
But Congress allocated nothing and cut the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Shelter and Services Program from $800 million to $650 million, the Associated Press reported.
In Denver, where the shelter population dipped under 1,000 in March, Ewing said migrants are encouraged to maintain open lines of communication with the city as they move into other housing.
“It’s tricky because once they’re in housing, they’re out of the city’s system,” Ewing told NewsNation.
Ewing said that part of the motivation for establishing the new Asylum Seekers Program was to cut down on the number of migrants struggling to remain in housing once they are there.
Yoli Casas, the founder and executive director of ViVe Wellness, a Denver nonprofit, has worked with local apartment landlords and rental property owners to provide housing for migrants once they move out of the city’s shelter system.
As part of the new city program, migrants must fill out an application for a lease and pass a background check to move into new housing, Casas said.
Ewing said that local nonprofits like ViVe will initially cover the housing assistance, which will allow migrants to earn their work authorizations once they are enrolled in the program.
The mayor said the plan may need tweaking depending on whether Denver sees another influx of new arrivals in the coming months, much like Johnson expects to see in Chicago as the city prepares to host the Democratic National Convention in August.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.