Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has grabbed the nation’s attention for his theatrical pronouncement that he would use local police and a vast array of citizen volunteers to block federal authorities from conducting mass deportations of illegal aliens in his city. The comments run face first into the uncomfortable reality that Johnston and his woke Denver officials are crafting another New York City-style migrant disaster in the Rockies.
“More than us having [Denver Police Department] stationed at the county line to keep them out, you would have 50,000 Denverites there,” Johnston told local publication Denverite in a blustering November 20 interview. “It’s like the Tiananmen Square moment with the rose and the gun, right?” He continued: “You’d have every one of those Highland moms who came out for the migrants. And you do not want to mess with them.”
Johnston only tepidly walked back his over-the-top comments two days later in an interview with KUSA-TV in Denver, saying he would take them back if he could but that “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.”
Yet he still vowed that he is willing to go to jail to fight the mass deportation of illegals in his city. “I think [if] things are happening that are illegal or immoral or un-American in our city, I would certainly protest it, and I would expect other residents would do the same,” Johnston reiterated.
Championing a Denver Disaster
Johnston is rather transparently seeking to cast himself as a modern-day incarnation of Civil Rights-era protesters against segregation. That’s long been an exceedingly stale Democrat pose in the decades since the 1960s. In this case, it further reveals the daydreamy disconnect of blue elected officials from the citizens of the United States. Johnston claims a wholly unconvincing moral high ground as he presides over a migration crisis in Denver similar to those now threatening to bankrupt progressive bastions such as Boston and New York.
Denver has spent $356 million on its sanctuary city policies for illegal aliens, according to an updated report by the Common Sense Institute.
In April, Liberty Nation News documented the frustration of Johnston’s own Denver officials with the migrant inundation of their town. Denver’s Newcomer Communications Liaison Andres Carrera (how’s that for a title?), who is also Mayor Johnston’s political director, flat-out told aliens to keep out.
“The opportunities are over,” Carrera was captured on video saying in Spanish to a group of migrants, urging them to seek out other leftist cities offering more goodies. “New York gives you more. Chicago gives you more. So I suggest you go there where there is longer-term shelter. There are also more job opportunities there.”
There you have it. Johnston’s own administration doesn’t want them – and with very good reason. The social, economic, and cultural costs to those other blue burgs have been calamitous.
Crime and Fiscal Punishment
“In New York City, it would take a lifetime to clear the city of the [migrant] criminals that we have,” Kenneth Genalo, the director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s New York City field office, stated on November 22.
“The fact is that I have to focus all of my resources on the worst of the worst, the most egregious violators. All I can tell you is we have leads that we work every day – and it’s not in the hundreds,” Genalo told The New York Post.
The Big Apple has seen more than 223,000 aliens flood into its boroughs since the migrant crisis began in 2022, The Post relates. Of that number, “at least 58,000 are still being cared for by taxpayers in city-funded shelters.”
Democrat Mayor Eric Adams has long understood where it all leads. “Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this,” Adams famously said in September 2023. “This issue will destroy New York City.... All of us are going to be impacted by this. I said it last year when we had 15,000, and I’m telling you now at 110,000. The city we knew, we’re about to lose.”
Woke Massachusetts is also feeling the pain of its migrant-welcoming approach. On November 22, Democrat Governor Maura Healey, who has been a tireless advocate of providing for every illegal alien who makes their way into the Bay State, called a retreat. Healey is seeking to install a six-month limit on the time migrants can spend in emergency shelters and wants to phase out the notorious use of hotels and motels as shelters.
Massachusetts’ migrant shelter system “is projected to cost nearly $1.1 billion in fiscal year 2025,” The Boston Globe reports. Healey now acknowledges that the program has become “increasingly unsustainable,” placing a crippling burden on state taxpayers.
“We won't change [the city’s support structures for illegal aliens] because those are one of our core values,” Johnston declared in his Denverite interview. “And we're not going to sell out those values to anyone. We're not going to be bullied into changing them.” His progressive government comrades in Massachusetts and New York mouthed the same words for years. They invited a full-fledged crisis into their environs and now are struggling for a way out of the disaster they’ve wrought. It’s only a matter of time before reality similarly crashes down on the empty elected official posturing in the Rocky Mountains.
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