On the last Friday in January, more than 100 people stood in the cold outside the Denver Aid Center near the downtown courthouse.
The dads wore Yankees, Bulls, Dodgers and Nuggets caps. One woman nursed her baby – young enough to be born in the United States, a citizen. The mother was not.
This crowd of immigrants represented a fraction of the people rushing for legal help, fearing their future under President Donald Trump’s threats of mass deportations, in a city that the new administration has made a target.
But was it safe to be out of the house, meeting with immigration lawyers? Were they protected here — or in more danger? Could immigration agents drive up and arrest them all?
Some of the attorneys at the Colorado Asylum Center, the group running the clinic, had the same fears. This would be the last time people were allowed to wait outside, a volunteer said.
The crowd was a cross-section of immigration. Some people had work authorization and had already filed for asylum. Others had Temporary Protected Status, while many were uncertain of their legal status.
None of them, however, felt safe. Changing executive orders, a tangle of confusing laws, and headlines about mass deportations have people scared.
Even people who thought they were following the asylum process could be under threat from Trump’s crusade. Many new immigrants are seeking asylum, a process that can take years in court. Some also have qualified Temporary Protected Status — depending on when and from where they came.
That’s how it worked under Biden, anyway.
A series of orders from the Trump administration has thrown the future of the asylum program and other immigration policies into doubt, an attempt to "radically expand the legal authorities used to enforce immigration law against immigrants already in the U.S.," according to the American Immigration Council.
The administration also has revoked Temporary Protected Status for more than 300,000 Venezuelan people in the U.S., raising the threat of deportation.
They wanted to know: What was next?
Most of the people near the courthouse spoke Spanish or indigenous languages. They came from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras and Nicaragua — but also places like Eastern Europe.
These newcomers were part of a surge of immigration that has reached Denver and the U.S. More than 5 million immigrants arrived in the United States between 2022 and 2024, an increase of almost 10 percent for a total of 55 million immigrants nationwide, according to a May 2024 report by the Center for Immigration Studies.
That includes some 40,000 people from South and Central American countries who have passed through Denver in recent years, often searching for economic opportunities, fleeing oppressive governments and violence or simply hoping to build something new.
Many had been welcomed by the city of Denver. They got help with housing and other basic necessities from residents. Even now, they were receiving free legal advice in a city-run building.
Trump’s administration wants many of these people gone, calling many "criminal aliens." He has threatened to deport them to their countries of origin, or Mexico, or a camp at Guantanamo Bay, where suspected and convicted terrorists are imprisoned, too. They could even go to El Salvador’s brutal prison system, if the U.S. accepts President Nayib Bukele’s offer. Anywhere but here.
They needed legal advice. Now.
Spanish speakers surrounded Christina Brown, the executive director of the Colorado Asylum Center.
Most listened intently as she explained in Spanish the asylum process: what types of immigrants are eligible, what sorts of traumas can qualify a person for U.S. protection, why you’re far more likely to win a case if you have a lawyer. She told them to watch out for scammers offering fake help.
One Ukrainian man waited for Brown to speak with him directly. She would use Google Translate on his phone to bridge their language divide.
She told people about their rights: to stay silent, to not incriminate themselves by sharing information about their national origins, to refuse to open the door for law enforcement unless an officer has a judge-signed warrant.
What Brown was saying could mean the difference between arrest and freedom, asylum and deportation, families together or separated. During recent immigration raids, many residents of the Edge apartment buildings refused to open their doors.
Federal authorities said that kind of ‘know your rights’ action got in the way of a search for violent gang members. Trump's immigration czar, Tom Homan, has talked about arresting advocates who were informing immigrants of their rights at ICE actions.
But immigrants and advocates said the raids were a thin pretense to sweep up immigrants. Out of 30 arrests, last week’s raids reportedly included only one member of the gang Tren de Aragaua, according to early media reports.
But the law could still help people, Brown said.
Despite the widely publicized immigration crackdown, Brown believes many new immigrants could ultimately win the right to stay in the U.S.
“I feel very good about every Venezuelan opportunity for asylum because all of these cases are textbook asylum cases,” Brown told Denverite. “They fit very squarely within delineated asylum law. There's not a lot of room for interpretation.”
Yes, Trump’s trying to shut down the border, close off the asylum option and deny entry to people fleeing trauma in their countries, Brown said.
“I imagine that those things will be struck down throughout a very sustained federal court battle,” she said. “While people are in here within the United States seeking asylum, that's their right. And it will get harder under this administration, but it's not gone.”
Kevin J. Beaty contributed reporting to this story.
