Migrants in Denver seek jobs but face hurdles without work approvals

Emily Borges wants to work — even if it’s not as a cop, the decade-long career she said she left behind in Venezuela after facing threats within her own police agency for doing her job amid pervasive corruption.

After a treacherous journey to the U.S., Borges and her 2-year-old daughter, Arantza, crossed the southern border in December, and then traveled to Denver, where they’ve been staying in a hotel shelter. She’s tried to pick up any jobs she can, such as cleaning houses. But to unlock the opportunity for regular work — her ticket to earning money, so she can find a place to live — she needs a work permit.

Time is already running short. Borges, 30, has just three weeks left under Denver’s time limit for migrant families in its shelters, and receiving federal work authorization often takes upwards of six months for asylum-seekers.

“It is difficult being here — being here without papers and starting from zero,” she said in Spanish, while waiting for her turn this month at a city-organized clinic to help migrants apply for work permits. “We hope that (the city) can help us. Not give us free stuff, but help us to … open the doors so that we can work.”

Millions of migrants like Borges have fled Venezuela’s unstable political, economic and humanitarian conditions in recent years. Tens of thousands have landed in Denver, with many of them beginning to build lives in the city while they seek asylum in the United States. It’s a lengthy and complicated process that will enable some, but not all, to secure legal status.

While they wait for cases that can take years to be resolved in overloaded federal immigration courts, work is their lifeline and their path to self-sufficiency — one that also could reduce the strain on local governments like Denver that are supporting the new arrivals. Federal law allows migrants to obtain work permits while their cases are pending, but they face significant waiting periods that vary depending on how they applied for asylum.

In their home country, the migrants supported themselves with jobs as varied as construction, customer service, restaurant work and law enforcement. Now, several interviewed by The Denver Post say they’re willing to take on any job to make ends meet.

During the winter months, migrants have cleaned houses, shoveled snow and washed windshields at busy intersections to earn some cash. They’ve stood in Home Depot parking lots, looking for day work. They’ve made money at Aurora’s Stanley Marketplace by styling hair and teaching fitness classes. With the help of Denver residents, some migrants have sold and catered food.

Community members, nonprofit groups and city officials have stepped in to help the migrants navigate uncertainty, offering odd jobs and a new program to assist them as they file for work authorizations.

Oscari Valentina Yaguaran, 24, cleaned houses and restaurants in the Venezuelan town of Páez before her family left, with a 1-year-old son in tow. Since they arrived in Denver two months ago, she’s had trouble finding similar work. Her husband, Ángel Bartolomé Ortiz Sojo, cleans windshields to scrounge together money for food. Neither has a work permit yet.

“I think I will end up on the street,” she said in Spanish, while still voicing cautious optimism about her adopted city. “We haven’t found work, we don’t have stability — but I still feel it’s good” in Denver.

Since December 2022, Denver has tracked the arrivals of 38,594 asylum seekers — some of whom have since moved on from Colorado. As of Friday, 3,122 were staying in shelters, according to city data.

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston and other Colorado leaders have advocated for changes to the asylum and work authorization processes at the federal level, particularly as Denver faces what the mayor calls a “fiscal crisis.” The mounting costs of assisting migrants recently prompted the first round of budget cuts to city services.

Venezuelans who arrived in the U.S. by July 31 received temporary protective status in a one-time move last year, allowing them to work. But there hasn’t been any action like that to help more recent waves of migrants.

“Our focus has always been that the most successful outcome for any migrant is the ability to work,” Johnston said in an interview. “That is always the first thing they ask for. … If you can work, you can get an apartment. If you can get an apartment, you can get food, you can support your family and get your kids in school.

“And if you can’t work, all those things become very difficult.”

The problem with delays in work permissions is far reaching and has affected undocumented immigrants for decades, Denver immigration attorney Hans Meyer said. The lag creates a barrier to accessing basic needs, he said, making it difficult to obtain specific forms of identification, to provide verification of income for rental leases, or to apply for health insurance and other benefits.

“They’ve got to navigate an underground economy,” Meyer said. “They’re working for cash or trying to figure out ways to subsist and to live because they don’t have valid work authorization.”

In recent years, the asylum process has become the de facto system for many immigrants who cross the southern U.S. border after fleeing Venezuela and other countries, the New York Times reported recently. That is in part because U.S. law allows them to remain in the country while their years-long cases play out — even if many cite poverty, violence and other reasons that are unlikely to meet the threshold for asylum.

Last year, judges granted asylum to just 29% of Venezuelan applicants, though their success rate was higher than people from several other Latin American countries. To be eligible, they must show that they’ve suffered or are likely to suffer persecution, including harm or death, in their home country because of their race, religion, political opinions or other factors.

Navigating asylum and work permits

Immigrants can legally apply for asylum at a port of entry into the U.S. or wait until after they’ve arrived. Using a mobile app created by U.S. Customs and Border Protection called CBP One, they can schedule an appointment before arriving at the border — making them eligible much sooner to apply for work permits.

But the many who wait until they’re in the U.S., and who sometimes surrender to authorities voluntarily after they cross the border to seek asylum, must wait 150 days to apply for work authorizations. That process then takes at least another month — and often several — before work permission is granted.

Dozens of Venezuelan migrants, clutching personal documents and their phones, were on a quest to get that process going as they waited together at a Denver hotel hosting a recent work authorization screening.

Young children gripped their parents’ hands. The adults, including Borges, hoped the next step could open doors for their new lives.

Borges said she had wrestled with leaving Venezuela for a year, considering factors that included the prospect of leaving her parents behind. But the former police officer decided it was the only way to keep her family safe.

“It was difficult getting here. Not just anyone makes that decision to move here,” she said. “We do it because it is necessary.”

At work authorization clinics, volunteers help migrants file their paperwork for work permits — a complex application they often don’t have the resources to complete on their own, city officials and advocates said.

During the screening process, volunteers ask migrants what kind of work they’re interested in. Regardless of whether they previously worked as physicians, engineers or mechanics back home, “they say what they want to work in is whatever they could get,” Denver City Attorney Kerry Tipper said.

Denver employers are struggling to fill open positions amid a labor shortage, particularly in construction trades, so the clinics are meant to serve as a stopgap. And for the migrants, she added, permits offer another layer of security, helping to reduce their vulnerability to being exploited by employers who might mistreat them or refuse to pay wages.

“We have a labor force that is willing and wants to work,” Tipper said. “There’s a path for them to work legally and we’re going to do everything we can to accelerate that process, so that they can become independent contributors … (and) become self-sustained.”

The city and its legal partners have helped hundreds of migrants prepare their documents in advance of clinics that, beginning last week, assisted them with applying for the work permits. The mayor’s office said volunteers also identified many who were eligible for permits already because they had registered using Customs and Border Protection’s app before arriving in the U.S.

Mark Shaker, the founder of the Stanley Marketplace, echoed some of Tipper’s points Wednesday during a roundtable discussion in Aurora about Colorado’s migrant response.

“As a small business owner, I will tell you that there are a lot of jobs that American citizens just do not want to do — won’t do,” he said, including dishwashing and other restaurant line work. Shaker added: “So, it’s really … hard to see people who will do anything to work, but you can’t hire them. And you have jobs that are available.”

Stylist is among those in search of work

Soranjel Fermin, 42, worked in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, as a hair stylist. She arrived in Denver about a month ago with her son and her niece, both in their 20s.

Her husband and her niece’s boyfriend haven’t made it — they were detained in New Mexico, she said, after the group’s harrowing journey to the U.S. over the course of more than a year. They walked to Colombia, then later trekked through the jungles of Panama, earning money along the way by taking on jobs.

They lived on the streets of Mexico City before riding atop trains to Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. They emerged soaking wet and hungry on the other side of the Rio Grande, she said.

In Denver, the trio bounced from shelter to shelter and then spent time on the street before a church pastor let the group stay in her house for about a week. Similar generosity helped them to settle into an apartment with other people, covering the deposit and first month’s rent.

“Now, it’s our turn to pay,” Fermin said in Spanish, through a translator. The five people living in the unit need to come up with $1,600, but, so far, their attempts at securing work permits have been unsuccessful. Fermin has inquired at salons, but she needs to study for eight months to get a license in her new country.

“I would do whatever it takes to be employed because we don’t know how we’re going to pay,” she said. “If they say, ‘Go clean,’ I would clean. If they say, ‘Go work in a restaurant,’ I would cook.”

Fermin dreams of staying in Denver, maybe even becoming an American someday. But not every Venezuelan migrant intends to remain in the city long-term.

Emely Moron, 26, who has been in Denver for a month, said she hoped to return to Venezuela when it’s safer. For now, she plans to stay in one of the city’s shelters until March 28 with her 2-year-old son, her husband and her 14-year-old stepson.

In Venezuela, she ran her own food cart, and her husband worked as a barber. While they wait on their work permits and asylum cases, they’re taking any odd job they can find. Moron also maintains her own YouTube channel where she posts videos, hoping to inspire other migrants to keep going, including those who plan to make it back to Venezuela.

“Sí se puede,” she tells them — “Yes, you can.” It’s not easy, she said, but it’s possible.

Jeison Hurtado Pulgarin, who immigrated from Colombia two months ago, is helping to ease the challenges for other migrants in Denver. Outside the recent work authorization screening event, he and other migrants handed out clothes and other essential items.

While Hurtado Pulgarin waits on a work permit, he’s been able to do landscaping and snow-shoveling work. He’s living with his wife and son, alongside two other families.

He said he wanted to assist other migrants the same way people helped him when he first arrived in the city. Now residents drop off donations at his house so he can deliver them to newcomers.

“I like doing this,” he said, sitting in his work truck. “We’ve always done stuff like this. There is nothing better than to be blessed, to bless others.”

“I couldn’t get it off my mind,” says Denverite who helped

Local residents have also helped migrants by offering informal work. And sometimes, they’ve formed close connections with the newcomers.

Danae Meurer, 46, was driving her daughter home from school in early December in southeast Denver when she noticed a young man with a baby in a stroller, standing on a street corner. Across the intersection, four women sat in the grass with five children.

Meurer soon returned with arms full of blankets, coats, diapers, tampons and food orders from Taco Bell.

“As a mom myself, just seeing that — I’m like, ‘Holy crap, what are they going to do?’” she recalled. “I couldn’t get it off of my mind.”

Ariagnny Guerra, 30, remembers that afternoon, too. She and several relatives were the ones sitting near that stoplight, cold and hungry. During her three months in Denver, the location has been a focal point in her typical daily routine, accompanying her brother, who brings his young son while he cleans car windshields for cash.

It’s a stark contrast with her hometown of Caracas, where she worked in school administration. In Denver, a still-unfamiliar city, she’s awaiting a work permit.

Meurer showed up again days later, communicating through Google Translate to exchange phone numbers. She learned the group of 16 — mostly family members — lived in two apartments nearby. Since then, Meurer has taken them grocery shopping, found furniture for their new homes and scheduled dental appointments at Denver Health.

She and her husband held a common-law wedding ceremony for several of the couples, celebrating afterward with a party that was catered by another Venezuelan migrant. Guerra signed marriage paperwork that day to send to her partner Luis Finol, 26, who’s currently held in a detention center in El Paso. She recalls the emotions tied to what amounted to an American wedding.

“We’ve been dreaming about it,” she said in Spanish. But it’s bittersweet for Guerra — a “very beautiful” ceremony that she’d always envisioned taking place in Venezuela, with Finol by her side.

“Thank God for that lady,” she said of Meurer, “because she is always thinking of us.”

When Meurer’s needed odd jobs done, the immigrants have helped with yard work, tree removal and housekeeping. Two women are certified nail technicians, but transferring their licenses to the U.S. has proved difficult.

“In reality, I would like to work in whatever (job),” Guerra said, including cleaning houses, offices or hotels. Driving around the city, Meurer sees plenty of “help wanted” signs, she said.

“That’s the problem: There’s jobs and they can’t get them,” she said.

Chance encounter leads to recurring work

Darren Franz, 58, has also helped fill the job gap, though he initially didn’t set out to.

The Arvada man pulled up to a Home Depot on a winter day, intent on buying supplies to tackle an ever-growing list of tasks. When he walked back outside with his purchases, a young man was leaning on his parked truck.

“Of course, I just wasn’t very polite,” Franz recalled in a recent interview.

But when he lowered the tailgate, the stranger, who didn’t speak English, began loading the materials for him. Once he was finished, Franz sat in the truck’s cab for a few moments before tipping the man $50 and driving away.