Centennial State News

Customs and Border Protection agents appear to be sending migrants to places that are not immediately equipped to handle their needs, the Associated Press reported Monday.

The AP said the migrants are being sent to addresses that aren’t shelters designed to house people.

“We believe that Border Patrol is attempting to demonstrate the chaos that they are experiencing on the border to inland cities,” Denise Chang, executive director of the Colorado Hosting Asylum Network, said in the report. “We just need to coordinate so that we can receive people properly."

The Colorado Hosting Asylum Network is a nonprofit organization that hosts asylum seekers in private homes and connects them with support teams as they work through the process to claim asylum, its website says.

“It almost seems as though, at the border, officials are simply just looking up any nonprofit address they can or just looking up any name at all that they can,” Lauren Wyatt, managing attorney with Catholic Charities of New York, told the AP.

The government had promised to end the practice by Aug. 1, but Wyatt said it is still going on.

Chang briefly took in a family from Venezuela and helped them to find a place to live, and she said she has worked with multiple families over the past few months. She also noted that she has heard stories about migrants who were being sent to nonprofit organizations that could not help them.

“The five families that I’ve worked with in the last three months, all five were picked up off the street, literally sitting on the sidewalk with children,” Chang told the AP.

In 2021, a variety of new policies were put in place that were designed to improve the immigration process in Colorado. A dozen laws were passed that year covering a variety of things — like housing assistance, professional licenses, public benefits, limiting ICE's access to information and even laws that cover reproductive rights for migrants.