Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman effectively blamed Denver Mayor Mike Johnston for the “national embarrassment” that his city suffered following reports of violence by a Venezuelan gang amid the national debate over how best to confront America’s illegal immigration crisis.
In an opinion piece that ran in The Denver Gazette on Monday, Coffman said the Johnston administration “placed” immigrants in Aurora, refused to tell him where they were housed and how many — and drew up contracts with nonprofits that gave the Denver mayor plausible deniability.
“It gives Johnston cover, should it become public, by allowing him to say that it wasn’t his decision to put them in Aurora; it was the nonprofits who made the decision,” Coffman wrote.
The Aurora mayor also disclosed that Aurora sought records from Denver via a channel typically employed by journalists to obtain documents from a government entity — the Colorado Open Records Act.
Johnston rejected Coffman’s assertions.
“I simply don’t know what he’s referring to,” Johnston told The Denver Gazette when asked about Coffman’s column, which accused the Denver mayor of being less than transparent on the movement of immigrants from Denver to Aurora.