Democrats in Colorado are using tax dollars to fund free legal assistance for immigrants to double the number of asylum seekers settling there even as officials claim that President Joe Biden’s border crisis is breaking their budget.
In 2022, Colorado Democrats pushed through their state-funded Immigration Legal Defense Fund, which provides free legal advice to immigrants to help them gain legal status. The program is funded by $700,000 in taxes through early 2025, up from the $330,000 the program was handed in previous years.
The revelation comes from a Wednesday article by Rocky Mountain PBS meant to cajole readers into believing that “newcomers” are a boon to the Centennial State. The station nevertheless admitted that tax dollars are going to increase the influx of immigrants into the state.
Colombian immigrants hand out donated clothes to Venezuelan immigrants in the parking lot of a hotel in Denver, Colorado, on February 5, 2024. (Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images)
“Newcomers” is the latest term that liberals are employing now that “migrants” and “immigrants” have all too often become synonymous with the word “illegal aliens.” This moving of the linguistic goalposts, so common on the left when a word or term outlives its usefulness for propaganda purposes, has been deployed throughout the media in 2024 in an effort to rebrand immigrants.
The PBS article focused on asylum seekers who have quasi-legal status and are officially permitted to be in the U.S. while their filings for asylum are being adjudicated.
The article went on to bat down what it called “myth #2,” which is that all asylum seekers are automatically approved for long-term residency in the U.S.
The article pointed out that the state funding has helped to double the share of immigrants who win asylum to stay in Colorado. From 2018 to 2021, only a quarter of the asylum applicants won their cases, but that share has now doubled to 50 percent.
That brought the PBS station to another “myth” it sought to kill: that of immigrants being given free lawyers for their cases. This, the article informed readers, is not the case. Immigrants do not qualify for free representation from public defenders because only legal citizens are guaranteed legal representation.
The article went on to say that there are not enough immigration lawyers in Colorado to service the 73,000 immigration cases on the docket in the state. So, many immigrants go without any representation at all.
An immigrant lies on a sleeping pad at a makeshift shelter in Denver, Colorado, on January 13, 2023. (Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
Laura Lunn, the director of advocacy and litigation at Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network (RMAIN), told the PBS reporters that new immigrants “are not being set up for success, that’s for sure.”
Even as the article tried to convince readers that asylum seekers are not given automatic consideration and free legal counsel, it also ended up revealing that Democrats at the state capitol in Denver actually are working to give free legal assistance to as many of these immigrants as they can and hoping to wildly increase the number of those given permanent residency.
The article noted that, in 2022, the state moved to set up a taxpayer-sponsored fund to give legal assistance to these migrants.
“In 2022, the state of Colorado created an Immigration Legal Defense Fund to encourage more legal representation for those going through immigration court,” the article read.
“The fund uses state dollars to pay attorneys to provide legal counsel in immigration proceedings, and in April 2024, the state doubled the funding from $330,000 to $700,000 for fiscal year 2024/2025.”
On April 29, 2024, Democrat Gov. Jared Polis was thrilled to sign HB24-1430 into law, which allocated more funding to the Immigrant Legal Defense Fund.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
In a press release, the left-wing activist group, American Friends Service Committee, bemoaned the legal climate many immigrants face, saying, “With no access to government-funded counsel in immigration proceedings, immigrants facing deportation often find themselves navigating complex legal proceedings alone.”
Democrat State Sen. Julie Gonzales and Democrat State Rep. Javier Mabrey celebrated the signing of HB24-1430, with Gonzales saying that the law reaffirms Colorado’s “commitment to justice and fairness for all.” Gonzalez added, “By increasing the Immigrant Legal Defense Fund, we are ensuring that our immigrant neighbors have the representation they need to navigate the legal system with dignity and fairness.”
Mabrey said:
Increasing access to legal representation is not just the right thing to do; it’s the smart thing to do. With this additional funding, we can ensure that fewer individuals face deportation proceedings alone, increasing the likelihood of successful outcomes in their cases and lessening the possibility of devastating familial separation.
Despite signing the bill to put more money into increasing immigration and providing free legal assistance, Polis has also made a show of deciding to bus migrants back out of Colorado. In January 2023, for instance, he was seen defending his policy of busing migrants to other states when they agreed to be relocated, and he pledged an additional $5 million in state funds to provide the buses to do so, the Colorado Sun reported at the time.
In the end, despite trying to move readers to believe that winning asylum is not easy or prevalent and that the state is not throwing free legal representation and tax dollars at asylum seekers, the article actually proved just the opposite.
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