By Joe Barrett

DENVER -- The cowboy-boot wearing mayor of this city on the edge of the Rocky Mountains rocketed into national headlines last fall when he promised to defy potential federal immigration actions he considered unconstitutional or un-American -- even if it meant being hauled off to jail.

Now Denver Mayor Mike Johnston stands as a leading Democratic foe of Washington Republicans who seek to punish those they say are obstructing President Trump's crackdown on illegal immigration.

On Wednesday, Johnston is set to go to Congress alongside three fellow Democratic mayors -- Eric Adams of New York, Michelle Wu of Boston and Brandon Johnson of Chicago -- to face the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about policies that limit these cities' cooperation with Trump's planned mass deportations.

To drum up attention for the coming hearing, the House committee released a video against "sanctuary mayors," filmed in the thunderous style of a disaster-movie trailer. Flashing footage of immigrant-criminal arrests and headlines describing chaos in the four mayors' cities, the video promises they will be "held publicly accountable on March 5."

"We're going to bring the mayors in, we're going to let them explain what their policies are, see if they can answer some questions," Committee Chairman James Comer (R., Ky.) pledges at the end of the video. "If they are going to continue to disobey the law, then I think we should cut as much of their federal funding as we can cut."

In his Denver City Hall office, Johnston, his crisp checked shirt anchored by a big silver belt buckle, expressed confidence about the coming discussion. "We're quite proud of what the city's done and how it stood up. And so that's a very positive story for us to tell, regardless of how they want to spin it."

Even for mayors governing hundreds of miles from the southern border, immigration now sparks more controversy than many other leadership issues. Johnston, 50 years old, a former school principal and state senator with an Ivy League pedigree -- Yale undergraduate and law degrees and a Harvard master's in education -- confronted this reality within months of taking office.

Denver 'swagger'

On his first full day as mayor in July 2023, Johnston declared a homelessness crisis in Denver, a city of more than 700,000, pledging to clear encampments citywide and find housing for 1,000 people by the end of the year.

Within a few months, a new crisis eclipsed that ambitious push: Nearly 43,000 migrants poured into Denver, some bused from the border by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, others buying their own ticket to the closest city known for friendliness to migrants.

"We were very engaged in homelessness," said Johnston. "Then we got overwhelmed by what seemed like an even more impossible problem. I think wonderfully, the city stepped up with some swagger to say, 'OK, well, we can take this on, too.'"

Today, Denver streets stand largely cleared of both tent cities of unhoused Coloradans -- and the migrant encampments that followed. But the migrant crisis is far from over for Johnston, a progressive Democrat who in November drew national attention for tangling with incoming border czar Tom Homan.

Homan said on national TV: "Look, me and the Denver mayor, we agree on one thing -- he's willing to go to jail, I'm willing to put him in jail."

Denver, Chicago, Boston and New York operate under state and city laws that forbid police from cooperating in ICE enforcement against individuals solely for being in the country illegally, but they can support arrests of those accused of serious crimes.

"We don't ask someone's status when we arrest them or charge them. We don't think it's material to the charge, and we think it can have a chilling effect on public safety," Johnston said. "If someone's always worried you're going to ask for their status, they won't call the police, they won't be a witness."

Denver v. Aurora

Johnston has weathered sharp criticism close to home, from his counterpart in the Denver suburb of Aurora. On a recent day, Mayor Mike Coffman, a former Republican U.S. congressman and a military veteran, was at Aurora City Hall, dressed in business attire and combat boots.

Coffman withstood his own negative limelight after video of purported Venezuelan gang members in Aurora went viral. At a campaign rally in the city, then-candidate Trump decried Aurora as invaded and conquered.

Coffman, who calls himself "a little more of a Reagan-style Republican versus a Trump Republican," pushed back. He said the gangs operated in a handful of troubled apartment complexes, representing a tiny portion of the sprawling city of nearly 400,000 and that police were handling the matter.

He has also blamed Denver for the predicament. In an op-ed in January, he said the city had failed to be transparent about how many migrants it sent to Aurora and where. Coffman has filed open-records requests to get to the bottom of the issue.

"It put me in a very hard position as mayor because Mike Johnston created the problem" and supporters of Trump in the city did everything they could to exploit it, he said.

Johnston disputes that, saying Denver worked with various agencies that placed the migrants and that his city has sought to answer all the questions from Aurora.

Some downtown Denver business owners say things have improved since the city was able to move the migrants off the streets, but that more needs to be done to return security to the area.

"When they were dropping them off [from Texas], I would see like a clown car of people going by every day," said Joanna Szalla, 56, who cuts hair in a glassed-in kiosk on a downtown sidewalk. Now, she wants a more consistent police presence downtown. She supports Denver's welcoming approach -- but only for migrants who follow the rules. "As long as they do it the right way," she said.

"The streets are definitely running rampant with crime," said Braxton Blakeman, 21, the manager of a shop called the Colorado Artisan Center. He blames what he views as lax immigration policies and general downtown vagrancy.

Johnston said that migrants tend to engage in crime less than native-born Americans and that Denver's overall crime rates had fallen in recent years.

Coffman, the Aurora mayor, said he thought Johnston would do well in his Capitol Hill testimony. "He is probably the best politician I ever met, and I don't mean that as a compliment because he can talk in circles forever," Coffman added. "He'll enrage the Republicans, but in terms of his political base, I think he'll do really well."

Write to Joe Barrett at Joseph.Barrett@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 04, 2025 10:00 ET (15:00 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.