Denver’s mayor has vowed to shield migrants in his sanctuary city from mass deportation by using local cops and 50,000 residents “stationed at the county line” — calling it a “Tiananmen Square moment.”
“More than us having [federal agents] stationed at the county line to keep them out, you would have 50,000 Denverites there,” Democratic Mayor Mike Johnston recently told the outlet Denverite — after President-elect Donald Trump vowed to undertake mass deportations of illegal migrants across the US.
“It’s like the Tiananmen Square moment … right?” said Johnston, referring to the famous caught-on-video showdown between a Chinese student and government tank in Tiananmen Square in China during the 1989 rebellion there.
“You’d have every one of those Highland moms who came out for the migrants. And you do not want to mess with them,” the mayor said of Denver residents apparently prepared to go to the mat against the federal government.
Roughly 40,000 migrants have flocked to the Mile High City since December 2022 — the largest number of new arrivals per capita across the nation.
With that influx came a surge in migrant crime tied to the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua.
The criminals have been terrorizing Denver and its nearby suburb of Aurora, where the gang has taken over apartment complexes and engaged in vicious incidents.
Aurora City Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky (R) told The Post that Johnston’s plan “will just further show how unproductive he is in one of the country’s so-called sanctuary cities, which discourage or prevent local authorities from cooperating with federal immigration agents in the case of migrants.
“If Mayor Johnston wants to stand at the Denver border with, I believe he said, Highland moms, or something to that effect, it will just further show how unproductive he is,” Jurinsky said. “Aurora does not plan to provide the Trump administration any assistance, as far as I know, but we will certainly not stand in the way of what the American people voted for.”
Xi Van Fleet, a survivor of Mao’s revolution in China, on Thursday called out Johnston for comparing his effort to Tiananmen Square, telling Fox Business that he is “either profoundly ignorant of the history, or he did the false analogy on purpose.”
Elon Musk, who Trump recently tapped to head the new Department of Government Efficiency, took to his platform X to say that Johnston’s threat shows “the mayor of Denver hates his constituents.”
The pressure of a hawkish new administration in the White House won’t change Denver’s status as a sanctuary city, Johnston said.
“The short answer is, we won’t change that, because those are one of our core values. And we’re not going to sell out those values to anyone. We’re not going to be bullied into changing them,” Johnston said.
“I think we are gonna continue to be a welcoming, open, big-hearted city that’s gonna stand by our values.”
Trump’s pick for “border czar,” Tom Homan, told The Post that his hope is the new White House administration will file lawsuits against sanctuary cities and withhold federal funding from them.
If that doesn’t change their ways, the Trump administration will “flood” those areas with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to wait outside local jails for illegal migrants to be released, he said.
Johnston also said he won’t allow local law enforcement to assist the feds in making arrests of illegal migrants.
“Absolutely not,” Johnston said. “We won’t do it.”