AURORA, Colo. – East Colfax Avenue was the best place to find a job. That's what everyone told Sofia Roca.
Never mind the open drug use, the sex workers or the groups of other migrant women marching the sidewalks soliciting work at the very same Mexican restaurants and bakeries.
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On East Colfax in Aurora, Colorado, bosses and customers would speak Spanish and might be willing to hire someone like Roca — a 49-year-old immigrant from Colombia — without legal authorization to work. That was the rationale for going back to Colfax each morning, fruitless as it was.
“Do you know how to cook Mexican food?” asked one woman, looking up from the limes she was quartering, when Roca inquired about a kitchen position advertised on the door. Roca’s accent was a giveaway: not Mexican.
“I can learn,” Roca replied in Spanish.
Responded the woman: “We’re not hiring."
As record numbers of South Americans attempt to cross the U.S. southern border seeking better economic opportunities, many are landing in communities that are unprepared for them — and sometimes outright hostile.
And many migrants have also been unprepared for the realities of their new home.
An influx of migrants strains one town
Women are leaving Colombia, and to a greater extent Venezuela, to escape starvation and violence, to provide for their children and to seek medical care. They represent some of the more than 42,000 migrants who have arrived in the Denver area over two years. Many didn’t know anyone in Denver. But it was the closest city to which Texas was offering free bus rides, both to relieve pressure on its towns and to make a political point to liberal-leaning cities about immigration’s impact on the border.
From Denver, untold numbers made their way to the neighboring suburb of Aurora, lured by cheaper rent and abundant Spanish speakers. But finding a job and an affordable place to stay has been anything but easy, and women face their own particular challenges.
Last year, nearly 900,000 women and girls tried to cross the U.S. southern border, more than a fivefold increase over the last decade, U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows. Like many of them, Roca came to the United States to help her children. Her adult daughter back in Colombia suffers from lupus and can’t afford “the good medicines.”
The economy in Colombia never recovered from pandemic shutdowns, and Roca heard from acquaintances that in the United States she could earn $1,000 a week. “That’s a lot of money in Colombia," she said. Back home, “one U.S. dollar can buy breakfast for your entire family.”
Roca set out for the United States with an uncle. He was detained in Mexico, but Roca made it across the border in Juárez and told U.S. agents she was seeking asylum. She heard from a shelter worker in El Paso that Denver was offering free housing for migrants and Texas would pay to get her there.
As of September, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has bused at least 119,000 migrants from the border to cities run by Democratic mayors, including Denver, New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., according to a press release from the governor’s office.
Roca arrived in November and stayed for two weeks in a hotel-turned-shelter paid for by the city of Denver. When she went looking for work in front of Home Depot and along East Colfax, she observed an icy reception from locals. “They said horrible things about Venezuelans,” she said.
She didn't know the benefits many recent migrants have received — specifically, a path to a temporary work visa and with it better-paying jobs — were causing resentment among Aurora's large Mexican community. Many have loved ones in the country illegally or have themselves lived for years in the United States without legal permission to work.
As chaos and economic collapse drove more migrants to the border, President Joe Biden’s administration created and expanded legal pathways to enter the U.S., with the possibility of applying for work permits. However, in June, Biden temporarily suspended asylum for new immigrants who cross illegally, ending a main pathway to legal work.
Roca never was eligible for a work permit, but Mexican residents in Aurora still associate her with the many migrants who are.
Resentment for newcomers was building in another corner of Aurora, too — City Hall. Aurora officials in February had warned other communities against housing migrants there, vowing not to spend city money to help them. This summer, Aurora’s mayor repeated a landlord’s claim that a notorious Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment building, saying he would investigate how so many Venezuelans ended up living in Aurora. Even though police say gangs hadn't taken over the building, former President Donald Trump took up the claim, mentioning it at his campaign rallies. The mayor last month walked back some of his comments.
She wants a job — but not in ‘the business’
Roca never made a deliberate decision to settle in Aurora. To her, it wasn't clear where Denver ended and Aurora began, or that Denver was more eager to help migrants coming to the area.
So when her time is almost up at the Denver shelter, she does the only thing she knows to do: She heads to East Colfax in Aurora.
She walks up and down the sidewalks, dodging people who’d taken over the bus shelters to shoot up drugs or smoke fentanyl and who sell apparently shoplifted toiletries on the sidewalks. She approaches migrants holding cardboard signs and begging for money outside Walmart, asking if they know of work or a place to stay.
A man standing by his truck parked outside a Goodwill thrift store catches her attention. He is singing along to rap music in Spanish. He seems happy, she thinks. He seems like a good guy.
He says he can help her and her cousin, who arrived a few weeks earlier. But not in Colorado. She can come back to Kentucky with him and his family. To hold her over in the short term, the man — El Cubano, she calls him — gives her $10 and invites her for ice cream.
After more than a week of staying with the family in Kentucky and cooking and eating meals together, Roca learns El Cubano's wife works in el negocio, or “the business.” There is not much work in Kentucky, so she earns her money through sex work, she tells Roca, while her kids play a few feet away.
A few days later, while they are cooking dinner together at the couple’s trailer, a Mexican man in his 30s pulls up outside in a pickup truck.
He’d seen a picture of Roca and liked her — and would pay $1,000 for two nights with Roca, the wife says. Roca would keep $600, the couple would get $400. Roca would have to pay him $6 for each ride to and from his house.
Roca stops chopping the onion and looks at her cousin. Don’t go with that man, the cousin says. You don’t know him.
Roca considers all of the jobs she’s done in her life. Caring for Alzheimer’s patients as a home health aide. Answering phones at a call center. Selling beauty products on the street in Mexico.
In her month in the United States, she has quickly come to understand she'll have to make sacrifices in this country. That the reports she’d heard back in Colombia about earning $1,000 a week were likely hyperbole. That she’ll have to push her body to its limits doing manual labor. She’ll have to accept below-standard wages until she gets work permission, if it ever comes. She’ll have to stay in someone’s living room with other new arrivals and give up her privacy.
But subjecting herself to the whims of a stranger in such an intimate and vulnerable way?
“No,” she tells the woman. “I’m not going anywhere with anyone.”
The man is told to leave. The insults start immediately.
How are you going to earn money, girl? asks the woman. You’re not going to just live here for free. The food here is good, isn’t it? But it’s not free.
Roca doesn't know what to expect — maybe violence. She and her cousin have no money or transportation. They're essentially trapped. But a few days later, Roca leaves as El Cubano yells insults from his trailer. A Venezuelan woman she met outside Home Depot finds someone to help them leave Kentucky.
Where did they want to go? Somewhere she knew people, she remembers thinking. Somewhere with other migrants.
Back to Aurora and East Colfax Avenue.
Even among Aurora's migrants, life isn't better
Back in Aurora, Roca reached out to a Venezuelan woman she'd met briefly begging for money outside the Walmart on Colfax. Soon she took a place in the woman’s living room, sharing a queen-sized blow-up mattress with the woman’s teenage son.
Roca found a job on the weekends helping a man set up and break down his stall at an outdoor flea market. She hefted large sacks of used clothing over her shoulders, put out the clothing on display, talked to customers. All for $10 an hour. “It’s an abusive wage," she said, “but it’s a job.”
She tried standing outside Home Depot, but found many people propositioned her for sex or wouldn’t pay her after she completed legitimate jobs. She gave up standing outside a day laborer’s center in Aurora when she didn’t feel safe trying to jockey for work against dozens of men, who would push her out of the way and jump onto moving trucks rounding up workers.
On most days walking along Colfax Avenue, Roca says, men would solicit her for sex, holding up their fingers to signal how many hundreds of dollars they were willing to pay.
As she looked for work in March, she came across what looked like an old motel, a place she hadn’t tried before. “Is this a hotel or a motel? I don’t know,” she said as she opened the heavy metal door. “Let’s check.”
In the small vestibule, a 1970s-era cigarette vending machine stood in the corner. A grandfatherly man waited behind a plexiglass sliding window. There were no vacancies, but he urged her to try the bar in the back. “They’re always looking for girls,” he said.
Roca walked to the rear of the building and recognized the name of the bar. “I know about this place,” she said.
At a few Mexican cantinas around Aurora and Denver, women are paid to talk and drink with men. “Ficheras,” as the women are known in Spanish, sell beers at a significant markup to men and pocket the profits. It can be a fast way to earn money, but also a route to sex trafficking or the drug trade. Visit these establishments, and you can see some “ficheras” wearing government-issued ankle bracelets with their sky-high heels. The bracelets were given to them by federal immigration officials to monitor their movements while they await immigration hearings.
“I don’t think I have to do that yet,” Roca said. “But this street — it only offers prostitution.”
She boards another Greyhound — and moves on
Since returning to Aurora, Roca had discovered she has few options for establishing legal residence or working legally in the U.S. She told U.S. Border Patrol officials she plans to plead for asylum at her deportation hearing next year, but she doubts they will grant it. Ironically, what happened to her in Kentucky could help her win a visa. The U.S. government issues special visas to victims of sex trafficking here, but Roca has never wanted to report the Cuban couple, fearing they might come after her.
She had gotten in touch through Facebook with a high school friend from Colombia living for the last year in the northeastern United States. “She’s told me she can get me a job at a hotel and I can stay with her,” she said. “What would you do if you were me?" she asked a reporter. "Would you go?”
The idea of learning to move around a new American city exhausted Roca. But without more work, there wasn’t much keeping her in Aurora. Her roommates were headed to eviction court the next week. She didn’t know where she would go if they lost the apartment.
Two days later, with about $80 in her pocket, Roca boarded a Greyhound bus paid for by the city of Denver. She landed in a new town — one that hasn’t received busloads of migrants from Texas — and reunited with her high school friend. (The Associated Press is not identifying her new location, since Roca is afraid the Cuban couple might seek her out after she spoke about them in the media.)
Roca’s friend followed through on her promises, allowing her to live with her and connecting her to a job cleaning hotel rooms. Roca has already changed jobs and has found one she likes better. She walks through the city with ease — and anonymously.
“It’s a huge difference from my life in Denver,” she says. “There’s less chaos, and no one has disrespected me. It's been a great refuge."
She's not sure how long she'll stay. But Sofia Roca will never live in Aurora, Colorado, again.
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