The two Democratic candidates vying to be Colorado’s next governor defended the state’s laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration efforts during a Latino town hall Sunday, and each expressed support for further efforts to regulate federal authorities here.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser backed Colorado’s existing rules — which have drawn the ire of the Trump administration — during separate, hour-long forums focused on Latino issues. While hitting familar lines about the economy and President Donald Trump, Bennet and Weiser each highlighted their prior history on immigration, including Bennet’s work on a and Weiser’s lawsuit against a Mesa County sheriff’s deputy who tipped off Immigration and Customs Enforcement about a University of Utah student who was later arrested and detained.
They also tied their own personal stories as the sons of immigrants to people “fleeing desperate situations,” as the attorney general put it. His mother, who was in attendance Sunday, was born in a Nazi concentration camp, while Bennet told the crowd at the hotel in downtown Denver that much of his Polish mother’s family were killed in the Holocaust.
But it was Weiser who received the lion’s share of applause and cheers from the crowd of roughly 150 people Sunday. The room clapped when he described his office’s “59 … and counting” lawsuits against the Trump administration, and again when he accused unnamed people of trying to “be nice” and “accommodate” Trump by voting to confirm the president’s agriculture secretary and trying to provide immigrants’ data to ICE. The line appeared to be a swipe at both Bennet, who voted to confirm Brooke Rollins to head the Department of Agriculture, and Gov. Jared Polis, who fought to turn over some employment records to ICE.
“One of us is working at the state level, knows our state really well,” Weiser said of the contrast between himself and Bennet. “And the other is in Washington, with 17 years of experience, where we should keep him, serving us where he can best use this avenue for Colorado.”
The forums were jointly held by Voces Unidas and the Colorado Organization for Latina Opportunity and Reproductive Rights, Latino and immigrant advocacy groups. The event, held in downtown Denver, came three and a half months before the primary election that will give Bennet or Weiser pole position to replace the term-limited Polis next year.
Latinos represent the largest minority group in Colorado, of the state’s roughly 6 million residents, and like much of the rest of the state’s voters, Latinos have consistently ranked Colorado’s high cost of living as their top issue, including in polling released late last year. Both Bennet and Weiser pledged to build more affordable housing should they be elected governor, and each criticized the achievement gap between Latino and white students, which Bennet called “intolerable.”
But anxiety over Trump’s mass deportation campaign is also pervasive, that November poll found: Forty percent of the registered voters who responded to the survey said that they or their communities feared arrest by immigration authorities, even if they were U.S. citizens or have some form of legal status.
Bennet, who has previously been dismissive of Weiser’s lawsuit tally, said the next governor needed to focus not only on “Trump, Trump, Trump” but on a vision “for the productive and positive role that immigrants and immigration play in our economy.”
“We have not done what needs to be done,” he said of efforts to improve Colorado’s cost of living. “If we had what needed to be done in Colorado, we wouldn’t have the second-most expensive housing in America. We wouldn’t have the fifth-most expensive child care in America.”
Asked about several bills in front of the legislature this year, Bennet said he needed to take a look at them before he could commit to supporting them. The bills would require more data collection and training related to ; more ; and in the state. But he voiced general support for further ICE regulations, and he highlighted his past work on evictions.
As for the temperature bill, Bennet said the state needed to balance protecting workers with ensuring the state’s economy continued to grow. That drew a boo from one audience member, and when Bennet then suggested that “laws and regulations” in the state contributed to the closure of some businesses, a woman seated in front of him gave him a double thumbs-down.
In response, Bennet pointed to the poll showing that affordability was the top issue for Latinos, and he argued that a growing economy was necessary to improve wages.
Weiser, who took the stage after Bennet and was asked the same questions, expressed general support for the goals of the legislation. He said his office was still studying the evictions bill and that he was offering support on the ICE measure to ensure it would survive legal challenges.
As for the temperature measure, he said he supported it in the long term but that its projected cost would likely pose a significant barrier amid the legislature’s ongoing budget crisis.
Neither COLOR nor Voces Unidas has yet endorsed a candidate in the race. The primary election is .
