Bartender and Escuelitas founder Tiffany Hernandez and civil rights attorney and Escuelitas volunteer Milo Schwab in a Denver bar on Thursday.Michael Ciaglo/The Globe and Mail
The Colorado resistance shakes cocktails behind bar counters. It circulates through schools and scrolls through encrypted chats. It knocks on doors and learns how to flush tear gas from eyes. It translates documents into Croatian and Nepali. It takes knowledge from deep inside the apparatus of border enforcement and delivers it to people preparing to defy that apparatus. It gathers financial support from Mexican tequila-makers.
In the surge of illegal migration under then-president Joe Biden, Colorado was among the states that saw vast numbers of arrivals. The city of Denver said it had received more migrants per capita than any other U.S. urban area.
Hotels filled and Donald Trump took notice, accusing the city of harbouring Venezuelan gangs. His administration criticized the state and its largest city of sanctuary policies “that thwart federal immigration enforcement to the detriment of the interests of the United States.”
Stand against the dictates of federal law enforcement and “we’re going to come after you,” Attorney-General Pam Bondi said last year, a warning that became tangible when thousands of federal agents deployed to Minnesota.
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But in the places that believe they could be next, that warning has not produced surrender. It has, instead, provoked defiance, an effort that has swept up retirees alongside school workers and legislators – and, in Denver, a group of bar workers determined to be ready.
“The average person doesn’t understand how much influence and power we have,” said Tiffany Hernandez, who has become an unlikely foot soldier in one campaign to prepare for a future immigration-enforcement surge to Denver.
Born in California to Mexican immigrants, Ms. Hernandez – who calls herself a “tiny Latina” – is a bartender who thrills to the creation of cocktails, shaking together martinis from vinegar shrubs and cilantro oils. She has mixed drinks for New York billionaires.
Ms. Hernandez says Escuelitas was founded to educate hospitality professionals about civic engagement and community safety, and has been focused on ICE raid preparedness sessions for the last year.Michael Ciaglo/The Globe and Mail
But over the past year, she has become a self-created lieutenant in a city of people marshalling whatever resources they can find to prepare. Ms. Hernandez has co-ordinated with lawyers, a local rapid-response hotline, employers and left-leaning politicians to organize training events. The have received backing from liquor makers, including Mexican tequila brands that have supported efforts in the U.S. to prepare for immigration enforcement.
Together, they have held nearly 50 training events in Colorado alone, with additional sessions in five other states. This week, they formally registered a non-profit under the name Escuelitas Inc. Their lessons draw on the history of protest – from civil rights to the LGBTQ movement – and the reality of the current moment. Immigrants make up roughly 40 per cent of hospitality workers in the U.S. Large numbers are undocumented.
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“We try to prepare bartenders, servers, chefs, managers and hosts how to interact with agents safely – but also to assert their constitutional rights and be able to mentally handle 15 or 20 armed, masked individuals screaming at you,” said Ms. Hernandez, who dots her face with white makeup to frustrate facial-recognition systems.
“As a bartender, usually the idea is: Don’t bring politics to the bar. But we can’t do that any more, because look at the mess that we are in.”
One aim is to teach others the use of cellphones as weapons of non-violent resistance.
But at a fraught moment, Ms. Hernandez’s effort to train Denver bartenders has quickly drawn in support from unexpected places as this city – like others across the U.S. – organizes itself to resist the power of a federal government determined to deport those in the country illegally.
Among them is a lawyer who previously worked with Border Patrol, the agency whose personnel have been involved in a series of violent confrontations, including the shooting death of Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti. The lawyer, whose name The Globe and Mail is not publishing because they fear reprisal, is now teaching others about the inner workings of an agency that has been among the most visible arms of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdowns.
An anti-ICE poster sits in the Denver Alliance for Street Health Response (DASHR) office.Michael Ciaglo/The Globe and Mail
It is important, the lawyer said, to distinguish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents from those with Border Patrol, who receive only a few months of training and have been accustomed to working in remote areas with little oversight.
“They’ve been able to operate with a really heavy hand when it comes to force,” the lawyer said. Border Patrol, too, has grown in influence. In Denver, a Border Patrol agent was assigned to be the ICE agent in charge.
“The tactics, the use-of-force work that they do is something that I have a lot of insight about. And I’ve been able to leverage that to get people more prepared,” said the lawyer.
“‘Understanding the enemy,’ is how we talk about it.”
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The warlike scenes in Minneapolis have only increased the appetite for that understanding and swelled the numbers of people willing to help.
On the day Mr. Pretti died, a small Denver group called We Keep Us Safe had already scheduled a Zoom training session. A hundred people had signed up to learn how to identify federal agents and share successful strategies from other cities. After Mr. Pretti was shot dead, the numbers swelled to 430. Some 1,400 people have now filled out a form expressing interest in training, said Kellyn McClanahan, one of the group’s founders.
“People’s reaction, instead of standing back or laying down before the intimidation, has instead been to rise up and try to support each other,” she said. “They think they can beat us down. Instead, they’re just giving us more motivation.”
Anxiety over what the future might bring has galvanized people of all ages and experiences. Former federal employees with USAID – the international aid organization shut down by the Trump administration – have helped to translate training documents into Croatian, Serbian and Nepali, languages spoken by some immigrants in Colorado.
Others have hit the streets.
People walk through Denver's City Park.Michael Ciaglo/The Globe and Mail
Joel and Jean, a couple in their seventies with a background in organized labour, have paused plans for international retirement travel in favour of many hours a week knocking on doors of local businesses.
They hand out signs, stickers and material explaining the difference between administrative and judicial warrants.
“We emphasize that ICE is running around mostly with administrative warrants, if anything,” said Joel. “And they don’t have a right to search your place without a judicial warrant.”
The Globe is not using their full names because they fear reprisal for their efforts as part of a group that has visited 1,500 Colorado businesses in the past few months alone.
Like many others, they have also begun to build lives on Signal, the encrypted messaging app that has become a favoured tool for organization and rapid dissemination of information. In Denver, community group chats have been arranged in layers of communication: one for each quadrant of the city and then, below that, groups for individual neighbourhoods.
“It gives us all a lot of security to know we have a plan,” said Michelle Baldwin, who works in a school and sits on the board of her local neighbourhood association.
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Bar and restaurant workers, too, have organized a series of Signal groups based around neighbourhoods of watering holes and coffee shops. The idea is to make those establishments into streetside scouts, able to quickly spread news of the arrival of federal agents and warn others nearby to respond.
“What’s being created is really something significant. It is awareness, preparation – and community,” said Milo Schwab, a civil-rights attorney who has worked closely with Escuelitas.
Ms. Hernandez holds to the idea that knowledge confers power, or at least that it will at some date in the future.
“The best thing that we can do right now is get as much evidence as possible to when we inevitably have our own Nuremberg trials – to make sure that these people are held accountable,” she said.
For those who have educated themselves, it has brought something else, too. At a time when blood has been shed in street confrontations, “getting to listen to lawyers and people on the ground doing actual work, felt very calming,” said Lizz Shrewsbury, a worker at a Denver speakeasy bar.
“Everybody’s here trying to keep each other safe, trying to protect each other and look out for each other,” she said.
Yet where some have drawn comfort from solidarity, others are less certain about what they are actually accomplishing.
The past few weeks have brought greater numbers of people into resistance movements. But “is it enough?” asks Jean. She doesn’t see numbers so great that they might cause those enforcing immigration law to back down.
The couple also wonders if they are better to spend their time teaching people rights or to instead campaign politically. “If we don’t change Congress, I think the country’s toast,” Joel said.
DASHR executive director Vinnie Cervantes in front of the Colorado State Capitol.Michael Ciaglo/The Globe and Mail
For now, the status quo for those seeking to alter the course of federal action, is that “we are losing,” said Vinnie Cervantes, the founder of Denver Alliance for Street Health Response.
“And we need to be more proactive and strategic in how we organize. Because right now, we’re just really reactive.”
His group conducts street medic training: how to care for wounds and wash eyes stinging from tear gas. Classes have become so popular that they are full for the next six months.
But for Mr. Cervantes, it’s no longer enough to observe federal agents and help the hurt.
He wants to create networks of Denver safe houses where protesters can seek shelter. He is encouraging new tactics for demonstrators, who he says should link arms to form solid blocks of humanity in confrontations with federal agents. “The most dangerous things happen when they’re able to siphon individuals off,” he said.
What it comes down to, he said, is moving past simple community organization.
Instead, if armed federal agents descend, “we want some level of community defence, to mobilize and interrupt this level of violence – to intervene however we can.”