Simaray Sanzo was desperate.
Her time in a hotel serving as a shelter for migrant families was about to run out. She and her husband, Samuel, didn’t have jobs or anywhere to live with their 6-year-old son, Santi (short for Santiago).
So she posted in a Denver neighborhood Facebook group seeking any kind of help she could get.
A private message landed in her inbox less than 30 minutes later: “Hi Sima — bienvenidos a Denver! I can try to help you all some!”
Simaray was surprised someone had responded so quickly.
The message would end up changing her life.
But Simaray didn’t know that then. And she knew very little about the woman who’d reached out to her.
Simaray used Google Translate to understand the English words, and to write back with more details about her family. It was a Tuesday in January. They made plans to meet for lunch a few days later, on a Sunday. Simaray wasn’t sure what to expect.
A friendly lunch leads to a surprising revelation
As they headed to lunch, the woman introduced herself as Courtney. She’d brought along her husband and two of their three kids.
“Hola, yo soy Mike,” her husband said.
To Samuel and Simaray, he seemed humble and unassuming. He spoke Spanish. And he helped translate their conversation for the others.
The American couple’s 12-year-old daughter, Ava, had lots of questions for Simaray and her family.
“How did they get here?”
“What was their journey like?”
“Why did they come?”
“So from there we started to explain why we’d come through eight countries to get here,” Samuel recalls.
He and Simaray recounted the dangers of the journey — how they’d seen people fall to their deaths as they trudged through the jungle, and how they tried to distract their kids with false promises that if they kept going, they’d have a chance to ride horses the rest of the way. They said they’d left Venezuela because they felt they had no other choice.
Before long, the lunch felt like a meal with friends.
But after they’d spent about an hour together, one thing Mike said left Simaray and Samuel feeling puzzled.
“Soy el alcalde de Denver.” I’m the mayor of Denver.
He must have misspoken, Samuel thought, or something got lost in translation. He probably works for the mayor’s office, Samuel said to himself, shrugging it off.
After lunch, the American family took Simaray, Samuel and Santi to a pharmacy to buy shampoo and other items they needed.
Samuel waited until his family returned to the Comfort Inn where they were staying to Google the name of the man he’d just met.
He shouted to Simaray when he saw the search results: “Mike Johnston, Denver mayor.” A picture of the man they’d just eaten lunch with flashed across his screen.
A ‘crisis’ was hitting the city
At first, Mike Johnston didn’t know about the Facebook message his wife had sent.
The Denver mayor was about six months into his term, and about six months into efforts to provide services to an influx of migrants in his city.
“I was spending, you know, hours around the clock working on trying to solve this challenge and going from shelter to shelter and reception site to reception site,” he recalls.
That same month, when a CNN team visited Denver, Johnston said the city was struggling.
Some migrant families were camping out in the cold under an overpass.
“This is both a humanitarian crisis for the individuals that are arriving, and it’s a fiscal crisis for the cities that are serving. Those two crises are coming to a head right now,” Johnston said at the time.
So when his wife, Courtney Johnston, told him they were going to have lunch with a Venezuelan family she’d met on Facebook, the mayor thought he’d keep things low-key.
“I just was along for the ride as the spouse,” he says.
But at some point during the lunch, he says, staying anonymous didn’t make sense.
“There were real services they needed and questions they had, and I wanted to help. And so there came a point at which it was too awkward to not say, ‘Well, I am, in fact, the mayor.’”
‘They invited us to their home when they didn’t even know us’
Samuel and Simaray couldn’t believe it. In Venezuela, politicians had an entourage of bodyguards.
“They were on another strata,” Samuel says. “You wouldn’t see them mingling with members of the public.”
The fact that a mayor in the US would take the time to get to know a migrant family was surprising, Samuel says.
“They are people with a very good heart. They invited us to their home when they didn’t even know us,” Samuel says.
In the days that followed, the families kept talking, and their friendship grew.
They were at very different points in their lives –— Mike was the mayor of Denver, and Courtney was Denver’s chief deputy district attorney. Samuel and Simaray had run a minimart selling food in Venezuela, until they say inflation and rising costs made it impossible for their business to stay afloat.
But when they got to talking about their families, they found they had many things in common. The meals they shared regularly together were only the beginning.
They sat together in a hospital waiting room
Courtney Johnston could tell when she first met Santi that something was wrong. The 6-year-old kept tugging at his ear, and as a mom of three children, she knew what that likely meant.
“I could tell he had an ear infection. … That’s just the universal parent experience, right? And there’s nothing like a child with an ear infection. They don’t go away easily, and it’s so much pain,” she recalls.
So the day after they first met in person, Courtney and Simaray took Santi to the hospital together. The mothers didn’t speak the same language, but they connected as parents — and Google Translate helped, too.
“We got to know each other much better then,” Courtney Johnston says.
When she’d seen Simaray’s post in the Facebook group, something about the Venezuelan mother’s words had spoken to her. The situation in the city seemed overwhelming, and it was so cold outside. Helping everyone seemed impossible, but she hoped reaching out to one family could make a difference.
In the weeks that followed, the Johnston family teamed up with another Denver family, who was trying to help Simaray’s sister, Saray, and her 5-year-old twins, Mathias and Laura.
Together, they found an apartment where the three adults and three kids could all live, within walking distance of the school the mayor’s daughter also attended.
When the Venezuelan family needed furniture, the American families shopped with them to find what they needed.
And when their family needed help scraping together enough money for their second month of rent, the Johnstons hosted a weekend garage sale at their Denver home. Samuel and Simaray made and sold arepas with their son, niece and nephew, while the Johnston family sold items from their basement.
The Johnstons’ 12-year-old daughter was eager to contribute, and put her dollhouse up for sale. But it took her a while to part with it.
“Two or three people came up to buy it, and each time, she said, ‘No,’” Mike Johnston says. “And then after she spent the day with Santi…selling arepas together, the next day she said, ‘Okay, dad, I’m ready.’ And they sold it. It was the biggest item we sold that day.”
The mayor mentions their friendship in a speech and gets a standing ovation
Since that day in January when she first asked for help, Simaray says her family’s fortunes have dramatically changed. They have work permits, which the Johnston family helped them apply for. All of them celebrated together when the documents arrived in the mail.
Samuel has a full-time job now, helping with maintenance and in the kitchen at a rehab hospital. Simaray works there, too, at least two days a week — and more when they need it.
In Denver, too, the situation has changed since the moment when their families first met. City officials say nearly 43,000 migrants came through Denver’s shelter program over the span of two years. But now, arrivals have diminished significantly, and officials closed the city’s last migrant shelter last month.
At a September immigration policy conference in Washington, the mayor made the case that what had begun as a crisis actually ended up helping his city.
“I think there was a belief that these folks were sent to us as if they were a plague…and that them arriving in Denver would somehow destroy us or divide us or break us. And I think what we found is a very different story,” he said.
He described the legal clinics and work training programs his city had offered to help migrants find their footing, and officials’ efforts to match migrants who needed jobs with the many employers who needed workers. He ended his speech by describing his family’s friendship with Samuel, Simaray, Saray and their kids. He talked about the garage sale, and the many meals they’d shared together. He talked about how his daughter looks out for their kids at school.
And in his closing line, he said with pride that Santi could end up being Denver’s mayor one day, too.
The crowd of officials, lawyers, policy experts, advocates and students gave the mayor a standing ovation.
Some critics back home were less receptive to the speech, which some local media covered from afar.
An advocate for the homeless said city officials had effectively forced many migrants to leave rather than letting them stay in Denver — a claim Johnston denies.
“We never forced anyone to go anywhere,” he says. “We just said, if you want to, we can help you get there.”
Johnston is a Democrat, and his approach to the situation has also drawn criticism from Republican elected officials in neighboring Aurora, who’ve accused him of covertly funneling migrants into their city — a claim representatives for the mayor have also denied.
What they’ve learned from their friendship
The mayor says he hasn’t spoken much publicly about his friendship with the Venezuelan family, wanting to protect their privacy.
But he says he hopes people will see in their story the importance of human connection, and how much a difference it makes to reach out.
Regular conversations with them, he says, helped him become a better person — and helped him pursue better policies as mayor. Many people across Denver, he says, went out of their way to make similar connections with newcomers.
“People across the city said, ‘I see these families that are struggling, like mine, and I should do something.’ And when people do that,” the mayor says, “it’s actually far easier to turn this problem into an opportunity.”
Courtney Johnston says she’s learned lessons of resilience from Simaray and her family. And she’s loved seeing how much their families’ kids have in common. Her 17-year-old twin boys play baseball and go swimming with Santi and Mathias.
“That,” she says, “has all been joyful.”
Simaray says she appreciates that the mayor hasn’t pressured them into public appearances.
The only photo that’s been shared of their get-togethers, Simaray says, is an image she posted on Facebook. It shows their families posing with a Yeti mannequin after having lunch at a local restaurant.
Her caption: “I thank God for putting these angels in our path. God never abandons his warriors. We are blessed.”
Life has gotten busy, and Samuel and Simaray say they don’t see the mayor, who they call “Señor Mike,” as frequently these days. But they’re often in touch in a WhatsApp chat their families share.
And this week, they’re planning to get together for a meal.
