December 16, 2025 09:21 AM UTC

Mayor Mike Silent As Trump Comes For Aurora's Ethiopians

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• by: Colorado Pols

As CBS4’s Michael Abeyta reports, the latest action by the Trump administration against immigrants with legal status in the country, arguably the most disruptive and harmful of the administration’s multifaceted campaign to re-whiten the country, is targeting one of Colorado’s largest and most politically influential immigrant communities:

Colorado has a large Ethiopian community; between 30,000 and 50,000 people, according to the University of Colorado Boulder Colorado Ethiopian Community.

Now, many in the community, according to immigration advocates, are panicking after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced on Friday that it’s terminating the Temporary Protected Status designation of Ethiopia. That means any Ethiopians in the United States under the TPS designation have 60 days to leave the country or be subject to deportation…

In the estimation of the Trump administration, everything is great in Ethiopia now, so thousands of refugees who have built lives in the United States after fleeing their homeland can be uprooted once again:

Regarding the cancellation, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson said, “Temporary Protected Status designations are time-limited and were never meant to be a ticket to permanent residency,” and “conditions in Ethiopia no longer pose a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Ethiopian nationals.”

Even though the same Trump administration advises against traveling to the country:

The U.S. Department of State has a Level 3 Travel Advisory for Ethiopia right now, saying on its website, “Reconsider travel to Ethiopia due to sporadic violent conflict, civil unrest, crime, communications disruptions, terrorism and kidnapping in border areas.”

Aurora’s Republican Mayor Mike Coffman has a long history of using the city’s large Ethiopian community as a political backdrop, and a foil against allegations that he and at least some of his fellow conservatives are anti-immigrant–a defense that was at length rendered ludicrous by Donald Trump’s overt appeals to racism and xenophobia in his second campaign for the White House. “Operation Aurora” became the brand for Trump’s promised mass deportation operation, and although Coffman meekly tried to push back against Trump’s falsehoods about the state of his city, Coffman’s conservative allies on the City Council like Danielle Jurinsky jumped on the “Operation Aurora” bandwagon with other local Republicans like then-congressional candidate Gabe Evans. The “Operation Aurora” hysteria was aimed at Venezuelans, not Ethiopians…

But to thousands of Ethiopians in Colorado facing deportation, that doesn’t matter much today.

Politically as readers know, everything changed in Aurora last month when Mayor Mike’s hand-picked conservative majority on the City Council was removed from office, despite a huge disparity in resources between the conservative candidates and the progressive underdogs who triumphed. This sea change in Aurora city government after years of conservative dominance under Mayor Mike was a backlash against Trump’s slanderous attacks on the city–and the local Republicans who joined in. After watching the majority Coffman had spent years and untold amounts of money constructing was washed away in a single referendum on Donald Trump, just the latest in years of Trump wrecking Coffman’s political aspirations going back to the loss of his congressional seat in 2018, the question presents itself more plainly than ever: what has Coffman got to lose by standing up to Trump? What is left for Trump to take from Mike Coffman?

At this point, absorbing Trump’s collateral damage appears to be Coffman’s whole legacy.

What a way to end a lifetime of public service.