DENVER — Denver’s revamped migrant program in recent days began enrolling the roughly 800 people who are expected to be the first beneficiaries of a new approach city leaders consider innovative.

Participants will receive six months of housing, help with living costs, job training and legal support as the city files asylum claims on their behalf in an effort to get them qualified for work permits.

Those are the “haves” among the city’s migrant community, the people who qualify for the narrower, more intensive — and less expensive — scope of the city’s new strategy, announced by Mayor Mike Johnston last month.

But there will be many more “have-nots” under the city’s retooled migrant response. Those who arrived in the city after April 11, the launch date of Johnston’s Denver Asylum Seekers Program, receive no more than three nights in a group shelter, support from city-contracted case managers and, if they want it, a bus ticket to another destination.

Migrant advocates and some City Council members are sounding the alarm that rolling back shelter stay lengths from weeks to just a few days will have consequences.

“When you turn someone out in the street, they’re not going to just disappear,” said Candice Marley, executive director of All Souls Denver, a nonprofit that serves migrants and people who are homeless.

Denver on Wednesday shut down a migrant encampment in the eastern part of the city. The camp included roughly 60 people, most of them families with children, according to Jon Ewing, spokesman for the Denver Human Services.

Many residents of that encampment refused city-provided hotel rooms and intensive case management services, Ewing said. Some had already been moved into leased apartments through the city’s nonprofit partners but had since been evicted for various reasons.

“I will be very frank and say we have our work cut out for us,” Ewing said.

But advocates warn those situations will only grow in frequency with such limited offerings for new arrivals.

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