Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has threatened a "Tiananmen Square moment" using tens of thousands of Mile High City residents to prevent President-elect Donald Trump from his plan to deport illegal immigrants.
"More than us having [federal agents] stationed at the county line to keep them out, you would have 50,000 Denverites there," Johnston said to The Denverite on Wednesday.
"It's like the Tiananmen Square moment, right?" said Johnston, referring to the infamous image of a Chinese student and People's Liberation Army tank coming face to face in Tiananmen Square in China during the 1989 uprising.
"You'd have every one of those Highland moms who came out for the migrants. And you do not want to mess with them," the mayor said.
Trump made illegal immigration and its impact on society a key issue of his campaign, promising to conduct mass deportations once elected.
"We're going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country," Trump said last month during a speech in Los Angeles. "And we're going to start with Springfield and Aurora."
Aurora City Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky told the New York Post that Johnston's plan "will just further show how unproductive he is in one of the country's so-called sanctuary cities, which discourage or prevent local authorities from cooperating with federal immigration agents in the case of migrants."
"If Mayor Johnston wants to stand at the Denver border with, I believe he said, Highland moms, or something to that effect, it will just further show how unproductive he is," Jurinsky said. "Aurora does not plan to provide the Trump administration any assistance, as far as I know, but we will certainly not stand in the way of what the American people voted for."
Johnston move comes on the heels of other Democrat politicians seeking to circumvent Trump's agenda. Last week, Govs. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois and Jared Polis of Colorado, both Democrats, launched their Governors Safeguarding Democracy initiative, which aims to resist the president-elect's America First policies.
Denver has welcomed illegal immigrants, taking in close to 40,000 since December 2022, the largest figure per capita in the country.