She was eight months pregnant when she was forced to leave her Denver homeless shelter. It was November.
Ivanni Herrera took her 4-year-old son Dylan by the hand and led him into the chilly night, dragging a suitcase containing donated clothes and blankets she'd taken from the Microtel Inn & Suites. It was one of 10 hotels where Denver has housed more than 30,000 migrants , many of them Venezuelan, over the last two years.
First they walked to Walmart. There, with money she and her husband had collected from begging on the street, they bought a tent.
They waited until dark to construct their new home. They chose a grassy median along a busy thoroughfare in Aurora, the next town over, a suburb known for its immigrant population.
"We wanted to go somewhere where there were people," Herrera, 28, said in Spanish. "It feels safer."
