With the number of arriving immigrants having dropped significantly, Denver’s $90 million budget for the illegal immigration crisis that’s spilling over into America’s interior cities is expected to get slashed next year.

The budget for 2025 is expected to cost $12.5 million.

“We just don’t see the same number of folks coming in,” said Jon Ewing, a Denver Human Services spokesperson. The agency is managing the city’s response to the crisis.

For example, the city’s shelters, which provide 72 hours of free housing, only had four immigrants on Tuesday, city data shows.

Ewing added: “It would be irresponsible for us to spend money on shelters that aren’t being utilized.”

At the height of the most recent surge back in January, the city was sheltering roughly 5,000 immigrants, drawn to the city — according to officials in El Paso, Texas — by Denver’s offer of free transportation to their desired destination and other services, notably housing.

The city initially doubled down on offering free housing and transportation. Later, officials limited people’s stay to a few days, instead of several weeks, and then created a program to give people who are chasing a work authorization a job training. That new program offers food and utility assistance, a computer, prepaid cell phone and metro bus passes, in addition to free shelter, to roughly 900 immigrants.

In the past, officials have said they would respond to the crisis based on need, which meant the city could spend more than what the $12.5 million they expect to allocate in 2025 if Denver sees another surge.

Like other major cities in America, Denver has seen waves of immigrants arriving in the city, sometimes by hundreds daily. In the past few months, by contrast, the influx has been a trickle.

The handful of immigrants, if any, arriving each day compared to the hundreds city officials saw last winter, represent historical migration patterns, Ewing said.

The city launched the Denver Asylum Seeker Program or DASP, which the Johnston administration designed at the height of the crisis to temporarily house, feed and provide job training to migrants seeking asylum as they wait for work authorization.

The program’s first cohort of more than 800 will likely the be last, officials suggested.

Ewing offered few details on how a downsized program will look like, saying those particulars are still being worked out.

Denver will close its remaining shelters for immigrants at the end of the month.

Despite the unpredictability of border crossings, Ewing said he is confident that the city will be able to pivot and deal with any future surges.

“Right now, they can’t get across the border,” Ewing said. “It’s pretty locked down and it’s hard to imagine the numbers increasing.”

Ewing credited the slow down, in part, to a crackdown at the border and to so few buses arriving from Texas.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s administration has bused nearly 120,000 immigrants — 19,200 to Denver alone — to so-called sanctuary cities in Democratic strongholds since 2022.

Generally speaking, a sanctuary city or state is one that establishes policies to discourage local law enforcement from reporting an individual’s immigration status. Surrounding communities, notably Douglas County, have criticized Denver’s “sanctuary” policies, arguing they are attracting immigrants to Colorado’s most populous city and, who, in turn, have flocked to other jurisdictions that do not have the funding or capability to respond to the crisis.

Denver has not had a busload of immigrants from Texas since June 10, Ewing said.

Early in the crisis, officials decided Denver taxpayers would foot the bill to temporarily house arriving immigrants who crossed the southern border illegally.

To date, the city has received roughly 43,000 immigrants, many of whom have fled economic and political violence in Venezuela.

All told, the city has spent about $75 million on the humanitarian crisis, Ewing said.

When Denver was temporarily housing more than 5,000 immigrants — mostly from South and Central America — earlier this year, Mayor Mike Johnston warned the cost to taxpayers could reach up to $180 million this year.

“We knew that, as a result of federal inaction on immigration and the resulting budget crisis, that there were two important steps we needed to take,” Johnston said in February. “No. 1 was adjusting city budgets to help supplement the needs and the second was to reduce the overall costs of our migrant program.”

To help pay for the city’s response, the Johnston administration froze hiring and cut some services, including MVD hours. Flower planting this year also took a hit this year.

As the numbers of immigrants arriving to the city dwindled, the city closed shelters, limited people’s length of stay and pleaded with immigrants to leave Denver.