The mayor of Denver, Mike Johnston, will on Tuesday propose massive cuts to his city’s public safety and social service budgets in order to cope with a migrant crisis that has gripped his city. Tens of thousands of migrants have flooded into Denver in recent months, and it has become the defining issue of Mr. Johnston’s tenure, which began less than nine months ago.

Mr. Johnston announced that he would cut $89.9 million from the city’s overall budget in order to free up resources to help house, feed, and provide healthcare for migrants. The Denver Police Department will see more than $8 million in cuts, much of which comes from not hiring new officers. The Denver Fire Department will also receive a $2.5 million cut. 

Mr. Johnston’s office will take a nearly ten percent cut, though that only amounts to just over $300,000. 

Much of the money will be used to create an “Asylum Seeker Program,” which allows migrants who have been in the city for six months or more to begin looking for permanent housing and employment. 

“It’s a balance,” Mr. Johnston said in an interview with CNBC. “We want to be a welcoming city, but doing that without federal help requires shared sacrifice, it requires compromise. 

“We are both making cuts to city budgets to meet this financial need, and we are making cuts to the amount of services we can provide to the migrants that arrive and to the number of folks that we can serve,” he added. 

Denver has seen 40,000 migrants flow into the city in recent months, thanks in part to Republican governors like Governor Abbott, who have been sending migrants via planes and buses to so-called “sanctuary cities.”

Mr. Johnson boasted in the CNBC interview that more than 99 percent of those 40,000 migrants are now sheltered indoors, even though Denver’s total homeless population is near 10,000 according to the Colorado Sun. 

“We figured out how to run this machine, how to welcome people, get them connected to legal clinics, provide them wrap-around resources,” he said. “To do that well just requires resources, and so, our challenge is, we can do it well with federal help, we can do it well with more work authorization, we can do it well with a coordinated plan for entry.”

Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, has also had to make some budget changes in the wake of the migrant crisis. During his state of the state address in February, he announced that he would provide $30 million to the city for social services for those migrants in need. He has declined to deploy the national guard, or declare a state of emergency, which other governors have done.