Amsalu Kassaw came to the United States from Ethiopia 17 years ago. As he left, he feared arrest by the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, a left-wing paramilitary group then in charge of the African country.
The 42-year-old father of three now works as a lieutenant for the GEO Group, the private contractor that runs the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Aurora.
That juxtaposition will no doubt be in mind during Kassaw’s swearing-in ceremony Monday, as he becomes the first immigrant of color to take a seat on the Aurora City Council. Last month, the council chose him, in a 6-4 vote, from a field of three hopefuls to fill an at-large seat vacated in the fall by former Councilman Dustin Zvonek.
Kassaw, now a U.S. citizen, sees nothing odd about the intersection of his job overseeing detained immigrants in Aurora and his story as a refugee from Ethiopia who sought new opportunities overseas.
“I give myself as an example of how to follow the rules,” he said.
Kassaw is launching his political career in a city that has become a flash point in the nation’s immigration debate. President-elect Donald Trump staged a campaign rally in the city in October amid headlines about members of a Venezuelan prison gang attacking and intimidating residents at a trio of apartment buildings in the city.
Recriminations between Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston — over the surge of migrants Colorado has seen in the last two years, and whether Denver has quietly pushed some of them into Aurora, as Coffman alleges — have become a contentious topic of late.
Kassaw will also have to negotiate tense relations between the council and the community, which for months has protested and disrupted council meetings over the police shooting of an unarmed Black man last spring.
Kassaw, a Republican, said he would use the skills he honed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. There, he worked for Vision for Justice Ethiopia, a civic organization he said was charged with “bringing political parties to the table.” There are more than 80 ethnic groups in the country, he said.
While his conciliatory role got Kassaw labeled a “political opponent” worthy of arrest by the Ethiopian government, it could be a crucial skill set for dealing with Aurora’s own patchwork of ethnicities. The city of more than 400,000 is Colorado’s most racially and ethnically diverse — more than 1 in 5 residents were born outside this country.
Following those of Mexican ancestry, the next-largest group of foreign-born residents in Aurora is Ethiopian — at nearly 5,000 people, according to a city report.
“My background can help bring people together,” Kassaw said. “I can work hard to be the bridge between the community and elected officials. I’m very open — and open to discussing anything.”
Priscilla Rahn, a former vice chair of the Colorado Republican Party who ran unsuccessfully for Douglas County commissioner last year, called Kassaw “fair-minded” and a “connector.”
“He’s not an adversarial person. He wants to bring people together,” she said. “He’s a de-escalator.”
And he will be invaluable at reaching out to Aurora’s immigrant community, Rahn said, especially as the incoming Trump administration has promised to carry out mass deportations of people who are in the country illegally — a plan that Trump has dubbed, in part, “Operation Aurora.”
“He’s speaking from a place of experience and understands the process of coming here,” she said. “His message is exactly the same message you need to send to the rest of the country: You need to come the legal way.”
Kassaw, who said he leaned on his Christian faith, listed his top priorities as a soon-to-be council member as ensuring the safety and security of all Aurorans and helping small businesses in the city flourish.
“If you break the law, there has to be consequences for that,” he said. “Everybody wants their children to be able to go out on the streets safely.”
Kassaw will have to run for the seat in the November election if he wants to remain on the council.
Nigusse Beyene, the executive director of Aurora-based Global Refugee Solutions, agrees that refugees in the country have to “follow the rule of law.” A fellow Ethiopian, he calls Kassaw “one of us.”
But he said the new councilman would have to do more than just make remarks from the dais when it comes to sorting out the fraught issues facing Colorado’s third-largest city.
“He has to work day and night on the ground with the community,” Beyene said. “You have to do the work of the people — or it’s going to be tough for him.”
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