AURORA, Colo. (AP) — East Colfax Avenue was the best place to find a job. That’s what everyone told Sofia Roca.

Never mind the open drug use, the sex workers or the groups of other migrant women marching the sidewalks soliciting work at the very same Mexican restaurants and bakeries.

On East Colfax in Aurora, Colorado, bosses would speak Spanish and might be willing to hire someone like Roca — a 49-year-old immigrant from Colombia — without legal authorization to work. That was the rationale for going back each morning, fruitless as it was.

“Do you know how to cook Mexican food?” asked one woman when Roca inquired about a kitchen position. Roca’s accent was a giveaway: not Mexican.

“I can learn,” Roca replied in Spanish.

Responded the woman: “We’re not hiring.”

As record numbers of South Americans attempt to cross the U.S. southern border, many are landing in communities that are unprepared for them — and sometimes outright hostile.

Women are leaving Colombia, and to a greater extent Venezuela, to escape starvation and violence, to provide for their children and to seek medical care. They represent some of the more than 42,000 migrants who have arrived in the Denver area over two years. Many didn’t know anyone in Denver. But it was the closest city to which Texas was offering free bus rides, both to relieve pressure on its towns and to make a political point to liberal-leaning cities about immigration’s impact on the border.

From Denver, untold numbers made their way to the suburb of Aurora, lured by cheaper rent and abundant Spanish speakers. But finding a job has been anything but easy, and women face their own particular challenges.

Last year, nearly 900,000 women and girls tried to cross the U.S. southern border, more than a fivefold increase over the last decade, U.S. Customs and Border Protection data shows. Like many of them, Roca came to the U.S. to help her children. Her adult daughter in Colombia suffers from lupus and can’t afford “the good medicines.”

After making it across the U.S. border, Roca told U.S. agents she was seeking asylum. She heard from a shelter worker in El Paso that Denver was offering migrants free housing and Texas would pay to get her there.

Roca arrived in November and stayed two weeks in a shelter. When she went looking for work along East Colfax, she observed an icy reception.

She didn’t know the benefits many recent migrants have received — specifically, a path to a temporary work visa and with it better-paying jobs — were causing resentment among Aurora’s large Mexican community. Many have loved ones in the country illegally or have themselves lived for years in the United States without legal permission to work.

Resentment for newcomers was building in another corner of Aurora, too — City Hall. Aurora officials in February had warned other communities against housing migrants there, vowing not to spend city money to help them. This summer, Aurora’s mayor repeated a landlord’s claim that a notorious Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment building. Even though police say that’s false, former President Donald Trump took up the claim, mentioning it at his campaign rallies. The mayor last month walked back some of his comments.

Roca never made a deliberate decision to settle in Aurora. To her, it wasn’t clear where Denver ended and Aurora began.

So when Roca’s time is almost up at the Denver shelter, she does the only thing she knows to do: She heads to East Colfax in Aurora.