When crossing the state line from Wyoming into Colorado, drivers have recently been confronted with a giant billboard that reads: “Venezuela ahead, BE PREPARED!”
The xenophobic political ad – funded by Donald Trump’s largest individual campaign donor – is, in part, a reaction to the more than 40,000 immigrants who have arrived in the Denver metro area over the last two years, many of them Venezuelan families fleeing poverty and violence.
Farther down the highway is a Denver-area city that Trump alleged – in front of 67 million people during his debate with Kamala Harris – was being “taken over” by violent immigrants. Today he is holding a rally there.
But the story he has told about Aurora, Colorado, is very different from that offered by city police and others. And just as Trump stoked fears of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, so Aurora is also at the center of a swirl of misinformation.
The Aurora mayor, for instance, has said the claims are “an incredible exaggeration”.
The controversy is rooted in a community housing problem that emerged in local news over the summer – and did not, at first glance, have anything to do with immigration.
In August, an Aurora apartment building, the Aspen Grove, was shut down by the city for neglect and mismanagement dating back a number of years. It cited leaks, mold, structural problems, an infestation of rats, uncollected trash and other issues.
The city told 85 families they had to vacate the building. The residents found themselves not only on the streets, but at the center of a political firestorm with implications for the presidential election.
Zev Baumgarten, head of of CBZ Management, the New York-based property management company, claimed the disrepair occurred because the building had been hijacked by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA). Property managers couldn’t enter the buildings without the threat of violence, he alleged. He owns other apartment buildings that he said faced similar problems.
The Aurora mayor responded by labeling Baumgarten an “out-of-state slumlord” who had neglected the properties, sentiments echoed by other officials.
Because Baumgarten does not live in Colorado, “he doesn’t have to see the consequences of being an absentee landlord, and not investing in his properties or even keeping them in livable condition,” said Crystal Murillo, an Aurora city councilmember and lifelong resident. “There are years of documented violations and mismanagement.”
CBZ did not respond to requests for comment.
The dispute gained traction on conservative media, and evidently also reached Trump himself, thanks to the purported links to migrant gangs, a favorite topic for the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign.
“We have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums,” Trump said during his debate with Harris in September. “You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently … And they’re destroying our country. They’re dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality.”
Yet the truth of possible gang activity is far more nuanced, and according to local police, far less striking than the narrative elaborated by Trump.
In July, a shooting at Baumgarten’s Aspen Grove apartment building resulted in multiple injuries. Two of the four men arrested in connection to the shooting were, indeed, identified by the Aurora police as members of TdA.
“Our support for the vulnerable population of undocumented individuals in the city of Aurora goes without question,” Todd Chamberlain, Aurora chief of police, said at a press conference. “We are not going to overpolice a population based on their race or ethnicity.”
In August, door camera footage emerged in the news of six armed men, later identified as Venezuelan immigrants, knocking on the door of a unit in another of Baumgarten’s apartment buildings. Minutes later, a shootout at a nearby location resulted in the death of 25-year-old Oswaldo Jose Dabion Araujo.
The footage was portrayed in conservative media as evidence of a TdA takeover of Aurora. However, to date none of the men in the video have been identified as members of the TdA gang, or any other. One is in custody, and there are warrants for the arrest of the other five.
Altogether there have been ten individuals with ties to TdA identified by Aurora police in the Denver metro area, eight of whom have been arrested. And yet, on the whole, crime in Aurora has been trending down over the last two years, and is expected to fall further in 2024.
Undocumented immigrants are not linked to a surge in crime, research by the Marshall Project indicates.
And Venezuelan immigrants are now dealing with the consequences of the conservative rhetoric.
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“I’m scared to go out. They’re accusing all of us at the complex of being in gangs, and this is completely false,” Oscar Rojas, a local resident, told Denver7.
Another resident told the station of hostile or unnerving encounters, like when “an American drove their car by with a flag, insulting people here”.
Murillo, the Aurora councilmember, says that she walks her dog in the areas near Baumgarten’s apartments, and believes the hype around gang violence is overblown. “Ten gang members out of 400,000 people is hardly a ‘takeover’ of the city,” she says.
Mike Coffman, Aurora’s mayor, initially bolstered the narrative about his city, saying during an 29 August appearance on Fox News: “There are several buildings, actually under the same ownership, out-of-state ownership that have fallen to these Venezuelan gangs.”
But a few weeks later, Coffman reversed his stance, saying in a Facebook post that he agreed with Aurora police’s assessment that “a Venezuelan gang is not in control of either of these two apartment complexes”.
Coffman was unavailable to comment further, his office said.
The issue has not gone away. Last week, Danielle Jurinsky, an Aurora city councilmember, appeared on an episode of Dr Phil titled: Armed & Dangerous: Colorado Town Overrun by a Criminal Gang?
‘These people just want to feed their kids’
Murillo and others feel disappointed that the city of Aurora has returned to the national spotlight for tragic events. A young Black man, Elijah McClain, was killed during a 2019 encounter with Aurora police and paramedics, when he was injected with a lethal dose of ketamine.
Before that, a gunman murdered 12 people in a movie theater, and injured 58, during the opening night showing of The Dark Knight Rises in 2012.
Coffman welcomes Trump’s visit to Aurora. “I want the former president to come, because I want to show him this city,” he said. “I want to show him that the narrative is not accurate by any stretch of the imagination.”
Jared Polis, Colorado’s governor, had a different response.
“Obviously, we welcome anybody to the city of Aurora, to Colorado,” he said. “But obviously, we worry about some of the criminal elements that he brings with him. He’s a convicted felon himself, and a lot of people who associate with him might engage in acts of terror against the residents of Aurora.”
Amid the national attention, the families who were forced to leave their apartments continue to seek new homes.
“It’s been really challenging, because there are a lot of rumors and false stories suggesting that these families are criminals or dangerous or violent,” said Zach Neumann, co-founder of Colorado’s Community Economic Defense Project. He works with 20 of the families that were displaced from Baumgarten’s apartment building.
“These are folks who have kids, some of those kids have special needs. Being forced out of your home makes it difficult to cook and prepare food, to send your kids to school, find and keep a job. All of those critical, normal activities have been complicated by displacing those families, now unable to find a clean and decent place to live. These people just want to feed their kids and be indoors at night.”
