Last September, in the waning months of the election, the NY Times published a story titled "How the False Story of a Gang ‘Takeover’ in Colorado Reached Trump."
Mike Coffman, the conservative Republican mayor of Aurora, Colo., said he was at home on Tuesday night watching the presidential debate and bracing for the worst...
“They’re taking over buildings,” Mr. Trump said. “They’re going in violently.”
Mr. Coffman was contrite on Thursday as he told that story. After all, he had helped create the tall tale now sullying his city’s reputation.
Before Springfield, Ohio, before the misinformation about devoured pets and the memes of Mr. Trump rescuing ducks and kittens, there was Aurora, pop. 404,219, supposedly overrun by the violent Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua. Those claims became a cause célèbre for the right-wing media, and ultimately a key focus of Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration repertoire as he escalated his attacks on immigrants as part of his campaign’s effort to capitalize on voter concerns about the southern border crisis.
You probably remember this video clip which was circulating at the time.
AMERICA IS BECOMING SAFER BY THE DAY!!!
— Chad Prather (@WatchChad) January 28, 2025
Tren de Aragua Ringleader behind Aurora, CO apartment building invasion arrested in NYC by ICE. pic.twitter.com/GSIo8vf7UZ
And the general response from the left was a lot like the NY Times story above. They claimed it was a false story used by Trump to attack migrants.
Today, the Times published a rebuttal of sorts about the same incidents. The tone of this one is very different. It's headline reads, "Democrats Denied This City Had a Gang Problem. The Truth Is Complicated."
Cindy Romero was in the living room of the small apartment she shared with her husband in Aurora, Colo., when she heard a commotion in the hallway. It was before midnight on a Sunday last August. Romero, 60, was sitting on the floor watching a feed on her phone from a security camera she had recently placed outside her door. Six young men carrying pistols and what appeared to be an assault rifle with a scope were milling around on the landing, focused on the door of an apartment across the hall where a friend of hers, a migrant from Venezuela, had been living.
Cindy Romero is the person who recorded the video above. That was the view from her doorway. And what that camera could not show is what happened minutes later.
Less than 10 minutes later, Romero and her husband heard shouting outside. “Shut your mouth!” someone yelled in Spanish. (Romero, an American citizen whose father was of Mexican descent, knew enough Spanish to make out the words.) Then came the sounds of a gunfight. “There were five to six different calibers of weapon,” Romero said in one of several interviews she gave afterward to local and national news outlets. She and her husband would later find bullet holes in both of their cars; the windows of other tenants’ cars were shattered.
Police arrived and found the victim in an alley. He was the person living in that apartment across the hall. He died from his injuries. Romero gave the doorbell video to a local news outlet and then a Republican city councilwoman named Danielle Jurinsky started sharing it.
Jurinsky and other Republicans pointed to the Romeros’ video as evidence that large numbers of Tren de Aragua members had come with the influx of migrants. Democratic politicians suggested they were crying wolf: “There is no gang takeover in any part of Aurora,” Representative Jason Crow, of Colorado, posted on X...
Events in Aurora soon caught the attention of Donald Trump, who was then campaigning on a promise to “take America back” from undocumented immigrants. During the Sept. 10 presidential debate with Kamala Harris, he mentioned Aurora twice, claiming that criminal immigrants were “taking over the towns, they are taking over buildings, they are going in violently.” The next day, the Aurora Police Department confirmed that several of the suspects seen in the Romeros’ video had been arrested and identified as likely Tren de Aragua members.
Trump held a rally in Aurora and Cindy Romero was there. Here's the key paragraph from the story:
The more central Aurora became to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, the greater the temptation among Democratic politicians and activists to wave away talk of gang activity in the city as a right-wing hallucination. But their refusal to acknowledge the violence that some residents were seeing with their own eyes came off not as reassurance but as erasure. At the rally, Romero described herself as a “former lifelong Democrat,” explaining that the denials had turned her against the party. She thanked Trump first and foremost “for believing me.” Mike Coffman, Aurora’s Republican mayor, found himself caught between dueling narratives as the city became a flashpoint in national politics. “There’s one side that said there’s never been a problem,” he said at a town hall in October. “There’s another side that says, yeah, the whole city is overrun. And I think that the truth lies in the middle.”
The truth lies in the middle isn't really the story here. The story is that Democrats denied this was happening and they were wrong. It was happening. Cindy Romero described how it developed in her complex as subsequent waves of Venezuelan migrants rolled in:
Things changed, she said, as three distinct waves of immigrants moved in. The first wave, in 2023, Romero described as mainly Venezuelan families, sometimes two of them living in a single one-bedroom apartment. “At the time I was a Democrat,” she said, “dedicated to helping them have a better life.” The next wave was more couples and some single men, “but mid-30s, early 40s, the kind of guys you’d see waiting for construction jobs.”
The third wave came a few months later and was “young, mostly men, maybe 20 years old,” and that’s when things started getting bad, Romero said. They staged barbecues in the courtyards between buildings, sometimes grilling in grocery carts under trees. They stole motorcycles and then brought them — or even rode them — indoors to work on them. Downstairs from her, she said, they also painted them and sometimes revved their engines. The noise from parties in the parking lot, right outside her window, could last all night.
Meanwhile, nearly everyone in the complex had stopped paying rent because the landlords had all been run off by the gangs. The New York based company that ran the properties hired a PR firm and presented a video of one of the landlords being beat up in a hallway.
Pictured: Aurora apartment worker beaten to a pulp by Tren de Aragua — as owners say migrant gang took over and tried to extort them https://t.co/JNcvDmJ4GV pic.twitter.com/K8INeOqim0
— New York Post (@nypost) October 14, 2024
And four moths after Romero moved out of the apartment complex a Venezuelan couple still living there called the police to report they had been held captive and tortured until they gave up their banking information. Fourteen people were arrested and later charged in the crime. One of them had appeared in Cindy Romero's video. And the problem still hasn't ended. Last month police released this video of an almost identitcal apartment break-in.
Police in Aurora, Colorado just released a video that shows nine suspected Venezuelan TdA members armed and stacked at an apartment door.
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) June 17, 2025
Trump needs to intervene and rein in control of this ASAP!
TdA is a violent foreign gang that wreaks havoc on American citizens DAILY. pic.twitter.com/fx8c3m8D3c
In short, there really was a gang problem and there still is in Aurora, Colorado. And not just there. Here's the top comment on the story (over 1,000 upvotes)
Some immigrants are gang members and Democrats need to acknowledge this. I know because we have some of them in my town, moving from Chicago into quiet neighborhoods with tree-lined streets and brick bungalows. Their own parents and grandparents don't say anything because the young men terrorize them, too. There's also large section of lovely vintage apartment buildings in town but they have trouble renting because everybody knows the buildings attract gangbangers. Nobody wants to get shot. Trump is exploiting the situation in the worst way and I'm against that, but I'm sorry, it's not all just mariachis and yummy churro cart vendors. There's a problem and it needs to be stopped.
And the #2 comment:
Denial of the problems opened the door for the making the harsh measures employed by the Trump administration acceptable. Failure on the progressive side directly lead to the current policies. I don't like where we are, but Its clear how we got there.
Denying the obvious really is the Democratic Party's core problem.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member