AURORA, Colo. — The Republican mayor of Colorado’s third-largest city doesn’t think former President Donald Trump will follow through on his promise to visit the mountain community, which has become embroiled in the national debate over immigration that Trump is helping fuel.
“I kind of doubt it by now,” Mayor Mike Coffman said in an interview this week. “The fact that we’re not a battleground state and the fact that you have a mayor who’s a Republican with a different view of the conditions of the city I think probably would cause him to hold back.”
But unlike Springfield, Ohio, whose mayor has asked Trump not to visit, Coffman would welcome him.
“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."
Despite Aurora’s having become a regular talking point at his rallies, a Trump campaign spokesperson declined to specify whether or when Trump would visit the city.
Fierce backlash over immigrants is unfolding in several towns across the country, including Springfield and Charleroi, Pennsylvania. But Aurora has some important differences: It has a much larger population, and it has long been diverse.
The issues here — like they so often are when it comes to immigration — are complex. Social media posts quickly amplified false rumors. There has been crime, but it’s not clear how much of it is gang-related or directly attributed to increased migration. Coffman, a moderate former member of Congress who lost his seat in 2018 at least partly because of the rise of Trump, acknowledges that politics have lost all nuance.
And Trump continues to talk about places like Aurora.
“They’re going in with guns that are beyond even military scope and they’re taking over apartment buildings,” Trump said Wednesday in North Carolina. “They’re literally taking over those towns."
A viral video
Cindy Romero didn’t expect the video to explode
“This was terrifying,” Romero said. “And I don’t wish it on anybody.”
She’d moved to the apartment building at 12th Avenue and Dallas Street in Aurora about four years ago and has seen waves of migrants move in and out. This was the third, she said, and she hadn’t had any problems with the previous two.
But this time was different. The young men spent hours outside partying. They kicked in the doors of empty apartments. She regularly heard gunshots. Then she saw the bullet holes in her car. One had pierced the passenger side and exited the other side of the trunk. People carried guns around the property. She soon feared for her life.
“I was not intimidated by them with the guns,” she said. “Until I saw the bigger guns.”
So she set up security cameras to capture the activity outside. One night in August, she was monitoring her door camera on her phone when she saw several armed men enter a neighboring apartment.
“It was never meant to be political when I released it,” Romero said. “It was meant to bring awareness so the people in my building could get help.”
It’s not clear whether any of the men seen in Romero’s video were indeed gang members. But the story quickly ricocheted across conservative media.
Romero and her husband finally decided to move.
“I’m incredibly angry,” she said. “I’m very frustrated with the system.”
Stretched thin
The wild claims about migrants overrunning Aurora threaten to obscure a more mundane yet still troubling reality: The Denver area has had an influx of thousands of immigrants in the past few years.
Many of them were bused inland from the southern border by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Resources in Denver have been stretched thin — and migrants have sought housing in neighboring Aurora, where rent is cheaper.
“I think a lot of cities have been impacted by increased immigration,” said Emily Goodman, housing assistance campaign senior manager for the East Colfax Community Collective, an advocacy organization. “But the anti-immigrant narrative that has come out of all of this is completely unjustified.”
For more than a year, Aurora officials have been trying to get an out-of-state landlord to fix up three dilapidated apartment buildings in the East Colfax Corridor, which connects the cities of Denver and Aurora. This past summer, the landlord said it couldn’t because Venezuelan gangs had taken over the buildings. City officials, including the mayor, dispute that, and the embattled property manager faces charges in municipal court because of years of unresolved health and safety code violations. Last month, the city shut down one of the apartment complexes and evicted hundreds of people.
“The problems with the landlord really go back prior to the migrant crisis,” Coffman said.
Goodman and her colleagues argue that the city should be doing more to ensure residents have adequate living conditions — and that the focus on crime is distracting from underlying issues, such as poverty and lax code enforcement.
“There is gang violence everywhere,” Goodman said. “But immigrant gang violence is not as significant as it’s painted out to be.”
Trump and his allies have highlighted a Venezuelan prison gang, Tren de Aragua, or TDA. Homeland security officials told NBC News they’ve launched more than 100 criminal investigations nationwide into TDA, some of them over allegations of sex trafficking and shooting police officers. But Aurora police have said it has been challenging to determine whether crime suspects in the city are part of the notorious gang — and they downplay any link to immigration status.
At a news conference last Friday, Aurora’s police chief, Todd Chamberlain, said that several of the armed suspects captured on the viral video forcing their way into the Aurora apartment have been identified and that one man is in custody. He didn’t confirm any of them were TDA members.
“This is not an immigration issue,” Chamberlain said. “It’s a crime issue.”
A changing narrative
Coffman said that he dreaded the presidential debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris and that he was disappointed to hear Trump bring up Aurora.
“I kind of sank in my sofa,” he said.
Still, Coffman himself initially fanned the right-wing firestorm. In an interview on Fox News, he said the apartment complexes had “fallen” to gang members. He has since backtracked and now says his initial comments were a “snapshot in time” based on police reports he’d been given at the time — claims that gang members had run off the property management and were collecting rent.
“I’m not sure how accurate that is, clearly,” Coffman said. “I’ve held meetings with the residents. And the reality is none of them are paying rent, period. They’re not paying it to a gang. They’re just not paying it. And I can’t fault them because of the fact that there is no property management there to pay the rent to.”
Carlos Ordosgoitti lives in one of the three embattled complexes — the one where the viral video was recorded. He’s from Venezuela and now works installing fiber cables after having come to the U.S. two years ago.
“This is all politics,” Ordosgoitti said in Spanish. He acknowledged there is some violence in the area, but he said that claims of a gang takeover are exaggerated and that most Venezuelans were here to work. He wishes Trump would indeed visit to see for himself.
“You can’t generalize an entire community,” he said.
