Claims that Aurora, Colorado, has been overrun by Venezuelan gangs are “grossly exaggerated,” and the city is “considerably safe,” Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman said on Tuesday, just days before former President Donald Trump is set to visit.
Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is set to visit Aurora on Friday and hold a rally at the Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center, according to his campaign.
“With approximately 43,000 migrants flooding the neighboring city of Denver since December 2022, many of these migrants have made their way to Aurora, bringing chaos and fear with them,” the campaign said.
Trump’s campaign said that local families in Aurora have been forced to flee their homes as Tren de Aragua members “terrorize apartment complexes with guns, theft, and rampant drug activity.”
The campaign added that “open-border policies are turning once-safe communities into nightmares for law-abiding citizens.”
“They are taking over the towns. They are taking over buildings. They are going in violently ... they’re destroying our country,” he said during the debate.
On Tuesday, Coffman said, “The incidents were limited to several apartment complexes in this city of more than 400,000 residents.”
Although the mayor did not specify exactly which criminal organizations were allegedly taking over the buildings, he said they were Venezuelan.
The mayor stated that the city had set up a task force of local, state, and federal law enforcement officials to help deal with the “intimidation” of individuals who own the apartments.
The mayor said at the time that he was investigating how and why there was such a high concentration of Venezuelans in the three buildings.
“Somebody placed them there, is it an agency of the federal government, perhaps using some of our local nonprofit partners here as a conduit,” he said.
He also criticized the federal government’s actions at the border.
“It is my understanding that Venezuela does not share criminal histories with the United States, so it’s very difficult to vet them at the border, yet they’ve been allowed to come in anyway,” Coffman said at the time.
“TdA’s presence in Aurora is limited to specific properties, all of which the city has been addressing in various ways for months,” the joint statement said.
They also said that the Aurora Police Department had arrested eight out of 10 people linked to the gang.
Two of the individuals arrested were involved in a July shooting at one of the specific properties in the city that have experienced issues with Tren de Aragua activity, Coffman and Jurinsky said.
“In line with these arrests, we can also now confirm that criminal activity, including TdA issues, had significantly affected those properties,” they wrote.
The Epoch Times contacted the Trump campaign for comment but didn’t receive a reply by publication time.
