DENVER—As early as November 2023, armed Venezuelan gang members began to terrorize residents of an Aurora, Colorado, apartment building, according to a Denver law firm hired to investigate.
Evidence also indicates that gang members have engaged in “flagrant trespass violations,” including human trafficking, attorney T. Markus Funk said.
Other alleged crimes included extortion, unlawful firearms possession, and sexual abuse of minors, “often targeting vulnerable Venezuelan and other immigrant populations.”
“The gang’s [motive] appears to be to unlawfully move gang members, as well as vulnerable immigrant families, into vacant units,” Funk wrote in the Aug. 9 letter to the mayor, city manager, and interim police chief.
“The gang also forces rent-paying residents out to create more open units and use the apartment for purposes of illegal activities such as prostitution.
“The gang, which operates in the open and uses firearms to patrol ‘their property,’ has intimidated staff, stabbed at least one vulnerable immigrant in the apartments because of alleged non-payment, and otherwise terrorized the community.”
The law firm represents the lender for Whispering Pines, a 54-unit apartment complex at 1357 Helena St. Average monthly rents range from $1,450 to $2,000.
Funk said that Tren de Aragua has threatened or attempted to kill management staff since members began to infiltrate the building in about November 2023.
In one case, according to the lawyer, an apartment manager was so badly beaten that he had to go to the hospital, and he later left the state in fear for his safety.
Gang activity at Whispering Pines has escalated in 2024, Funk said.
Based on interviews with tenants, about 10 gang members threatened to execute a “business plan” unless the property manager agreed to surrender vacant units.
One gang member reportedly told a housekeeper, “If he doesn’t like it, we’ll fill him with bullets.”
“The housekeeper understood the reference to be to the gang’s ‘business plan’ of extortion,” Funk wrote.
Recent video footage shows gang members moving about the building in large numbers and kicking doors open.
“This conduct’s brazen and public nature further exhibits the suspected gang members’ sense of comfort and control consistent with their taking over the property and not fearing the law enforcement or the property management,” he wrote.
Funk said the firm wants to meet with city officials to discuss returning the building to management control and the “helpless Whispering Pines residents, and the Aurora community.”
Not a Sanctuary City
Before the gang activity started, most residents in the quiet and picturesque suburb of Aurora were not interested in it becoming a sanctuary city like Denver—still, Mayor Mike Coffman said, it made little difference to state officials. Sanctuary jurisdictions generally shield illegal immigrants from federal immigration authorities, often by banning local law enforcement from cooperating with immigration agents.Coffman said unvetted illegal immigrants have been moving into several private housing complexes in Aurora since 2023, regardless of whether the city wanted them to or not.
The influx of illegal immigrants, some with unsavory ties to Tren de Aragua, appears to have been funded by state and federal taxpayer dollars distributed by local nonprofits, he said.
The task for city officials now, Coffman said, is to trace the steps and the funding that made it happen as Aurora “pays the price” with increased crime at these apartment complexes.
“If I felt this is the new normal, I’d feel a lot worse,“ he said. ”I don’t think this is the new normal. I feel we can develop strategies to combat it.”
On Nov. 21, 2023, officers responded to a CBZ Management apartment building on Helena Street.
Police said the man who answered the door had a gun in his hoodie pocket and was touching it with his left hand before police disarmed him.
Nobody Wanted This
Despite the City Council’s February resolution affirming that Aurora was not a sanctuary city and that it lacked the resources to aid migrant families, the issue arose.“Property owners are now coming out of the woodwork, saying they don’t know what to do,” Aurora Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky, co-sponsor of the council resolution with Aurora Councilman Steven Sundberg, said.
“I have absolutely no idea how deep this truly goes,” she told The Epoch Times.
Colorado is one of 11 sanctuary states that have welcomed thousands of illegal immigrants.
Coffman said there have been shootings, a home invasion, and even threats against other illegal immigrants by armed gang members in recent months.
However, he said he believes that these crimes are “isolated.”
In one incident, police arrested Jhonardy Jose Pacheco-Chirinos, 22, a confirmed Tren de Aragua gang member from Venezuela, in connection with a July 28 shooting.
Pacheco-Chirinos is currently in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“I knew there were challenges” associated with the Biden administration border policies, Coffman said, “but not this.”
The city is seeking an emergency court order to clear CBZ Management apartment buildings of known gang and criminal activity.
“This will require a municipal judge to issue the order with the goal of getting these properties back under the control of the property owners,” Coffman wrote on Facebook on Aug. 30.
“I strongly believe that the best course of action is to shut these buildings down and make sure that this never happens again.”
CBZ Management said on the company’s website that it owns 11 apartment complexes in Colorado and 11 in New York.
An Aurora police department spokesperson said that Shmary Baumgarten, owner of CBZ Management, has contacted the department on many occasions looking to hire off-duty officers.
“He was told we didn’t have the staffing to provide adequate security at all his properties,” the spokesperson said.
On Aug. 13, the city shut down CBZ Management’s 98-unit apartment complex on Nome Street for code violations and placed tenants in 60 hotel rooms.
“The problems associated with Venezuelan gang activity has been isolated to properties that are all under the same out-of-state ownership whose problems with code violations and criminal activity preceded the migrant crisis,” Coffman wrote on Facebook.
Venezuelan Connection
City officials have confirmed that some of the illegal immigrants have ties to the notorious Tren de Aragua gang.“We are aware that components of TdA are operating in Aurora,” Ryan Luby, Aurora’s deputy director of communications and marketing, said.
In an Aug. 28 statement, Luby said the Aurora Police Department has been gathering evidence of the connection between gang activity and crimes in the area.
However, he said it would be “improper at this time” for the city and police to make any “conclusory statements about specific incidents,” or law enforcement strategy and operations.
The group’s criminal network has been spreading throughout South America and recently extended north into Central America and the United States.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Colorado Department of Human Services didn’t respond to requests for comment about funding for illegal immigrants by publication time.
“Local, regional, and national media are leading the nation to believe that Aurora is wholly unsafe. That is simply not true,” the statement reads.
“While these isolated situations are rightfully of great concern and warrant increased action and scrutiny, violent crime in the city is down in nearly all crime categories.”
The Aurora Police Department didn’t respond to The Epoch Times’ request for a tour of the impacted buildings.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Denver Mayor Michael Johnston didn’t respond to requests for comment by publication time.
In the meantime, the city has set up a law enforcement task force to arrest Venezuelan gang members.
Sundberg said that forming the task force is a good step, but he questions whether it is “too little, too late.”
“If it’s not dealt with, it will grow, is what I’m told,” he told The Epoch Times. “It’s obvious the people just flowed into our city. Whether they’re good actors or bad actors, they’re not vetted.
“We can thank Denver for being a sanctuary city and boasting that they are. Therefore, it attracted migrants, many of which spilled over into our city.”
Sundberg described the situation as “unsettling” to the point where he feels apprehensive and locks his doors more often than he used to.
“It’s created a sense of fear—especially after the release of that video,” he said.
The one question waiting for an answer, according to Sundberg, is how unvetted illegal immigrants obtain firearms.
“We can thank our failed federal policies at the border for this,” he said. “In the meantime, we’ve been listening to the police. They’re scared to go [into the apartments] because of the shootouts.
“It’s frustrating because of inaction.
“State authorities, as far as our governor, are in denial. They’re still just flooding [migrants] across our borders. We feel helpless.
“One of my frustrations is why haven’t we acted sooner, but it takes a coordinated effort with Homeland Security.”
Jurinsky said transnational gang members are taking over apartment buildings.
“They are terrorizing other Venezuelan migrants. They are terrorizing the American people,” she said.
“It’s been ignored. The city had downplayed this as code violations at properties. The people have been lied to. I have been lied to.
“I finally decided I'd had enough and that I was going to expose this on my own.”
Jurinsky took action by spearheading a city resolution that Aurora is not and will not become a sanctuary city.
However, she said, the city has been losing by default because of the state government’s failure to act and Denver’s sanctuary status.
“They think they’re out there doing the Lord’s work or whatever they think they’re doing,” Jurinsky said. “Now, here we are. These property owners can’t get their properties back. These people are controlling these properties with guns.
“This is sheer chaos.”
One transportation worker told The Epoch Times that he has heard about gang activity but hasn’t encountered it yet.
“It’s the gang element that concerns me. You don’t see it every day. It depends on where you are in the city. You see [apartment] blocks deteriorated. It’s not like I see people in the streets with weapons,” he said.
“It’s bad in some pockets. You have to be careful. You have to be situationally aware.”
Things have been quiet since the Nome Street property was closed, according to one business owner who spoke with The Epoch Times.
Although he hasn’t witnessed any direct gang activity, he said he had “heard it was happening nearby.”
For Coffman, a former U.S. representative for Colorado, the names of the gangs are “irrelevant.”
“It’s an organized effort by criminals. They have to be dealt with irrespective of what their name is,” he said.
During the illegal immigrant surge in 2023, Coffman said Aurora took a stance and decided it would not become a sanctuary city.
“The position of the city was that we not expend our resources. We would not be a conduit for state and federal resources to support the migrants,” he said. “It’s not our problem.
“I felt if we did participate, we were really acquiescing to what is a bad immigration policy. It’s up to the federal government to resolve it.”
He said Colorado ultimately “rolled over” the city when it declared sanctuary status in 2019.
Those who didn’t settle in Denver have been making their way into cities such as Aurora, Coffman said.
“We’re suffering from the ramifications of that,” he said, referring to the gang activity. “I think TdA is in Colorado. They are thugs working together. To what extent, I don’t know.”
The presence of transnational gang members in Aurora has been a “terrible blow” to the city, Coffman said, and residents are angry, disappointed, and disillusioned.
“But again, it’s about retracing the steps that got us here. I believe some things were done that precipitated this problem,” he said.
“It wasn’t our problem, and yet it turned out to be our problem.”
