“Former President Trump’s visit to Aurora is an opportunity to show him and the nation that Aurora is a considerably safe city — not a city overrun by Venezuelan gangs," Mayor Mike Coffman.
The city of Aurora is roughly the size of pre-evacuation Tampa, Florida. With 400,000 people spread over 164 square miles, it has swank subdivisions, working-class neighborhoods and the high-end resort where Donald Trump will hold a rally Friday to highlight a city turned into “a war zone” by immigrants, in the words of his campaign.
The reality is much different from the one Trump has been portraying to his rally attendees. As with many other American cities, Aurora's crime rate is actually declining.
The matter that brought the Denver suburb to Trump's attention occurred in August in a single block of the city, in an apartment complex housing Venezuelan migrants.
Aurora's crime rate has followed a downward trend seen across the country. That's despite — or, some argue, partly because of — the influx of Venezuelans fleeing their country who have funneled into Colorado and other cities nationwide.
Multiple studies show immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. But Aurora also is an example of how Trump has been able to use real but isolated episodes of migrant violence to tar an entire population. He uses those examples to paint a picture of a country in chaos due to what he regularly calls an immigrant “invasion.”
The tall tales of Colorado’s third largest city being occupied by armed Venezuelans stem from the novel excuse given by an out-of-state landlord, CBZ Management, to the city of Aurora for the utterly deplorable conditions in which residents of three of its apartment complexes were living.
In July, CBZ told the city that its property managers were unable to make the repairs that tenants and city officials were demanding because armed leaders of Tren de Aragua had taken over the complexes, violently expelled the managers and begun extracting rent payments from the migrant residents themselves.
A public relations firm hired by the landlord enlisted Denver’s Fox affiliate to run a story on the supposed takeover.
That assertion has been denied strongly by city officials, including the Republican mayor and Democratic City Council members, all of whom say CBZ is an out-of-state slumlord that has exploited clients, bilked the city and created a fiasco now weighing on the city’s reputation.
