Federal agents take a man into custody at the Cedar Run Apartments in Denver, in a photo posted to social media by the Denver field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Feb. 5, 2025. (ICE)
Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal law enforcement agencies conducted operations beginning early Wednesday at at least four locations in Denver and Aurora in what appeared to be the most concentrated effort yet to pursue President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda in Colorado.
A video posted to social media by the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Rocky Mountain Division showed agents deploying a smoke grenade outside an apartment building, as part of what it said was an execution of a “search warrant in support of (Department of Homeland Security) operations taking place throughout the metro area this morning.”
A separate post from ICE’s Denver field office confirmed that agents from the DEA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Customs and Border Patrol, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals participated in the operation, which it said was targeting “100+ members of the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.”
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ICE representatives didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
Locations where federal law enforcement agents were present included several apartment complexes at the center of months of local and national controversy over the alleged influence of the Tren de Aragua gang, or TdA, including the Edge at Lowry complex at 12th and Dallas Streets.
Denver and Aurora police officials have characterized TdA’s presence in the metro area as isolated and relatively small, with its criminal activity — including a December kidnapping at the Edge at Lowry — mostly targeting victims within the Venezuelan immigrant community itself. Immigrants residing at the apartment buildings in question have placed blame for the situation on an absentee “slumlord,” CBZ, which records show had let the properties fall into abject disrepair long before the arrival in the area of large numbers of migrants in early 2023.
But Trump and his allies — pursuing a mass deportation campaign and a nationalist vision of “America for Americans only” — have made a series of sensational allegations that the gang has “invaded and conquered” Aurora, a sprawling and diverse suburb of 400,000 residents to the east of Denver. Far-right political figures have falsely claimed that crime has “skyrocketed” in Aurora since the new immigrants arrived. In fact, consistent with national trends, crime rates have declined there and in Colorado as a whole since 2022.
The Colorado Rapid Response Network, an immigrant advocacy organization that oversees an ICE activity hotline, posted to Facebook a live video of federal operations in Aurora on Wednesday.
“Officials have shown no warrant, are asking people for citizenship status and IDs when they leave their apartments. They have been asked to leave and continue to be there. We are advising people of their rights and asking them to leave,” the group said in the post.
Crystal Murillo, an Aurora City Council member and executive director of Colorado People’s Alliance, which supports immigrant justice, said reports she received indicated that federal agents detained more than half a dozen people in the area of Hinkley High School and another CBZ property, Whispering Pines, on Helena Street.
A photo she shared with Newsline shows what appeared to be federal agents in an armored vehicle, which Murillo said was located just north of the school.
“It looked like a checkpoint in the middle of the street,” Murillo said.
Initial reports from multiple Denver news outlets on the scene of Wednesday’s operations indicated the number of people taken into custody was far less than the hundred or more ICE said it was targeting. Since last summer, at least two dozen suspected TdA members have been arrested by local police departments in a variety of circumstances.
Last month, the DEA conducted a raid of what it said was an “invite-only TdA party” at a makeshift nightclub in Adams County. Forty-one people alleged to be in the country unlawfully were taken into custody, but the agency subsequently acknowledged many of them were from countries other than Venezuela, including some European countries. The DEA has refused to release the names of the people taken into custody, say how many of them are suspected TdA members or disclose other details of the operation.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Quentin Young contributed to this report.
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