The greatest threat to Aurora is not a gang. It’s dishonest council members.

Disputing claims of a gang takeover and instead placing blame on an absentee landlord, tenants at several Aurora apartment complexes showed off receipts for rent payments, photos of trash pileups and dead mice they had trapped in their units. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline)

Aurora was thrust into the national spotlight in recent weeks as right-wing media amplified a false story claiming Venezuelan gang members had taken over apartment buildings in the Colorado city. Former President Donald Trump supercharged this misinformation when he mentioned it last week during a debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, which was viewed by tens of millions of Americans.

The swell of negative attention hurt the city and jeopardized residents. It has given cover to an out-of-state slumlord who’s responsible for unbearable conditions at the apartment buildings. And the worst part is that the city’s own elected leaders are to blame for so much of the fallout. They propagated bigoted falsehoods in reckless pursuit of partisan advantage and fame. They failed the most basic duty of any public servant — to protect the public.

It is true that about 40,000 migrants from Central and South America, including Venezuela, have arrived in the Denver area since December 2022. And it’s true that individuals associated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have been identified in Aurora. But they number 10, and the only thing they have taken over in Aurora is the dark imagination of right-wing conspiracy theorists.

Unsafe conditions at the apartment buildings in question predate the uptick in immigration and have nothing to do with gangs. Denver Post reporting establishes that tenants of out-of-state landlord CBZ Management’s Aurora properties endured unlivable conditions going back to at least 2020. “The problems have included black mold, water leaks, a lack of hot water, broken appliances, sagging infrastructure, fees for amenities that didn’t work or didn’t exist, rodent and cockroach infestations, poor building security and slapdash repairs,” the Post reported.

CBZ owned the Whispering Pines, Aspen Grove and Edge of Lowry apartment buildings, which were commonly cited in gang-takeover rhetoric. The company sought to deflect blame this summer by claiming the Venezuelan gang had assumed control of its buildings.

Conservative city officials jumped in, none more vocally than City Council member Danielle Jurinsky. She and two other council members in early August pushed the gang-takeover story. In an appearance on Fox, Jurinsky made an incendiary claim: “This gang, they are marking their territory, they are putting up their gang-related graffiti on the blocks, on the areas they have taken over, and quite frankly, I have heard too many stories from too many property owners, business owners and residents to think this is anything other than a complete gang takeover in parts of our city.”

Republican Mayor Mike Coffman, though he often chose more tempered language, in his own appearance on Fox told a national audience that several buildings in Aurora had “fallen to these Venezuelan gangs.”

Fox, the New York Post and other conservative media made this xenophobic falsehood a national story, especially after a video from a CBZ building emerged showing armed men appearing to enter one of the apartments, even though facts about the video and the people in it remain murky.

Through the growing firestorm, it was apparent that Jurinsky trafficked, at best, in conspiracy theories and misinformation. The Aurora Sentinel has documented since at least early August the lack of evidence for the most sensational gang claims. The city’s own interim police chief in late August publicly debunked the gang-takeover assertion. Early this month, residents of the building where the video of armed men was taken participated in a press conference, where they insisted their slumlord owner, not a gang, was responsible for problems at the building.

But the hateful tenor of the takeover story was too much for the anti-immigrant presidential candidate to pass up.

“They’re taking over towns, they’re taking over buildings, they’re going in violently,” Trump said during the debate, referring to Aurora. He also, infamously, repeated a false story about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

That’s when even Jurinsky apparently had second thoughts. The day after the debate, she and Coffman released a joint statement that said Tren de Aragua “has not ‘taken over’ the city. The overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations are simply not true.”

Pure gaslighting. They acknowledged no responsibility for having spread those overstated claims themselves.

Anyway, it was too late. The damage to their own city and its residents had already been done. And more could be in store. After the debate Trump pledged to carry out the “largest deportation in the history of our country,” starting in Aurora. He had previously told a Wisconsin audience that removing Venezuelan immigrants from Colorado will “be a bloody story.”

Now Venezuelan residents of Aurora, many of them workers with families who have experienced many hardships before arriving in Colorado, are targeted for racist harassment and threats. The Colorado Sun interviewed tenants at the CBZ buildings and found that “they are more scared of white supremacists and people with animosity toward immigrants than they ever were of a Venezuelan gang.” 

An Aurora Sentinel editorial noted that there’s now “widespread fear among immigrants, Latinos and others” who are being demonized as a result of gang-takeover lies, which the paper called “a dog-whistle race war against immigrants.”

Former residents of one of the Aurora buildings, which the city condemned, face discrimination as they seek new homes because of the reputation of their previous residence, Raquel Lane-Arellano, communications manager for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, told Newsline.

“If they’re Venezuelan, it’s hard to get jobs now,” she said, adding that Trump’s rhetoric “creates a lot of fear.”

The larger immigrant community in Colorado is caught up in the blowback. Someone called law enforcement Sunday on what they complained was a Venezuelan gang takeover of a park in Adams County. It turned out to be a completely lawful car-club gathering of Hispanic men, 9News reported.

Meanwhile, every minute of gang-takeover rhetoric distracted from the inhumane business practices of CBZ, which can afford representation from powerful law firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck and has faced scant accountability.

That’s what Jurinsky did to her own city. That’s what she did to the people who call Aurora home. Public officials, from the president to water board director, have a solemn obligation to safeguard the people who entrust them with power. The good name of the government is in their hands.

But Jurinsky, as well as Coffman and other conservative public officials who repeated lies, undercut the well-being of Aurora residents, put many of them in danger, and brought disrepute to the entire city. By spreading baseless claims, they made themselves more of a threat to Aurorans than any fictitious gang activity.