Trump claims migrant gangs are ‘taking over’ entire state

Former President Donald Trump claimed at a campaign rally in Georgia on Tuesday that a gang of migrants from Venezuela will “take over” the “whole damn state” of Colorado if he is not re-elected president.

Trump’s comments were said to be mostly about the economy, but he took a side road, criticizing the vice president Kamala Harris on immigration. Trump, as usual, held no punches, claiming, “We need to tell this woman that she has let record numbers of people into our country. They are coming from all over the world. They are now causing criminal chaos across the country. Aurora, Colorado, you saw that, where Venezuelan gangs are taking over real estate, they are becoming developers. How cool is that?”

“They’re taking over real estate and they’ve got weapons that even our military has said, who’s going to give them the weapons? But Aurora is a mess. The governor is a mess. You know, the governor is a Democrat and he’s a radical left Democrat. And he’s not that popular right now because they’re going to take over a lot more than Aurora. They’re going to go through Colorado, take over the whole damn state, by the time they’re done, unless I’m president, they’re not going to last long,” Trump said to applause, adding:

In Springfield, Ohio. So you have a town of 50,000 people. They brought 32,000 migrants into town overnight. And the people are so nice, you know, they want to be nice. They say, well, what the mayor is actually looking for interpreters. He’s looking everywhere for interpreters because they can’t understand the language, is totally different than… What the hell? I’m sorry. You have to take people back to the country that they came from.

“You have to. You have to,” Trump repeated to applause.

The claims coming out of Aurora were initially brought forward by the mayor, Mike Coffmanduring an interview with Fox News in late August, in which he claimed that several apartment buildings had fallen “into the hands” of the Tren de Aragua gang and that gang members were now collecting rent from residents.

A week later, Aurora’s interim police chief Heather Morris publicly refuted those claims, and Coffman, a former GOP congressman, eventually admitted that he was “not sure where the truth was in all of this.” The claim was widely circulated on social media and fueled by videos of criminal activity captured on doorbell cameras that appeared to show armed men attempting to break into an apartment. Coffman has since made public statements reassuring his community that they are, in fact, safe.

NBC News investigated how the now-debunked claims spread through the community, on social media and ultimately to the Republican Party’s presidential candidate.

“The viral rumors used tactics from ‘the most common forms of disinformation,’ such as reposting old videos without context, misrepresenting existing data and ‘Frankensteining’ misleading evidence to fabricate a false narrative, according to the News Literacy Project, a nonprofit fact-checking organization that debunked the rumor,” the NBC report said.

The debunked claims that the migrant gang took over apartment buildings in Colorado are similar to claims Trump made during the debate about Haitian migrants in Ohio eating pets. Those claims have also been denied as baseless by community leaders.

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