Aurora’s Republican mayor objects to Trump’s depictions of migrants

AURORA, CO. The Republican mayor of Colorado’s third-largest city doesn’t think former President Donald Trump will keep his promise to visit the mountain community, which is embroiled in the national immigration debate that the Republican nominee is helping to shape. feed.

I kind of doubt it now, Mike Coffman said in an interview this week. The fact that it’s not a battleground state and the fact that you have a Republican mayor with a different view of the city’s situation would probably make him reluctant.

But unlike Springfield, Ohio, where the mayor asked Trump not to visit, Coffman would welcome it.

“I want the former president to come because I want to show him this city,” he said. I want to show him that the story is absolutely wrong. »

While Aurora has become a regular topic of discussion at his rallies, a Trump campaign spokesman declined to say when or if the former president would visit the city.

Violent responses against immigrants are taking place in several cities across the country, including Springfield, Ohio, and Charleroi, Pennsylvania. But Aurora has important differences: it has a much larger population and a long history of diversity.

The issues here, as is often the case when it comes to immigration, are complex. Posts on social media quickly amplified the false rumors. Crimes have occurred, but it is not clear to what extent these are gang-related or directly attributed to increased migration. Coffman, a moderate former congressman who lost his seat in 2018 at least in part because of Trump’s rise, acknowledges that politics has lost all nuance.

And Trump keeps talking about places like Aurora.

They’re going there with weapons that are even beyond military reach and they’re taking over apartment buildings, Trump said Wednesday in North Carolina. They are literally taking over these cities. »

A viral video

Cindy Romero didn’t expect the video to blow up

It was terrifying, Romero said. And I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

She had moved into a building at 12th Avenue and Dallas Street in Aurora about four years ago and watched waves of migrants come and go. This was the third, she said, and they had had no problems with the previous two.

But this time it was different. Young men spent hours partying outside. They broke down the doors of vacant apartments. She heard gunshots frequently. Then she saw the bullet holes in her car. One of them had pierced the passenger side and came out the other side of the trunk. People carried weapons on the premises. She soon feared for her life.

Cindy Romero in Aurora, Colorado. Gabe Gutierrez/NBC News

“I wasn’t intimidated by their weapons,” she said. Until I saw the bigger guns.

So she installed security cameras to record the activities outside. One evening in August, she was monitoring the door camera on her phone when she saw several armed men enter a neighboring apartment.

It was never meant to be political when I published it, Romero said. It was about raising awareness so that people in my building could get help.

It is unclear whether the men seen in Romero’s video were actually gang members. But the story quickly bounced through the conservative media.

Romero and her husband eventually decided to move.

“I’m incredibly angry,” she said. I’m very frustrated with the system.

Stretched thin

Wild claims that migrants have invaded Aurora threaten to obscure a more mundane but nonetheless disturbing reality: the Denver area has seen an influx of thousands of immigrants in recent years.

Many of them were transported inland from the southern border by Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Denver’s resources were scarce, and migrants sought housing in the nearby city of Aurora, where rents were cheaper.

I think a lot of cities have been affected by increased immigration, said Emily Goodman, housing campaign manager for the East Colfax Community Collective, an advocacy group. But the anti-immigration rhetoric emerging from all of this is completely unwarranted.

For more than a year, Aurora officials have been trying to convince an out-of-state landlord to fix up three dilapidated apartment buildings in the East Colfax corridor, which connects the cities of Denver and Aurora. Last summer the owner said this was not possible because Venezuelan gangs had taken over the buildings. City officials, including the mayor, dispute this claim, and the embattled property manager is being sued in municipal court over years of unresolved health and safety code violations. Last month, the city closed one of the apartment complexes and evicted hundreds of people.

The landlord issues actually predate the migrant crisis, Coffman said.

Goodman and his colleagues argue that the city must do more to ensure residents have adequate living conditions and that the focus on crime distracts from underlying problems such as poverty and lax enforcement. codes.

There is gang violence everywhere, Goodman said. But immigrant gang violence is not as bad as people say.

Trump and his allies have spotlighted a Venezuelan prison gang called the Tren de Aragua, or TDA. Homeland Security officials told NBC News that they have currently launched more than 100 criminal investigations into TDA nationwide, including sex trafficking and the shooting of police officers. But Aurora police said it was difficult to determine whether suspects in crimes in the city were part of the notorious gang and downplayed any connection to immigration status.

At a news conference last Friday, Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain said several of the armed suspects captured in the viral video breaking into the Aurora apartment had been identified and one man was in custody. He did not confirm that any of them were members of the TDA.

This is not an immigration issue, Chamberlain said. It’s a matter of crime.

A changing story

Coffman said he was dreading the presidential debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris and was disappointed when he heard Trump bring up Aurora.

“I sank into my couch a little,” he said.

Yet Coffman himself first stoked the right-wing firestorm. In an interview on Fox News, he said apartment complexes had fallen into the hands of gang members. He has since backtracked and now claims his initial comments were immediate and based on police reports provided to him at the time, alleging that gang members had given up control of the property and were collecting rent.

“I’m obviously not sure how accurate this information is,” Coffman said. I have held meetings with residents. And the reality is that none of them pay rent, period. They don’t pay it to a gang. They just don’t pay it. And I can’t blame them for not having property management to pay the rent into.

Carlos Ordosgoitti lives in one of the three besieged buildings where the viral video was shot. He is from Venezuela and now works installing fiber optic cables after arriving in the United States two years ago.

This is all political, Ordosgoitti said in Spanish. He acknowledged there was some violence in the area, but said allegations of a gang takeover were exaggerated and that most Venezuelans were there to work. He wishes Trump would actually come see for himself.

You can’t generalize an entire community, he said.

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