Cindy Romero was in the living room of the small apartment she shared with her husband in Aurora, Colo., when she heard a commotion in the hallway. It was before midnight on a Sunday last August. Romero, 60, was sitting on the floor watching a feed on her phone from a security camera she had recently placed outside her door. Six young men carrying pistols and what appeared to be an assault rifle with a scope were milling around on the landing, focused on the door of an apartment across the hall where a friend of hers, a migrant from Venezuela, had been living.
The presence of young men with guns in the apartment complex, called the Edge at Lowry, was not a rarity. Mostly recent migrants from Venezuela, they had grown more brazen in recent months; she’d seen them selling drugs out of the parking lot and snorting a drug cocktail known as tusi or pink cocaine, at kitchen tables in ground-floor apartments that didn’t have curtains. Their loud parties outside her window would last all night. In the stairwell, she passed groups of men with guns tucked into their waistbands. She had called the police dozens of times, though officers seldom responded; they didn’t seem to take the problem seriously.
Romero took in the fish-eye view and was frightened: This time the men, dressed in shorts and athletic pants, T-shirts and baseball caps, faces mostly uncovered, looked as if they were on a mission. They opened the door of the neighboring apartment and walked in but didn’t seem to find what they were looking for. Then they disappeared back down the stairs.
Less than 10 minutes later, Romero and her husband heard shouting outside. “Shut your mouth!” someone yelled in Spanish. (Romero, an American citizen whose father was of Mexican descent, knew enough Spanish to make out the words.) Then came the sounds of a gunfight. “There were five to six different calibers of weapon,” Romero said in one of several interviews she gave afterward to local and national news outlets. She and her husband would later find bullet holes in both of their cars; the windows of other tenants’ cars were shattered.
This time the police responded, following a trail of blood to a nearby alley, where officers found the victim of the shooting — Oswaldo José Dabion Araujo, the Venezuelan man who had lived across the hall from Romero. They managed to get him to a hospital, where he would eventually die of his wounds.
Romero and her husband spoke with a reporter for Denver’s Fox affiliate and provided him with the doorbell-camera video. The clip quickly went viral, rebroadcast by news outlets all over the country. Danielle Jurinsky, a Republican city councilwoman who quickly shared the footage, asserted that the gunslingers were affiliated with a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, that she claimed had “taken over” the Edge at Lowry. Jurinsky helped the Romeros move out of the complex and began raising the alarm about “a huge gang problem” in Aurora, a city of 400,000 people just east of Denver.
Some 40,000 Venezuelans had arrived in the Denver area over the previous two years, fleeing a collapsing economy and the repressive government of Nicolás Maduro. Thousands of them were bused north by Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, to put pressure on “sanctuary cities” like Denver that had pledged to limit their cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. The influx reached its peak in December 2023, with hundreds of Venezuelans arriving in Denver each day. The city converted seven hotels into shelters and provided housing assistance and other services. Still, Denver couldn’t house everybody. Because Aurora has some of the least expensive housing in the area, many Venezuelans went there when their stays in Denver shelters expired.
Jurinsky and other Republicans pointed to the Romeros’ video as evidence that large numbers of Tren de Aragua members had come with the influx of migrants. Democratic politicians suggested they were crying wolf: “There is no gang takeover in any part of Aurora,” Representative Jason Crow, of Colorado, posted on X. A representative for Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, said that the “purported invasion is largely a feature of Danielle Jurinsky’s imagination,” condemning what he called “recent misinformation campaigns.” The Aurora Police Department did not say whether it had verified the authenticity of the video or if arrests had been made in connection with the shooting.
Events in Aurora soon caught the attention of Donald Trump, who was then campaigning on a promise to “take America back” from undocumented immigrants. During the Sept. 10 presidential debate with Kamala Harris, he mentioned Aurora twice, claiming that criminal immigrants were “taking over the towns, they are taking over buildings, they are going in violently.” The next day, the Aurora Police Department confirmed that several of the suspects seen in the Romeros’ video had been arrested and identified as likely Tren de Aragua members.
Trump announced he would hold a rally in Aurora. On Oct. 11, he took the stage at the city’s convention center flanked by giant photos of some of the men accused of being Tren de Aragua, clad in prison orange. He praised Cindy Romero’s bravery and invited her to the stage, standing behind her with his hands briefly on her shoulders. “Because of Cindy,” Trump said, “the radical left can’t say it never happened.” For more than an hour, Trump repeated the message that Aurora had been set upon by “an army of illegal-alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the Third World.” He promised that a campaign of mass deportations, which he named “Operation Aurora,” would begin as soon as he was elected. “We’re going to take care of it,” Trump said. “I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered.”
In March, he invoked a 1798 wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to deport immigrants if they are citizens of countries judged to be “enemies” of the United States. Claiming that Tren de Aragua was coordinating with the Venezuelan government to undermine U.S. national security, Trump asserted that the law gave him expansive power to deport purported gang members without due process.
The more central Aurora became to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, the greater the temptation among Democratic politicians and activists to wave away talk of gang activity in the city as a right-wing hallucination. But their refusal to acknowledge the violence that some residents were seeing with their own eyes came off not as reassurance but as erasure. At the rally, Romero described herself as a “former lifelong Democrat,” explaining that the denials had turned her against the party. She thanked Trump first and foremost “for believing me.” Mike Coffman, Aurora’s Republican mayor, found himself caught between dueling narratives as the city became a flashpoint in national politics. “There’s one side that said there’s never been a problem,” he said at a town hall in October. “There’s another side that says, yeah, the whole city is overrun. And I think that the truth lies in the middle.”
When I was in high school in Denver in the 1970s, I interned at The Aurora Sentinel, a weekly newspaper. Aurora, like other new suburbs, felt like a sketch being colored in; it did not have a particularly distinctive character. Much of the news we covered was about new residential subdivisions being planned, being built, being sold. The story in Aurora was usually about growth, as it crept outward onto undeveloped prairie, toward new highways and new malls. Like other Denver suburbs at the time, it was mostly white and working class.
In the years I was away, Aurora became more diverse, its low-cost housing attracting a wave of Salvadoran and Mexican immigrants. Center cities (like downtown Denver) by then had turned a corner and were being renovated and revitalized, while the once-new suburbs around them started looking frayed. By the aughts, Aurora’s old downtown area, along East Colfax Avenue, was rundown and contested by offshoots of the Bloods and Crips. Twenty years on, Aurora is now Colorado’s third-largest city. It is approximately half nonwhite, with one in five residents born in another country. Students in the Aurora public schools speak more than 160 languages.
Venezuelans began arriving in significant numbers in late 2022. One of them was a woman who asked to go by her middle name, Fernanda, because she fears deportation. She and her husband and their toddler arrived in Denver that November, on a bus from Texas. She came to escape poverty and gang threats — she said thugs had demanded $500, or they would kill her daughter and torch her bodega — but over the next two years, Fernanda would witness danger and violence that reminded her of home.
Initially Fernanda and her family stayed in a shelter; then, in February, the city placed them for eight weeks at a Comfort Inn near Aurora. Fernanda grew close with the other mothers housed at the motel — there were half a dozen of them, caring for children and trying to figure out a next place to live while their husbands were at work — and they hoped to find housing together. Through word of mouth they heard of a building, on Nome Street in Aurora, with enough vacancies for all of them. The Nome Street building was one of three apartment complexes along East Colfax Avenue owned by CBZ Management, an out-of-state landlord based in Brooklyn; the other two were Whispering Pines and the Edge at Lowry, where Romero would later record her video.
On move-in day, Fernanda and the other women were met at Nome Street by church volunteers and a rented U-Haul truck filled with donated furniture and household goods. But when they walked into the 99-unit complex, they were taken aback. “There were rats, roaches, bedbugs and carpet that smelled like pee,” Fernanda said, in Spanish. “There was rotten food in the refrigerator and mold in the bathroom.” Juan Peña, a Colombian-born pastor whose church in nearby Denver had helped dozens of Venezuelans move into Aurora apartments, said these were the worst he’d seen. “It looked like Beirut, with bullet holes in the front.” Fernanda told me hers was the most disgusting of them all. Peña’s son scrubbed its bathroom for two hours. Peña’s wife, who brought her vacuum cleaner, was hesitant to bring it back into their house, fearing it was full of roaches.
Though Fernanda and other new tenants didn’t know it at the time, there was a reason Nome Street had so many vacancies. The city had been receiving complaints about CBZ Management since 2020, long before the surge of Venezuelan migrants began, for health and safety issues including sewage backups, rodent infestations, water leaks, trash pileups, broken and missing windows and lack of electricity. In 2021, the local Fox affiliate reported on “nasty” conditions at Nome Street — there were “mice, roaches, feces and trash in their common areas.” A toilet had fallen through the ceiling of one unit.
There was a lot of crime, and a lot of drugs. The front door of the building didn’t lock, and homeless people would sleep in the lobby. Fernanda said that many of the people who lived there cooked and sold meth. The property manager she knew as Nicolás stopped coming by, and a pair of Venezuelan brothers, Jhonnarty and Jhonardy Pacheco Chirinos, who lived in a single small apartment with their families, established themselves as shot-callers around the complex. Fernanda and her friends tried to steer clear of them, but sometimes that was difficult: One night, a man and a woman were arguing in the parking lot when one of the brothers appeared and shot the man, twice, in the leg. Fernanda’s daughter was standing at the window and cried out. She became afraid to go outside and would panic if one of her parents came home late.
As more Venezuelans continued to arrive in Denver, meanwhile, the city’s social-services infrastructure began to come under strain. In December 2023, Danielle Jurinsky, the Aurora councilwoman, got a call from an employee at a local bar she owns. Joe Sauceda and his partner had been living at an extended-stay motel with their dog for almost a year, he told Jurinsky, but the motel had recently made a deal with Denver to accommodate about 400 migrants and told its other renters to move out. “They were crying,” Jurinsky told me. “They said, ‘Danielle, we were just thrown out, they wouldn’t accept our rent.’” Sauceda and his partner were sleeping in their car.
“The city of Aurora is not a sanctuary city,” Jurinsky said at the next council meeting. “This is Denver mayor Mike Johnston busing migrants into the city of Aurora, taking up hotels and throwing American citizens, Aurora residents, onto the streets.” Sauceda told CBS News in Denver: “I know they’re trying to better themselves by coming here. But the fact is we have our own people that we need to take care of.”
The day of the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election was a turning point for Jurinsky and the city. On the afternoon of July 28, cars full of Venezuelans began to arrive in the parking lot of a shopping center in Aurora in anticipation of celebrating Maduro’s expected defeat. Officers hadn’t known about the gathering in advance and were surprised by the turnout — 3,000 to 4,000 people as the evening went on. “Due to the high mass of people in the area and officers being outnumbered,” one police officer’s report read, “officers were advised to not engage.”
Shortly before midnight, Maduro claimed victory, resulting in an angry cacophony of horns honking, banging on pots and shots fired into the sky. The size of the crowd and the disruption of traffic and business alarmed many Aurora residents, who found their voice in Jurinsky. “Thousands of these folks took over and completely shut down a part of our city,” she wrote on Facebook. “The police were totally overrun, and were forced to get out of the area for their safety. A police car was shot up. This is in the United States of America … this is in YOUR city. Please, please spread the word. This November’s election may, in fact, be the actual most important of your lives, your children’s lives, and your grandchildren’s lives. Again, you all deserve the truth!”
At 4:30 a.m. that same day, Fernanda woke up to the sound of an extended gunfight that lasted five to 10 minutes. She and her family jumped out of bed and lay on the floor as bullets flew. Tenants say that police, who were often slow to respond to calls from Nome Street, this time arrived quickly. They found one man who had been shot in the arm and another across the street who was shot in the stomach; a third, who had jumped out a fourth-floor window, had a broken ankle.
The arrests that followed included Jhonnarty and Jhonardy Pacheco Chirinos and also another pair of brothers living at the complex. The Pacheco Chirinos were part of a group of men who “terrorized residents,” local news outlets reported, during a “drunken night turned violent.” Witnesses said they boasted that they “owned” the apartment complex and funded their gang partly through stealing from Walmart. Initially the city and the Aurora Police Department didn’t provide much information on the shootout or its aftermath; the incident got little press at the time. But arrest affidavits from that night, obtained by The Denver Gazette in the subsequent weeks, revealed that police suspected that all four of the men arrested were members of Tren de Aragua.
The Aurora Police Department was then a battered institution, still operating under a state consent decree put in place after the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a young, unarmed Black man who was stopped by police and given a lethal dose of ketamine by responding paramedics. Heather Morris, the interim police chief, was the department’s fifth leader in five years. Morris had already butted heads with Jurinsky, who believed she was downplaying any bad news involving immigrants, an accusation the Aurora Police Department denies. According to Jurinsky, the officer who reported a police car being shot after the Venezuelan-election gathering was rebuked by Morris, and his report of the incident has not been released.
By that point, the department had suspected for many months that there might be Tren de Aragua members in the Denver area. According to The Denver Gazette, police officers concerned about recent shootings exchanged emails seeking information about the gang as early as September 2023. John Fabbricatore, a former ICE field-office director in Denver who was then running for Congress, publicly condemned what he saw as Morris’s failure to address Tren de Aragua. But in conversation he suggested to me, in her defense, that her predecessor, Art Acevedo, had also sat on the information, wanting to avoid alarms on the eve of his departure. “I believe that he left Heather with a bag of trash,” Fabbricatore said. (Acevedo called that characterization “ridiculous.” “Our department was understaffed,” he said, “but we started working on it right away.”)
CBZ Management, for its part, wanted very much to talk about Tren de Aragua — and to blame the gang for its neglect of the buildings. The Aurora Police Department had declared its Nome Street apartments a “criminal nuisance property,” citing a rise in crime of almost 30 percent since CBZ Management bought it in 2019. A letter from the chief to the owners noted that, under the city’s municipal code, they were expected “to be vigilant in preventing or deterring crime on or in their property and will be held responsible for the use of their property by tenants, guests and occupants.” It listed 105 serious calls to which police had responded in the previous 12 months for everything from “motor vehicle theft recovery” to “aggravated assault double shooting.”
As the city followed through on threats to close the apartments and fine the owners, CBZ Management hired a Florida public-relations firm to make the case that the gang had taken over its Aurora properties, chasing away property managers as part of a scheme to extort rent from residents. The main issue, they said, was a lack of policing by Aurora. On a newly created X account, they posted a fuzzy video of a person being beaten at the end of a hallway at Whispering Pines in November 2023; they said the victim was Zev Baumgarten, the landlord, who had angered squatters by trying to collect rent. Media outlets including The New York Post ran a selfie of Baumgarten, his face bloodied.
On Aug. 9, the law firm Perkins Coie, representing CBZ Management’s lenders, sent a report to city officials about the problems at Whispering Pines, which it said included use of the premises for prostitution and sex trafficking and a demand by gang members to keep half of all rent. In a TV interview that day, the mayor brushed it off, noting that significant problems at the landlord’s properties predated the reported gang presence by at least two years.
Several families were left without a home when Aurora shut down the Nome Street apartments with just a week’s notice on Aug. 13. Workers had scarcely boarded up the ground-floor windows when Cindy Romero posted her video of the armed men at the Edge at Lowry. Less than two miles away from Nome Street, the Edge at Lowry had the architecture of a big-city housing project in miniature. The place was in terrible shape, with landlords no longer paying for trash cleanup and property management intimidated and absent. Romero told me it wasn’t that bad when she and her husband arrived in 2021. The building wasn’t fancy, but their apartment had a fresh coat of paint and new stick-on floor tiles.
Things changed, she said, as three distinct waves of immigrants moved in. The first wave, in 2023, Romero described as mainly Venezuelan families, sometimes two of them living in a single one-bedroom apartment. “At the time I was a Democrat,” she said, “dedicated to helping them have a better life.” The next wave was more couples and some single men, “but mid-30s, early 40s, the kind of guys you’d see waiting for construction jobs.”
The third wave came a few months later and was “young, mostly men, maybe 20 years old,” and that’s when things started getting bad, Romero said. They staged barbecues in the courtyards between buildings, sometimes grilling in grocery carts under trees. They stole motorcycles and then brought them — or even rode them — indoors to work on them. Downstairs from her, she said, they also painted them and sometimes revved their engines. The noise from parties in the parking lot, right outside her window, could last all night.
After the new arrivals chased away management completely, a few things got better. “It was definitely the end of the meth heads,” Romero said, “and we had this one drunk lady who would wander around the property all the time, screaming. They ran off all the people who were already taking advantage of the landlord, and became the main people taking advantage of the landlord.” They knocked holes in walls and ran extension cords between floors to provide power to apartments where electricity had been turned off.
Romero said she never heard of any rent extortion; instead, she learned belatedly that she was among the only tenants still paying rent — another leaseholder in the complex said she had stopped paying a year earlier because of the disappearance of property management. Mostly, Romero said, the young men wanted to use empty apartments for themselves and their friends. Predicting her departure, Romero said, one of them asked if he could please just have her keys when she left. It would save him from having to break down the door. (In March 2024, a viral TikTok by a Venezuelan man recommended that newly arrived migrants occupy abandoned homes, because U.S. laws protected squatters. The video, shared by JD Vance and many others, prompted outrage, and the man has since been deported.)
Romero says that until the day she moved out, about 10 days after she filmed her video, she never thought of the men as a gang. They were just guys with guns. That changed the night after Jurinsky, in front of TV cameras, helped her move to a new apartment building. Romero says they caught up on the phone that night. “Look, I’m just going to go ahead and break it all down for you,” she recalls Jurinsky telling her. “This is a transnational gang.”
Tren de Aragua lore is almost floridly frightening. In Venezuela, where the gang grew stronger as the failed state shrunk, it was famous for its leaders’ power to direct a criminal enterprise — sex trafficking and gun and drug sales — from inside a prison in the state of Aragua. Maduro’s government raided the prison in 2023, revealing that the gang quite literally ran the place: It had built facilities including a swimming pool, a night club, a tiny zoo and stores stocked with items unavailable to people on the outside.
The gang’s identification as a political boogeyman has made it hard to soberly assess how serious a threat Tren de Aragua is inside the United States. Last year, the Biden administration designated the gang a “transnational criminal organization” at the request of Republican lawmakers including Marco Rubio, a Floridian whose home state had seen crimes believed to be linked to the gang. Since then, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi, police officers have arrested more than 2,700 purported gang members across the country. Some experts on the gang have questioned this count, calling the government’s methods of identification deeply flawed. One particularly controversial method has been tattoos: Both federal and local law enforcement have been relying in part on descriptions of tattoos said to indicate membership in Tren de Aragua, but experts insist that the gang has never had that tradition.
In asserting his right to deport people using the Alien Enemies Act, Donald Trump has claimed that Tren de Aragua is literally an invading army, organized and directed from abroad. But it was hard to imagine that the young men living at CBZ properties in Aurora were directed by somebody in Venezuela. Jhonnarty and Jhonardy Pacheco Chirinos were doubled up with their families in a single crummy apartment on Nome Street, stealing from Walmart to make ends meet. In addition to the brothers, Aurora police have so far identified only eight Venezuelans as Tren de Aragua gang members, including five of the six seen in Cindy Romero’s viral videos. The fact that they were a small and disorganized group, of course, didn’t stop them from terrorizing their neighbors. One of them had been charged with 38 crimes in connection with five incidents over eight months.
Some of those men were still living at the Edge at Lowry in December, four months after Cindy Romero took her video, when a call came in to the Aurora Police Department after midnight. A Venezuelan couple said they’d been held prisoner for hours by armed men, in retaliation for a video they took of two women fighting in the parking lot that a friend of theirs had posted on social media. More than a dozen men forced them into a vacant unit where, they said, they were tied up, pistol-whipped and beaten. The man, who was also stabbed in the leg, said they were forced to give up their banking information. As a condition of release, they had promised not to call the police — but then they did.
The police responded quickly, alongside homeland security agents. They sealed off part of the complex and rounded up the presumed malefactors — 19 of them in all. Fourteen were later charged with crimes that included second-degree kidnapping, first-degree assault, aggravated robbery, second-degree burglary, extortion and menacing. One of those charged had appeared in the Romeros’ viral video, police said.
In a news conference about the incident in December, Aurora’s new police chief, Todd Chamberlain, was unusually candid. “This is without question a gang incident,” he said. “I don’t know which gang they are affiliated with yet. It might be T.D.A., it could not be T.D.A. It is incredibly hard to identify specifically as T.D.A., because there are no specific markers.” Acknowledging that CBZ’s buildings had become a crime hot spot, Chamberlain urged the assembled press to keep the incident in perspective. Though Aurora’s crime rate remains much higher than the national median, serious crime fell between 2022 and 2024 when Venezuelan migrants were arriving in the city. It is now at its lowest level in five years.
In March, when the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act and flew 238 men to El Salvador, the flights included one of the young men arrested in connection with the shootout at Nome Street. None of the men who appeared in Romero’s video were among them. Numerous media and NGO reports have cast doubt on whether many of the men flown to El Salvador were in fact affiliated with the gang, finding that more than three-quarters of the group had no criminal records in the U.S. or abroad.
Most of the Venezuelan migrants I met in Aurora said they wanted nothing so much as to work. But employers, I heard time and again, had become afraid to hire Venezuelan men, because of fears of the gang. A middle-aged father named Ramón told me last winter that he had recently been pulled over by an Aurora police officer because his license plate had expired. It was a cold day, and he had a toddler in the back seat. The officer made him stand in the street, take off his shirt, and hold up his arms, Ramón said, so that he could be examined for possible Tren de Aragua tattoos.
Donald Trump had warned that his campaign of mass deportation, to be known as Operation Aurora, would begin as soon as he took office. Posters went up all along East Colfax Avenue, in English and Spanish, that said “Know your rights” and “Report ICE activity,” with a toll-free number. On Feb. 6, raids were staged across the country, including in Aurora. A municipal judge in January had ordered the Edge at Lowry closed, but that night a handful of tenants still remained. A housing activist who spent that night with them, sleeping on the floor, shared with me a video taken from inside a dark apartment at 6 a.m. The camera was aimed at a sliver of light coming from the hallway; the sounds of tenants’ whispers were punctuated by shouts of “Police, open the door!” as ICE officers made their way down a hall, banging on doors. But no doors were opened, and nobody was detained.
“Raids like this are not about public safety,” wrote Juan Peña, the pastor, in an opinion column in The Denver Post. “They are about sowing terror.” Peña canceled his legal clinic and Sunday worship service in Spanish that week. “It was such an unsettling time that I didn’t feel comfortable having a church service without really knowing exactly what ICE was up to or what the dangers were,” he said. Indeed, on Jan. 20 the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security revoked the policy, in effect since 2011, that said ICE could not conduct raids in churches, hospitals or schools.
On Feb. 18, the city shuttered the Edge at Lowry, and the next day, Chamberlain, the police chief, held another news conference in an empty apartment on the third floor of one of the buildings. The unit had a bare wire hanging from the ceiling of the bedroom, a filthy bathroom and a kitchen with broken cabinet doors; the floors were covered with squashed cockroaches.
Chamberlain, in a nicely pressed uniform, looked out of place at a lectern set up at the edge of the squalid kitchen. He expressed sympathy for the former tenants and criticism of the landlords, referring in the same breath to extortion by the gang and neglect by the landlords. The complex had been the site of “drug trafficking, home invasions, shooting and violent assaults”; the landlords stopped paying for trash pickup and other necessities while people were still living there, and garbage “basically was stacked taller than a human being.”
As reporters asked the chief questions, I realized that not all of those dead cockroaches on the floor were dead. The reporter next to me stamped her boot on one of them. Next a television cameraman glanced down, smashed one with his shoe and then shook the legs of his pants. Then everyone started checking their shoes and trousers.
Despite the presence of the University of Colorado’s new and expansive Anschutz Medical Campus, much of East Colfax Avenue seemed to be getting worse: Last June a Walmart at the intersection of Colfax and Havana closed its doors, followed by a Walgreens in November. That left a bus stop on one corner, where people would linger all day not waiting for a bus, and a 7-Eleven store on another; the store blared opera music from speakers in front to deter loiterers.
Looking back, Fernanda, the Venezuelan migrant, told me that she was glad that Nome Street was closed and that her family had been forced to move out. She managed to find a two-bedroom, townhouse-style apartment in a newer part of Aurora, started full-time work as a home health aide and studied at night to gain state certification. Her daughter, she told me, was receiving counseling for trauma and was happier miles away from East Colfax Avenue.
When I spoke to Fernanda, the Trump administration had recently stripped more than 300,000 Venezuelans of temporary protected status, a program greatly expanded by Joe Biden that offered work permits and protection from deportation to migrants from certain countries in crisis. Juan Peña, the pastor, told me that losing temporary protected status had caused widespread anxiety in his congregation that parents would be detained and separated from their children. He and his team were now helping one family at a time to scan all of their important documents in case they were detained without them. He offered parents a power of attorney form, which would allow him to make decisions about their minor children should they be separated.
I attended Peña’s Spanish-language worship service on a Sunday in March, and attendance was down to about 300 people, from 500 or more on Sundays before the raids. But that was still a lot of Venezuelans in one space, and certainly all were aware that under Trump, ICE agents could now apprehend migrants in churches. The service began as it usually did, with electric guitar, bass and drums on a small stage, and three singers leading songs of praise. Then things got quiet as Peña began to speak.
“I know it feels like taking a risk to be here,” he said in Spanish. “It may feel like we are imprisoned in our own apartments right now, like we don’t have much liberty. But we need each other, and this is why we’re here, as a church.” He reassured the parishioners that the church doors were locked, and a volunteer was stationed out front. “He won’t let anyone in without a warrant,” Peña continued, “and if agents do come in, don’t panic — I’ll go talk to them. We have set up protocols, and my wife knows who to call, what to do.” He quoted Psalm 91: “This I declare about the Lord, He alone is my refuge, my place of safety.”
Immigration arrests in Colorado are up more than 250 percent since Trump took office, but that has not ended the presence of young men with guns in Aurora’s downtown. In June, a new doorbell-cam video surfaced, eerily similar to Romero’s. This time there were nine armed men, standing in the hallway of a complex called the Innovation at Fitz Apartments, and reporters learned about the incident not from posts on X but directly from Chamberlain at a news conference. “This might sound like déjà vu,” he said, explaining that he was showing the video to demonstrate that the department was taking it seriously. “This is something that we are proactively addressing with everything that we can.” Police had arrested one suspect and were looking for eight more.
Chamberlain said the men seemed to have been trying to get into the apartment of a Venezuelan family that had moved in only two days earlier, possibly to extort rent. The landlords were cooperating with the investigation, “completely opposite” of the response from CBZ Management, he said. The chief didn’t yet know for certain if the group was affiliated with a Venezuelan gang, but he seemed to suspect it. The fact that they were preying on Venezuelan migrants, “people that fled their country to get away from that behavior,” bothered him. He didn’t want their victims to think this was normal in America. “There’s still a lot we have to find out,” Chamberlain said, but he promised: “We are going to stop it.”
The post Democrats Denied This City Had a Gang Problem. The Truth Is Complicated. appeared first on New York Times.
