President Donald Trump once more cited Aurora, Colorado in his address to Congress on Tuesday night, calling the city a “beautiful town destroyed” by illegal immigration and a transnational gang now operating in metro Denver.

Blaming the “open border policies” under the Biden administration, Trump referenced Aurora as a city that “buckled” under the influx of immigrants, some 43,000 of whom arrived in metro Denver in the past two years.

“Entire towns like Aurora, Colorado and Springfield, Ohio buckled under the weight of the migrant occupation and corruption like nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said. “Beautiful towns destroyed.”

On Wednesday, Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman told The Denver Gazette he is “very disappointed” that Trump cited Aurora anew in his address without also mentioning “all the work that APD (Aurora Police Department) has done in successfully pursuing the Venezuelan gang presence that was limited to several apartment complexes in Northwest Aurora.”

“This was undeserved and will cause both long-term reputational and economic harm to our city,” Coffman said. 

City Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky, who spotlighted the tentacles of a Venezuelan gang in Aurora, said she is not worried about protecting the city’s image over “saving peoples’ lives.”

“This matter is being taken very seriously, arrests are being made,” she said Wednesday. “If it has had implications, if there are future implications on the city’s image, we should take into consideration how to navigate that, but I would certainly never worry about protecting our image over saving peoples’ lives.”

The TdA story “started out of Aurora,” Jurinsky said, adding that exposing the gang prompted other agencies across the country to come forward.

“I expect there to be some sort of conversation about it,” she said.

Tren de Aragua in Aurora 

Originally, a prison gang that started in Tocorón Penitentiary Center in Aragua, a state in north-central Venezuela, TdA has expanded the footprint of its criminal enterprises into at least eight Latin American countries, including Brazil, Colombia and Chile. The organization has an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 members, according to Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan investigative journalist.

It’s unclear when TdA was first discovered in the United States, but it is believed that gang members embedded themselves with immigrants fleeing the political and economic collapse in Venezuela. Nearly eight million Venezuelans have already fled their country under President Nicolás Maduro’s oppressive regime, with more than 500,000 estimated to be living in the U.S.

Through violence and intimidation, the gang ran off an apartment management in a complex and demanded half of the rent from leaseholders and moved “vulnerable immigrant families into vacant units.”   

Police have arrested several members on a variety of charges, including an armed home invasion, in which a Venezuelan couple was bound, pistol-whipped, and tortured. Jurinsky, the Aurora councilmember, said the suspects ripped out the woman’s fingernails. 

The gang’s activities attracted the attention of Donald Trump — whose campaign described the city as a “war zone” suffering from an influx of violent gang members and blaming the Biden-Harris administration for that predicament. In September, Trump opened his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris with that description of Aurora.

Local officials insisted the Venezuelan gang’s influence had been “grossly exaggerated.” 

David Levesque, who owns Launch Pad Brewery in Aurora, said the rhetoric around Aurora and gangs isn’t necessarily impacting his brewery, but he suspected that it has affected the wholesale side of his business.

Some of the hotels Levesque sells his beer to are taking a “big hit” — from the narrative that Aurora is a dangerous place, he said. 

“My beer sales to local hotels are going down because they’re not as busy with conventions,” Levesque said. “They have conventions coming to the area and not wanting to stay in Aurora because of gangs.”

Launch Pad Brewery’s customers are mostly locals who know what’s actually going on in Aurora, Levesque said. However, people traveling into the Denver area who don’t live in Aurora and only hear the national news often hear about gang activity in the city, he added.

Aurora officials have shut down apartment complexes where the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had operated. Recently, the city shuttered the troubled Edge at Lowry complex following an emergency order from Aurora Municipal Court Presiding Judge Shawn Day. City officials said they shut the building down because of numerous health code violations causing a public health risk. 

The move marked the second apartment complex shut down. Officials in August also shuttered Aspen Grove — a 99-unit apartment complex on Nome Street — citing a litany of health and safety violations that included rodent infestations, sewage backups and trash pileups. The property management company maintained that the presence of gang members precluded it from doing its work at the complex and that it feared for the safety of its staffers and residents. 

“The Aurora Police Department will not let you take root in the city of Aurora,” Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain — standing in a cockroach infested room — said, referring to TdA, during the final phase of shutting down the Edge at Lowry.