STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been talking lately about a city in Colorado, a suburb of Denver.
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DONALD TRUMP: You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns.
INSKEEP: Days after making that claim about migrants during a presidential debate, Trump said he had a solution.
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TRUMP: It's like an invasion from within. And we're going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country.
INSKEEP: He also said he was coming to the city to see for himself.
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TRUMP: They've got to get much tougher. I'm going to go there in the next two weeks. I'm going to Springfield, and I'm going to Aurora.
INSKEEP: Trump reaches Aurora today. So let's find out what's really going on there. Colorado Public Radio's partner publication, Denverite, has been covering the situation for months. And reporter Kyle Harris is on the line. Hi there, Kyle.
KYLE HARRIS, BYLINE: Hello.
INSKEEP: Is it true that there are people with international gang ties who've been arrested in Aurora?
HARRIS: Yes, that is true. There's an international Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua - it started in a prison in the state of Aragua - that does have a small presence in the city of Aurora. Both the police there and the mayor say it is not a huge problem, certainly not a citywide problem. For them, the media blitz has been just as big of an issue, particularly as they're trying to manage the city's reputation in this moment. Crime in Aurora for years and years has risen. It's fallen. It went up during the pandemic, like a lot of places. Lately, citywide, it's dropped.
INSKEEP: So I've just been looking up the population figures, and I saw that Aurora, although it's a suburb, is a big city - almost 400,000 people. That's bigger than New Orleans. So how much of that city is actually affected by gang issues?
HARRIS: Well, there is no major part of Aurora that has been dominated or taken over by Tren de Aragua. The national attention has been focused on essentially three apartment buildings. Over the past few years, 40,000 people have come through Denver. These are new immigrants, most from Venezuela. The city and nonprofits have been scrambling to find these folks a place to stay. These three apartment buildings were some of the places that had really affordable options. The trade-off there, of course, was that the living conditions were absolutely atrocious. So we're talking rodents and mold, broken appliances, drains that don't work.
And there was also a landlord there the city of Aurora has said has been AWOL. The mayor there calls him an out-of-state slumlord. The landlord was in a legal fight with the city. And just before this case goes to court, the company, CBZ Management, went on a PR blitz, and video of armed men entering an apartment went national. This idea, though, that Aurora has been taken over, hijacked by gangs, it spread from there.
INSKEEP: Wow. So one of the buildings has been closed down, and you watched that happen. Where are the people now who live there?
HARRIS: It was sad to watch roughly 300 people get pushed out of their home. Some of those folks went to new rentals fairly immediately. Many wound up having a few weeks in a hotel room, and the organizers who were tasked with putting those people in new homes said many are likely homeless. They've essentially lost touch.
INSKEEP: What do people across the city make of the national attention now?
HARRIS: Well, the residents in those buildings are very much aware this is happening, and they feel like they have crosshairs on their community. They're scared of the attention that it's bringing them. They're worried about vigilantes. Both residents throughout those neighborhoods, throughout Aurora, and Mayor Mike Coffman have said, you know, things are being blown way out of proportion. Residents of the building, the mayor are asking Trump to tour the community to show him that these claims of a citywide gang takeover simply aren't true. Now, to be real, that has not been scheduled. At the same time, Coffman is not planning to go to Trump's rally.
INSKEEP: That's Denverite's Kyle Harris. Thanks so much.
HARRIS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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