Law enforcement in Colorado lied to the public about Venezuelan gang operations in the suburb of Aurora by hiding the truth about the Tren de Aragua (TdA) murder outfit as it grew increasingly powerful, even seizing control of apartment complexes.
The lies are exposed in government documents obtained by America First Legal (AFL).
Helping the gang take over apartments were the “nonprofit” nongovernmental organizations, subsidized by the Biden administration, that move “migrants” into a town or city without the knowledge of residents.
“Migrant” Gangland
The documents AFL dislodged from the government show negligence at best, and outright malfeasance at worst.
“Local officials failed to disclose the gang’s violent crimes and the threat it posed to the public for over a year, gravely endangering law-abiding U.S. citizens,” AFL reported.
Though viral video showed TdA gangbangers with weapons in an apartment complex in Aurora, which forced city officials to admit their presence, “state and local officials continued to downplay and outrightly dismiss the threat posed by the gang.”
As The Associated Press reported on September 5, “Police deny Venezuela gang has taken over rundown apartment complex in Denver suburb.”
Indeed, Colorado officials knew about the TdA infiltration in June 2023, but “failed to warn the public until more than a year later,” AFL reported. As well, those officials and Aurora cops “were aware of Venezuelan-connected criminal activity at two of the apartment complexes more than a year before warning the public of TdA’s growing presence in the area.”
Continued AFL:
An email from February 5, 2024, states that two apartment complexes were “currently having Venezuelan refugees placed there and we have had multiple violent cases involving those addresses with Venezuelan suspects since about June of 2023.” The APD [Aurora Police Department] crime analyst also noted that “it’s difficult to ID people who have no history in the U.S. yet.”’
As The New American reported in September, City Journal’s Christopher Rufo and Christina Buttons revealed that the Biden administration subsidized the gang takeover of apartments by sending millions of dollars to two “nonprofits,” ViVe Wellness and Papagayo.
Papagayo “worked with a landlord called CBZ Management, a property company that operates the three apartment buildings at the center of the current controversy: Edge [at] Lowry, Whispering Pines, and Fitzsimons Place, also known as Aspen Grove,” Rufo and Buttons wrote. The outfit worked with CBZ to plant Venezuelan “migrants in the company’s Aurora apartment complexes. When a Venezuelan individual or family needed housing, the NGO would contact the regional property manager, who then matched them with available apartments.”
Continued Rufo and Buttons:
It was a booming business. According to the employee, Papagayo arranged hundreds of contracts with the property manager. The NGO provided up to two months of rental assistance, as many migrants did not have, or were unable to open, bank accounts. Within six months, according to the employee, approximately 80 percent of the residents of these buildings were Venezuelan migrants. The employee also noted that the buildings [began to see] gang activity and violence.
Edge at Lowry was the scene of the viral video.
Migrant Crime Wave
A Venezuelan “migrant” crime wave soon began.
At one CBZ apartment, the AFL-obtained documents reveal, calls for police help nearly doubled between 2022 and 2023, and nearly doubled again the following year. “Criminal investigations increased from 41 in 2022 to 84 in 2023, then 66 in just the first half of 2024,” the documents show:
The crimes “included various motor vehicle crimes, robbery, drugs, trespass, sexual assault and aggravated assault,” and “a shooting that injured two people.” In August 2024, rather than solving the property owners’ complaints regarding gang activity, the City of Aurora condemned the property for “code violations” and “poor property conditions,” evicting its more than one hundred residents. The City of Aurora would similarly designate the Edge at Lowry as a criminal nuisance to be closed in February 2025.
In an APD document collecting incidents across CBZ Management apartments, they recorded an assault on a property manager, the arrest of two armed men allegedly on their way to kill a property manager, a stabbing incident, multiple incidents involving men with guns or gun cases, and TdA scamming residents. Alarmingly, APD documented “extortion statements about [the] gang receiving 50% of rent collected.”
Then TdA began expanding its sphere of malign influence. State and local cops found “‘a developing trend’ of ‘Venezuelans stealing and selling stolen vehicles and… using fake plates,’” the documents revealed.
In other words, President Joe Biden and “migrant” activists opened once-peaceful Aurora to an invasion of Venezuelan illegal-alien criminals.
ICE Raid
Rounding up those criminals and protecting Coloradans was a top priority for the new Trump administration.
But far-left Denver Mayor Mike Johnston vowed rebellion and insurrection to stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from entering the city.
He said that Denver cops and “50,000 Denverites” would cordon off the city to stop the federal agents from entering.
Beyond the promise of resistance from Johnston, ICE faces another obstacle. To protect illegal-alien rapists and murders from deportation, leakers inside federal law enforcement revealed the date and time of the raids.
ICE had hoped to bag 100 gang members in Aurora when it showed up on February 5, but they were long gone when the agents arrived. They collared just one gang member and arrested 30 other illegals.
“We’re not going to tolerate it anymore,” border czar Tom Homan said of the leak:
This is not a game when we show up at these sites. This is a dangerous job for the men and women of ICE and Border Patrol and all the DOJ [Department of Justice] agencies. To have this type of interference puts our officers at great risk. Not only the officers, [but] it puts the aliens at great risk because anything can happen when we take our eyes off the goal here. …
[This is] not a joke, this is serious business. And they need to stop, or we’re going to prosecute them through [the] Department of Justice.
Homan told Fox talker Sean Hannity that he believed the leaker, likely in the FBI, had been identified.
Another leak went to the Los Angeles Times, which on February 7 disclosed forthcoming raids.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to prosecute leakers.
