Venezuelan gangs terrorizing my hometown? This I had to see.
I looked all over for the “armed illegal alien gang members” — but nada.
AURORA, Colo. — Evidently, Venezuelan gangsters are good at blending in. I looked all over for them. At the apartment building where they supposedly terrorize the residents — no sign. Just a couple of little kids playing on a piece of exercise equipment and two neighbors walking their big, friendly dog.
At the nearby Fox movie theater, now the Aurora Fox Arts Center, where my sisters and I watched double features and ate Milk Duds on hot summer days because it had the best air conditioning in town — nada. At the blood plasma donation center that used to be our bowling alley — not a single armed thug in sight.
It caught my attention, believe me, when once and would-be president Donald Trump visited my hometown and pronounced it “a war zone” occupied by “the most violent people on Earth.” He told a crowd of supporters that his opponent deliberately placed hardened killers in this Denver suburb for the express purpose of victimizing Aurorans.
“Kamala [Harris] has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the Third World,” said Trump. “And she has had them resettled, beautifully, into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens, that’s what they’re doing. And no place is it more evident than right here.” His mass deportation plan now has a name: “Operation Aurora.”
When I learned that a supposed epicenter of the “war zone” was right across the street from the largest research hospital complex in the Rocky Mountain West, I hurried over. Some 1.5 million patient visits per year take place in those gleaming Aurora buildings. I could only imagine all the preying that must go on.
Yet, though I saw plenty of people coming and going along unguarded sidewalks, not one of them acted even a little bit scared.
Evidently, when Trump said the menace was “evident,” he didn’t exactly know — or much care — what he was talking about. According to the Aurora Police Department, in this city of some 400,000 people, there are 10 known or suspected members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua accused of crimes. Ten. And six of them are in custody. No wonder I couldn’t find the “army of illegal alien gang members.”
That this all started with a bit of social media flotsam and was hyped for purposes of political propaganda is no surprise. A surveillance camera in an Aurora apartment building captured images of a group of armed thugs banging on doorways in August. Police have identified the men, and to date, no connection has been drawn between them and any Venezuelan gang. But for rage-baiters on the right, it was off to the races.
For Mayor Mike Coffman, a Republican and former member of Congress, the reckless hype of his party’s presidential candidate has been an uncomfortable problem to deal with. Coffman declined to talk with me and instead had a spokesman point me to a prepared statement. “I am disappointed that the former president did not get to experience more of our city for himself,” the statement said. “The reality is that the concerns about Venezuelan gang activity in our city — and our state — have been grossly exaggerated and have unfairly hurt the city’s identity and sense of safety. The city and state have not been ‘taken over’ or ‘invaded’ or ‘occupied’ by migrant gangs.”
Su Ryden, a Democrat and former majority whip of the Colorado General Assembly who now lives in Aurora, told me how discouraging it is to see the city slandered by someone with such a powerful megaphone and so little concern for the city’s reality. “For years, we’ve made such an effort to be a welcoming place for people trying to better themselves,” Ryden said. “There are children from 130 different countries in the Aurora Public Schools.”
I’m not going to sugarcoat my hometown, which until now was best known as the scene of a 2012 massacre at a cinema near my high school. It’s not the part of the Denver metro where the rich people live. It is mostly starter homes for working people, and always has been. My family’s first neighborhood, Hoffman Heights, was Colorado’s version of Levittown, the quintessential cookie-cutter suburb built in response to the post-World War II housing crisis. It’s just a few blocks from the part of town where the invading army is supposedly headquartered — which has been a little sketchy for nearly as long as I can remember, and I remember the Johnson administration.
But just because we don’t have country clubs and gold-plated toilets like the places Trump hangs around in doesn’t mean Aurorans aren’t proud to be a community where American dreams get started. The world comes here, to the rough edge of the dusty prairie, and tries with varied success to get along together and get ahead in life. They need encouragement more than they need demagoguery; they need celebration, not inflammation.
In that sense, the motto on Aurora’s street signs is perfectly apt. This truly is The All-American City.
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