Mike Coffman, the conservative Republican mayor of Aurora, Colo., had a message for former President Donald J. Trump before the Republican nominee for the White House arrived on Friday to a city he has repeatedly painted as having been taken over by vicious migrant street thugs.
The visit, Mr. Coffman said in a statement to The Times, “is an opportunity to show him and the nation that Aurora is a considerably safe city — not a city overrun by Venezuelan gangs. My public offer to show him our community and meet with our police chief for a briefing still stands.”
It is not a message likely to get through.
In the closing weeks of Mr. Trump’s campaign, his efforts to demonize immigrants, whether they are from Venezuela, Haiti or elsewhere, have gotten ever more lurid — and more impervious to the facts, even those provided by Republican allies such as Mr. Coffman. Last month, the former president began portraying Aurora, a sprawling suburb of Denver, population 404,219, as “a war zone” overrun by a violent Venezuelan street gang, Tren de Aragua.
Despite the entreaties of Aurora city officials in both parties to stay away, Mr. Trump is taking his case to Aurora itself on Friday. He will head there for an afternoon rally at the Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center, a location that is decidedly not overrun by Venezuelan gangs.
He is not welcome, declared Crystal Murillo, a Democratic city councilwoman and a Mexican American.
“My message is, Trump doesn’t belong here,” she said in an interview. “His divisiveness, his rhetoric, is not what Aurora is about.”
The tall tales of Colorado’s third largest city being occupied by armed Venezuelans stem from the novel excuse given by an out-of-state landlord, CBZ Management, to the city of Aurora for the utterly deplorable conditions in which residents of three of its apartment complexes were living.
In July, CBZ told the city that its property managers were unable to make the repairs that tenants and city officials were demanding because armed leaders of Tren de Aragua had taken over the complexes, violently expelled the managers and begun extracting rent payments from the migrant residents themselves.
A public relations firm hired by the landlord enlisted Denver’s Fox affiliate to run a story on the supposed takeover. Mr. Coffman, the mayor, and a conservative city councilwoman, Danielle Jurinsky, repeated the landlord’s story, though they have since retracted their statements. And a video of armed men in one of the complexes began circulating in conservative media.
By the time Mr. Trump picked up the cause, the fever dream of a huge Colorado city overrun by migrant criminals — a city that is home to the University of Colorado’s medical school and one of the most prominent children’s hospitals in the country — had taken hold.
“The reality is that the concerns about Venezuelan gang activity have been grossly exaggerated,” Mr. Coffman said Friday morning, trying once again to set the record straight. “The incidents were limited to several apartment complexes in this city of more than 400,000 residents.”
The city put out its own statement on Friday, also pre-emptively fact-checking the former president ahead of his rally. “A gang has not ‘taken over’ the city,” it said. “The overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations are simply not true. It is tragic that select individuals and entities have mischaracterized our city based on some specific incidents.”
(The city did not name any of the “select individuals” it had in mind.)
Major crimes, it continued, “are down more than 17 percent in Aurora.” And “the city is actively deploying every legal tool to ensure CBZ Management is accountable for its properties and meets its responsibilities.”
The Aurora Police Department has secured all three apartment complexes. Ten men associated with Tren de Aragua have been identified, and nine have been arrested, said Ryan Luby, a city spokesman. Six armed men seen in a viral video taken by a doorbell camera in one of the apartment complexes have now been identified and one has been arrested, he added.
One of the CBZ-owned complexes has also been seized and closed down, and two others are now in receivership, Ms. Murillo said. The city is encouraging the bank that seized the properties to sell them to a reputable, low-income housing company to make sure that the poor residents — some but not all of whom are Venezuelan migrants — remain housed.
Lawyers for CBZ and for Zev Baumgarten, the man officials identified as the landlord and who has been criminally charged for neglect, have said repeatedly that the city, not the company, is to blame for the deplorable conditions in the apartments.
“It’s the government’s responsibility to protect property and — more importantly — to protect the people who live there,” said Matthew C. Arentsen, a lawyer for CBZ. “The government failed in this responsibility.”
That assertion has been denied strongly by city officials, including the Republican mayor and Democratic City Council members, all of whom say CBZ is an out-of-state slumlord that has exploited clients, bilked the city and created a fiasco now weighing on the city’s reputation.
The tales of rampaging gangs have been “a distraction from the real issues,” Ms. Murillo said, “a lack of accountability for corporate landlords and a lack of housing.”
Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat who lives in Aurora, said Friday he will keep calling Mr. Trump out on his “lies” about the city, regardless of how impervious the former president is to fact-checking. The Aurora visit is another sign that Mr. Trump “knows that he is losing,” Mr. Crow said.
“We set the standard for welcoming people from around the world, and we do it remarkably well,” the congressman said of his city. “We are not going to allow ourselves to be victimized by his politics.”
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