We might expect former President Donald Trump, in Tuesday night’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, to claim that Tren de Aragua, a gang based in Venezuela, has taken over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado. That’s not true, as firsthand accounts from residents of the apartment complex, the Aurora Police and an editorial in The Denver Post attest.
But the truth doesn’t matter to Trump.
Trump and the Republican Party are determined to scare us all, and they intend to do all they can do to conjure up images of marauding brown invaders who are here to destroy the United States.
“If you look at Aurora, Colorado, they’re taking over the place; they took over buildings,” he said last Friday. “This is just the beginning.”
“Getting them out will be a bloody story,” he said this weekend at a rally in Wisconsin. “They should never have been allowed to come into our country. Nobody checked them.”
Trump and the Republican Party are determined to scare us all, and they intend to do all they can do to conjure up images of marauding brown invaders who are here to destroy the United States.
The idea that members of Tren de Aragua, TdA, are taking over an apartment complex in Aurora originated with a video posted by a Denver news station that went viral. The images of gun-toting Venezuelans was confirmed by Aurora Police. Nobody is disputing the fear that residents are facing from the violence they are seeing. However, interim Aurora Police Chief Heather Morris visited the complex and said, contrary to reports and even a statement from Aurora’s mayor, that members of the gang had not taken over and weren’t forcing residents there to pay rent to them.
After residents of the building held a news conference to dispute the claims of a gang takeover, Republican Mayor Mike Coffman, a former congressman, acknowledged that he was “not sure where the truth is in all of this” and he said that reports that Aurora is unsafe are not true.
But despite that fuller context, the video suggesting a TdA takeover was picked up by Trump-friendly outlets, and Republicans amplified it.
“Kamala Harris has managed to import the worst of Latin American gangs right in Colorado,” Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Col., said on X. “And we’re not even a border state. This is pure insanity. I was raised in Aurora. This is something that we never had before. How are children supposed to grow up with this mess around them?”
“Colorado is under violent attack,” the Colorado Republican Party said in a fundraising email about the news, noting that “Tren de Aragua, or TdA, a transnational gang based out of Venezuela, is terrorizing Aurora residents.”
“The gang, which boasts about 5,000 members, has a motto of ‘real until death.’’ Law enforcement is largely allowing TdA terrorists to do whatever they want,” the email added.
Republicans want us to believe that Venezuelans are taking over. Republicans want us to believe that the United States isn’t safe. That is the narrative Trump wants. It is the narrative his supporters want to hear, and the right-wing media distribution network has helped make that narrative go mainstream.
But here’s what The Denver Post argued in a Sept 3. editorial: “The Denver Post and other mainstream news outlets have covered the emergence of this gang in America, but also have maintained perspective on the size, threat and activities of the gang, unlike some who are using incidents in Aurora and Denver to fuel fear of other Venezuelans and asylum seekers.”
The editorial continues: “Others, like the owners of an apartment beset with crime in Aurora, are using the gang as a scapegoat for the unsanitary, unsafe and unhealthy conditions of their apartments that were condemned by the city this month.”
It’s all coordinated. Whipping up fear about a Venezuelan gang taking over is a campaign strategy, and the Aurora example is not just an isolated incident. Days after the Venezuelan gang video got millions of views, there was a similar misrepresentation, from Libs of TikTok, that TdA had taken over a building in Chicago. That lie caught Elon Musk’s attention, who responded on X with two exclamation points. Though there have been reports that members of the gang are in Chicago, police say there was no attempted takeover of a building and that police responded to a “call of service” at the building that was logged as a noise disturbance with “no police service necessary.” With less than two months before the presidential election, such narratives must be confronted. As much as Republicans want you to believe the opposite, rampant migrant crime is a myth. Homicides and violent crime in the U.S. continue to decrease. Still, no matter how many facts are presented to counter Republican hysteria, the online push has already convinced people to accept falsehoods as truth. Stories get picked up. Then we have to prove why a falsehood is a falsehood. Oscar Rojas, a Venezuelan tenant in the Aurora apartment complex in question, told local Denver7 last week that he “was scared to go out” because “they’re accusing all of us at the complex of being in gangs, and this is completely false.” “It’s completely false. There are good people here, families. There’s always going to be crime everywhere,” Rojas said. “There weren’t 32 armed people here last night. That’s a lie. Look, there’s no one outside,” a resident from Venezuela told the Chicago Tribune about the building in question there. “We all know each other. No one is hurting anyone.” No matter how many facts are presented to counter Republican hysteria, the online push has already convinced people to accept falsehoods as truth. Who are you going to believe? A right-wing media machine known to share misinformation to prop a Republican presidential candidate who continues to say that immigrants have “poisoned” the country, or actual brown and Black people who live in the places that are allegedly being “overrun?” The right-wing media machine knows that fear of a changing country is an outrage winner. That machine will keep manufacturing and amplifying it in hopes of electing Trump. If Trump repeats the lie about Aurora or Chicago tonight, then Harris needs to be ready to counter with the facts and demonstrate that we can never let such lies become accepted truths.
Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder of The Latino Newsletter. 
