The good folks in Aurora can take heart from the news that no one is saying violent Venezuelan gang members there are barbecuing either dogs or cats.
To this point, Donald Trump and JD Vance and their buddies in Congress and allies in the right-wing media have apparently been content to spread that baseless rumor solely about Haitian migrants in the small town of Springfield, Ohio, where the situation is slightly more serious than the often-hilarious dog-and-cat memes spurred by Trump’s often-mendacious debate ramblings.
Trump is doing what he can to label Aurora a war zone, but it could be worse. Far worse.
Two days after the debate, Springfield had to deal not only with baseless rumors but with bomb threats, leading to the evacuation of city hall, two schools and the town’s state motor vehicle facility.
Why would anyone threaten to bomb Springfield facilities, when, in real life, the town is dealing remarkably well with a surging population of mostly legal Haitian migrants?
I’ll bet you can guess.
It’s the same reason that Vance felt the need to tweet the hysteria-inducing lie that Aiden Clark, an 11-year-old child who had been killed in an automobile accident, had been “murdered by a Haitian migrant.”
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Aiden’s father, Nathan Clark, called out Vance and others for politicizing his son’s death and begged them to stop.
“My son was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti,” Clark said at a Springfield City Commission meeting.
“This tragedy is felt all over this community, the state and even the nation, but don’t spin this towards hate,” he added.
Yeah, this is about politics and about the presidential race and about MAGA-inspired xenophobia.
And you can probably say the same about the slightly more complicated situation in Aurora. If you watched the debate, or just saw the clips, you already know that Trump, citing Aurora by name, says migrants “are taking over the towns, they are taking over buildings, they are going in violently. These are the people (Kamala Harris) and Biden have been letting into our country. And they’re destroying our country.”
Of course, Trump had been talking about Aurora at rallies for days at that point. And he still is. In fact, at a news conference Friday, Trump said his plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants would start in Aurora and Springfield. Of course, he did.
And it’s not just Trump. It’s Lauren Boebert, of course. And it’s many parts of the right-wing media machine. As an example, according to a, uh, news report in the New York Post, “the bedroom community” of Aurora has become “a war zone” and has, in part, “descended into a migrant wasteland.”
You almost certainly know something about the situation in Aurora and the threatening presence of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, in several apartment buildings. It has been all over the local news, too.
Whether anyone has “taken over” the buildings is a matter of sometimes furious debate.
Whether the apartment buildings in question — housing mostly Central American migrants — are dilapidated and run down and have been cited over the years for a long list of code violations is not up for debate. It’s true. Rep. Jason Crow, who represents Aurora in Congress, called the conditions “squalid” in a tweet while saying the gang issues are “grossly exaggerated.”
And also not up for debate is whether Aurora is a war zone or a migrant wasteland. That’s simply false.
Reporters who have gone to the apartment sites, as the Colorado Sun’s Jennifer Brown and others have done, often come back with stories from tenants who say they are more worried about the horrifying conditions at the apartments and about threats from white supremacists than they are about gangs.
What is true is that, thanks in large part to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s policy of busing migrants to so-called sanctuary cities, tens of thousands of migrants have come to Colorado.
The Aurora part of the story began with a property management company sending a letter to Mayor Mike Coffman and others blaming the brutal conditions at their apartments on the Venezuelan gang. That was followed by a Fox News video showing heavily armed men entering one of the apartments. Aurora city council member Danielle Jurinsky blamed the issue on “failed border policies,” and we were off.
Soon we were seeing false internet rumors that the Hells Angels were coming to town to do the job that police were supposedly not doing. And that an Aurora Target store had been, well, targeted.
That was more than enough for Trump to try to make Aurora a poster city for violence at the hands of migrants — the same sort of ugliness he has been spreading since he came down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015, launching his presidential campaign by characterizing migrants as rapists and murders. Now, of course, he has updated his rants to include insane asylums, Hannibal Lecter and, yes, Springfield and Aurora.
And he is saying that if elected again, he will start massive deportations. In a recent rally in Wisconsin, after mentioning Aurora again, he said that removing the migrants would be “a bloody story.”
It’s an old story, but one that never goes away — and one that has been highlighted in this election campaign. So, of course, if there’s any violence, Trump will try to put the blame on Kamala Harris, even though immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes and even though violent crime has dropped in Colorado and across the nation.
☀️ MORE FROM MIKE LITTWIN
Coffman, the Republican mayor of Aurora, has not exactly been consistent when discussing the issue, once telling Fox News that the apartments had “fallen to the Venezuelan gangs.”
But now he says the gangs are not in control and says it’s “questionable” whether they ever were. And though there apparently has been gang presence at the apartments, it’s not even clear that Tren de Aragua, which is an extremely violent gang, was involved.
What is clear is that slumlords — as Coffman calls them — have exploited migrants in Aurora. What’s also clear is that Republican politicians have exploited any news, fake or otherwise, of violence by migrants.
And what should be crystal clear is that Trump, who brings you easily debunked news about migrants eating pets and about much else, is the last person you should believe about anything happening in Colorado.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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