(DCNF)—Colorado officials are pushing back on former President Donald Trump’s claims that Aurora is overrun with organized crime by Venezuelan migrants, but spite of the officials’ claims, crimes involving gangs have increased considerably since last year.
Trump will speak in Aurora on Friday as part of his push to highlight migrant crime, following ten members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua being identified in September in the city after the gang allegedly took over apartment complexes. While crime in aggregate has fallen in the city since last year, gang-related crime has increased, and long-term trends paint a more bleak picture of Aurora overall, according to city data.
“This is a safer town than its been before,” Democratic Colorado Governor Jared Polis said in an interview, according to The Associated Press. “Things are going really great … and I don’t want this bizarre counter-narrative out there.”
Preliminary data published by the city suggests crime is down 16% between January and September compared to the same time frame in 2023. However, the data also shows a 30.2% increase in gang-related activity compared to last year at this point.
The city has also seen a significant increase of 12.4% among all crimes from 2008 to 2022, with incidents against persons rising by 46% and property by 17.7%, according to the Common Sense Institute in 2023.
“Former President Trump’s visit to Aurora is an opportunity to show him and the nation that Aurora is a considerably safe city — not a city overrun by Venezuelan gangs,” Republican Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman told the Daily Caller News Foundation in a statement. “The reality is that the concerns about Venezuelan gang activity have been grossly exaggerated. The incidents were limited to several apartment complexes in this city of more than 400,000 residents.”
Despite Coffman’s insistence that the problem is overblown, Aurora’s proposed 2025 budget included a $125 million funding increase, which included cash for the Aurora Police Department to counteract international gang activity and retail crime. The proposed plan would take the police budget from $155.7 million in 2024 to nearly $165 million by 2025.
Tren de Aragua started as a prison gang in Venezuela in 2013, taking over the Torocon prison in the Aragua state and making it their base of operations, growing to around 5,000 members in 2023, according to Insight Crime. The gang’s activity is relatively novel in the U.S., coming largely in the wake of a surge in immigration, with Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) seeing a 421% increase in Venezuelans encountered at the southern border from fiscal year 2021 to 2023, according to agency data.
“We’re not heavily scrutinizing anyone coming in,” Ammon Blair, former CBP agent and senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told the DCNF. “We’re not detaining them. We’re using alternatives to detention, so no one’s really being vetted.”
The governor’s office did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.