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(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.
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Afghan Who Plotted Election Day Terrorism Was a CIA Contractor
by Headline USA
It looks like the FBI may have entrapped a former CIA contractor in a plot to commit a terrorist attack on Election Day. The Justice Department announced this week the arrest of Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, a 27-year-old Afghan man, alleging that he was planning an Election…
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Genetically Modified Crops: A Growing Threat to Health and the Environment
by Olivia Cook
(Natural News)—Bioengineered foods and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are commonly confused with each other, but they have different meanings. “Bioengineered” describes food and products that are enhanced with scientific techniques to add particular traits. In contrast, “GMOs” involve changing the genetic makeup of animals, plants or microbes in ways that…
United Nations Expands into “UN 2.0” to Turbocharge Sustainable Development Goals
by Liberty Sentinel
The United Nations (UN) has not gone rogue, argues journalist Alex Newman on American Family Radio’s show, At the Core , but they have always existed to achieve one goal: one-world government. This goal is not only un-American, but it is unbiblical. Newman and AFR host Walker Wildmon also dive…
Congressman Matt Gaetz Says Epstein Was Killed as Part of a ‘Foreign Operation’
by Modernity
Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz says sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was killed as part of a ‘foreign operation’, but refused to divulge which government was responsible for his death. Gaetz made the comments during an appearance on Benny Johnson’s show. In August 2019, Epstein was found unresponsive in his jail cell…
DOJ Takes Aim at Breaking Up Google
by Infowars
On Tuesday, the United States announced potential plans to request a court mandate directing Alphabet Inc to divest significant segments of its operations, including its Chrome browser and Android operating system. This move aims to dismantle what is described as an illegal monopoly held by Google in the online search…
Is Gavin Newsom Hoping that Kamala Harris Loses the Election?
by American Greatness
Two minutes of airtime during the Democrat National Convention in Chicago gave California Governor Gavin Newsom his latest opportunity to build his national stature. As part of the announcement of Kamala Harris’s clinching of the Democrat presidential nomination during a symbolic roll call of state delegates, Newsom portrayed Harris as…
Is It Time for a Nationwide Ban on Fluoridated Water?
by Natural News
Do community leaders reserve the right to mass medicate every person in their community using the water supply as a vector? What if that medicine was eventually exposed as a POISON decades later? What if that POISON was damaging the brains of children and stunting the cognitive development of the…
GOP Rep. Luna: We Need to End FEMA Migrant Spending and Boost Disaster Relief Funding
by Breitbart
On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Ingraham Angle,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) stated that FEMA’s funding for migrants should be zeroed out at once and that while there is FEMA money for hurricane victims, we should also boost emergency relief funding “that will go directly to Americans…
Earth’s Continental Crust in America and China Is Breaking Apart
by End Times Headlines
Researchers, who have been studying the dramatic changes in the continental configurations of Earth over the past billions of years, have made a stunning observation: that the oldest continental crusts are disintegrating. According to experts, the Earth’s crust went through expansion and contraction and has transformed not only its positions…
“Line All Those Guys Up and Shoot Them”: Professor Says Men Who Don’t Support Female Candidates Should Be Massacred
by Daily Caller
(Jaryn Crouson, DCNF)—A professor at the University of Kansas (UK) told a class that men who would not vote for a female president should be lined up and shot, according to a video posted on X Wednesday. The university confirmed the professor is employed at UK and made the comment…