Republican Mayor Tries to Reassure Community After Trump Pushed Debunked Claims of Migrant Gangs Taking Over Part of His City

The Republican mayor of Aurora, Colorado released a statement on Wednesday addressing what he called “the overstated claims” about a member of a Venezuelan gang taking over part of his city – claims that former President Donald Trump pushed during his Tuesday night debate with Kamala Harris.

“You see what’s happening with towns throughout the United States,” Trump said during the first question of the debate, adding:

You look at Springfield in Ohio. You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They are taking over buildings. They’re going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. They’re dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality, and we have to get them out.

The claims coming out of Aurora were initially pushed by the mayor, Mike Coffman, during a Fox News interview in late August, where he claimed several apartment buildings “have fallen” to the gang Tren de Aragua and gang members were now collecting rent from the residents.

A week later, interim Aurora police chief Heather Morris refuted those claims publicly and Coffman, a former GOP member of Congress, eventually conceded he was “not sure where the truth is in all of this.” The claim was widely spread on social media and fueled by video of criminal activity caught on doorbell cameras, which appeared to show armed men trying to break into an apartment.

NBC News took a deep dive into how the now-debunked claims spread through the community, social media, and eventually the GOP presidential nominee.

“The viral rumors used “the most common forms of misinformation” tactics, such as reposting old videos without context, misrepresenting existing data and “frankensteining” together misleading pieces of evidence to fabricate a false narrative, according to the News Literacy Project, a nonprofit fact-checking organization that debunked the rumor,” noted the NBC report.

The debunked claims of the migrant gang taking over apartment buildings in Colorado paralleled those pushed by Trump during the debate regarding Haitian migrants in Ohio eating household pets, which community leaders have also disavowed as baseless.

Coffman, who is now working to reassure his citizens that they are safe after having raised the specter of fear, wrote in his statement:

We would like to clear the record about the widely reported presence of Tren de Aragua (TdA) in Aurora and across the metro area. We want to provide an update about the facts of the situation and the Aurora Police Department’s collaborative, ongoing efforts to investigate and aggressively pursue criminal activity linked to TdA members and associates. The city’s duty is to make sure it gathers and presents factual, accurate, and comprehensive information about any issue affecting the community.

We reiterate that the safety, security, and well-being of community members and visitors is of paramount concern to us and the city. As for the perception and reality of public safety in Aurora, please understand that issues experienced at a select few properties do not apply to the city as a whole or large portions of it. TdA has not “taken over” the city. The overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations are simply not true.

Again, TdA’s presence in Aurora is limited to specific properties, all of which the city has been addressing in various ways for months. For some time, well before concerns about TdA in Colorado generated national attention, APD had been arresting people for various criminal activities who had suspected, but not necessarily confirmed, TdA connections. To date, APD has now linked 10 people to TdA and has arrested eight of those people.

Coffman ended his statement by also trying to urge unity, “We will continue to embrace our identity as the most diverse city in Colorado and remain steadfast in our commitment to arrest bad actors.”

The statement was co-signed by Aurora City Council member Danielle Jurinsky who had also pushed the claims in various media interviews. Local Colorado news anchor Kyle Clark noted, “Jurinsky was the chief driver of claims repeated uncritically by some local news media and promoted heavily by Fox News, InfoWars, and other conservative media. Coffman had pushed back on her claims, but he offered conflicting statements in interviews, sometimes within hours.” Jurinsky, a Republican, also denied that the statement was a direct response to Trump promoting the claims on the national stage.

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