Aurora’s mayor, police chief push back on claims that a Venezuelan gang has ‘taken over’ the city

AURORA, Colo. — Aurora’s mayor and police chief pushed back Saturday on former President Donald Trump’s ongoing assertions that a Venezuelan gang has “conquered” the city.

The claims gained currency after the airing of video showing multiple young men with guns in an Aurora apartment house — and amid reports that a gang known as Tren de Aragua, or TDA, was operating in the city.

“I’m a Republican — but it was an exaggeration,” Mayor Mike Coffman said Saturday at a town hall at the city’s central library. “That statement, allowed to stand, has economic consequences to this city pure and simple.”

“This city is not overrun by TDA,” Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain said at the same meeting, which also included discussions of local schools, proposed development, and even the difficultly one resident has had being able to share concerns with elected officials.

But after Chamberlain raised the issue of crime — and TDA in particular — the meeting revisited the topic multiple times.

“The narrative that this city is being overrun and controlled by one particular group is false,” Chamberlain said. “But I will say by the same token that there are issues, there is crime, there is problems and there are bad, bad behavior and bad actions that are going on that we as a department have to focus on.”

When Trump was in Aurora on Oct. 11, he repeatedly said that the city had been taken over.

“I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered,” Trump said.

Coffman did not attend the rally.

“It’s a political environment right now going into the election,” Coffman said. “There’s one side that said there’s never been a problem. There’s another side that says, yeah, the whole city is overrun.

“And I think that the truth lies in the middle.”