On October 11, 2024, Donald Trump stood before a rally in the Colorado suburb of Aurora, flanked by mug shots he labeled “Illegal immigrant gang members from Venezuela.” Following an introduction by his current senior advisor, Stephen Miller, who gestured to the posters and asked the crowd if “these are the neighbors you want,” Trump took the stage to announce a campaign promise he dubbed “Operation Aurora.” Under the plan, he pledged to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 wartime law that authorizes deporting noncitizens from nations at war with the United States, to conduct mass deportations if re-elected.
The choice to name his mass deportation agenda after the Colorado suburb was a direct nod to a pervasive right-wing narrative that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had taken over Aurora apartment complexes housing primarily Venezuelan migrants. The claim, sparked by a viral video, was immediately refuted by tenants and local authorities, who instead pointed to CBZ Management—a multi-million-dollar property firm—as the criminal culprit that had circulated the false narrative to deflect blame for its own neglect. Nevertheless, a year later, the Aurora myth continues to play a key role in a larger feedback loop in which local police bulletins, uncritically disseminated by federal agencies and right-wing media, create boogie men to serve as the ideological scaffolding for an ethnonationalist agenda.
As promised, on March 15, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, claiming that the Tren de Aragua is operating “in conjunction” with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to “invade” our borders in a “plot against America.” Though unsupported by evidence—and rejected by the United States’ own intelligence community—the claim has now become the legal pretext for the sweeping suspension of due process rights and the criminalization of Venezuelans at home and abroad. This reality was made manifest in the detention, deportation, and eventual torture of 238 Venezuelan migrants sent to El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) mega prison.
Since then, the same security paradigm has been deployed to Venezuela’s Caribbean waters as the political justification of what U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently dubbed “Operation Southern Spear.” The operation, pushed atop thinly veiled accusations of drug trafficking, has led to the deployment of the largest concentration of U.S. naval and air assets in the region in 20 years and extrajudicial strikes against alleged drug traffickers that have killed at least 83 people across the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.
Situated within this same security paradigm, the case of Aurora exposes how the architecture of U.S. imperialism seeps into the fabric of domestic life and reveals the contradictory nature of U.S. expansionism. Venezuelan migrants—caught at the nexus of the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, and the War on Migrants—are both created and criminalized by U.S. policy, while media hysteria dictates who belongs, who is dangerous, and who can be disappeared without notice.
A Slumlord’s Scapegoat
The narrative of a Venezuelan gang takeover in Aurora was seeded prior to the viral videos that fueled it. On July 28, 2024, then Aurora City Council member Danielle Jurinsky falsely claimed that a public Venezuelan election watch party, held at a local Target parking lot, ended in “assaults, theft,” and a “shot up police car.” Although the Aurora Police Department immediately released a statement debunking her claims, Mayor Mike Coffman amplified the rhetoric, stating that “residents were owed an apology from the Venezuelan immigrant community.”
As this political firestorm ignited, a quieter crisis was culminating for New York-based CBZ Management. The corporate landlord, which owns three Aurora complexes, was facing legal repercussions from the city over rampant code violations, including mold, pests, broken utilities, and unsafe conditions documented as far back as 2020. By mid-2024, facing mounting fines and possible criminal penalties, the company was on the brink of legal reckoning.
In reality, while tenants had suffered from violent crime and unsafe conditions, there was no evidence that the complexes were “taken” by gangs—let alone the Venezuelan group.
On July 29th, just one day after the election watch party, city attorneys emailed CBZ’s lawyers a proposed settlement that included a 60-day jail sentence for company owner Zev Baumgarten, citing chronic neglect. Within a week, CBZ retained a PR firm that spun the narrative by pushing a sensational story to local news: their properties had been “taken over by Tren de Aragua.”
In reality, while tenants had suffered from violent crime and unsafe conditions, there was no evidence that the complexes were “taken” by gangs—let alone the Venezuelan group. There was one telling link in the story, however: every viral claim of a Tren de Aragua “takeover” that emerged during this period could be traced back to CBZ-owned properties. “You see a similar pattern emerging here where they own multiple properties within 10 minutes of each other,” said Nate Kassa, a tenant organizer who assisted the residents placed at the center of the Tren de Aragua takeover story. “All of them are essentially slums.”
It was the tenants that ultimately had to answer for their slumlord’s misdeeds. In August 2024, as many as 200 residents were evicted from one CBZ property in Aurora with as little as 24-hours notice, while tenants at the two other properties—The Edge at Lowry and Whispering Pines apartments—were offered a $1,200 buyout to leave under threat of eviction. In a pattern that would be repeated across the country, those that choose to stay, citing the financial difficulties of relocation, saw armed federal agents essentially carry out the work of eviction in Aurora.
Aurora ICE Raids and Community Resistance
In the pre-dawn hours of February 6, 2025, a militarized convoy of dozens of ICE, DHS, ATF and DEA vehicles descended on residences across Denver and Aurora, including the Edge at Lowry and Whispering Pines. The operation, launched two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, was designed for flashy spectacle. Federal agents armed with rifles and battering rams descended on the apartment complexes, accompanied by an embedded Fox News crew that aired the raids in real-time on social media. Using flash grenades and rubber bullets, officials claimed they were targeting over 100 alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang.
Even still, for those swept up in the crackdown, the consequences were severe. Some residents, branded as “gang members” based upon flimsy evidence that largely conflated their Venezuelan nationality with criminality, were ultimately arrested and deported to CECOT.
Yet according to community organizers, on the ground a different story unfolded. With the Trump administration publicly promising mass raids at the apartments for months, a robust organizing network of activists with the Colorado Rapid Response Network (CORRN) were already on high alert. At the Edge at Lowry, activists slept in their cars. “We knew ICE was targeting that building, so we got to know people that lived there and came up with an organizing strategy” explained Sophia Morrow*, a teacher, parent, and member of CORRN for five years. As federal agents went door-to-door, protesters with bullhorns fanned out, shouted “Know Your Rights” information in English and Spanish, and informed residents they were not obligated to open their doors without a judicial warrant.
The result was a dramatic failure. Although ICE was reluctant to share any official arrest figures, FOX later reported that only 30 individuals were detained across the entirety of the massive operation. Speaking in front of the White House, border czar Tom Homan falsely blamed the failure on media leaks and threatened the activists, saying “they may find themselves in a pair of handcuffs very soon.” The truth, however, was much simpler: a coordinated community defense network proved stronger than the force of hundreds of armed federal officers.
Even still, for those swept up in the crackdown, the consequences were severe. Some residents, branded as “gang members” based upon flimsy evidence that largely conflated their Venezuelan nationality with criminality, were ultimately arrested and deported to CECOT.
The Raids Continue
While the February raids—and the resistance against them—caused a media firestorm, the machinery of immigration enforcement has continued. It has done so in ways both more mundane and more insidious.
For Jorge*, a young Venezuelan granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in 2023, this reality struck when a routine delivery to drop off a television landed him at the Fort Carson Army Base in Colorado Springs. Though his heart pounded as he approached the military installation, he had a valid work permit and driver’s license while his asylum case was pending.
At the entrance, a guard took his ID, handed him a visitor form, and told him to wait while the paperwork was processed. Jorge did as he was told, but was surrounded by eleven armed soldiers soon after sitting down. Confused, he asked if he was being detained. “We just need to revise your paperwork,” an officer assured him in Spanish. Moments later, Jorge was handcuffed, placed in an unmarked vehicle, and taken to the Aurora GEO ICE facility to face removal proceedings—all while the soldier who had ordered the television arrived to casually collect it. The transaction continued around this unfolding nightmare.
Speaking with Jorge at the GEO ICE facility through the wall-mounted phones of our no contact visit, he struggled to make sense of what had transpired. Sophia later explained his detention. “It is a misconception that ICE needs a reason to detain people,” she said. Indeed, section 237 (a)(4) of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act gives ICE the authority to arrest and detain noncitizens pending immigration hearings, even if they have committed no crime.
Jorge’s community has fallen into a state of suspended terror. Within a month, another friend was detained at a mandatory ICE check-in, leaving his roommates—including one who cares for a young child—prisoners in their own home, terrified that a trip to the grocery store could be their last moment of freedom.
The Imperial Playbook
Venezuelans are punished at home by U.S. policies that cripple their nation with bombs and sanctions, punished for fleeing the crisis under U.S. narratives of security threats, and punished on U.S. soil as scapegoats for deteriorating living conditions.
Jorge’s story encapsulates the vicious, circular logic of U.S. imperialism. Fleeing Venezuela’s economic and political turmoil—a crisis exacerbated by years of U.S. foreign policy and sanctions—he was encouraged to move north under the promised shield of TPS. Told the city “would be a safe place,” he finally settled in Denver as one of some 40,000 Venezuelan migrants who arrived in Colorado between 2022 and 2024. Yet for many of these migrants, TPS proved to be a Faustian bargain.
This precarious situation was shattered on November 7, when TPS was formally eliminated by the Trump administration for an estimated 250,000 Venezuelans, aided in part by a recent Supreme Court ruling. Overnight, people who had been protected were now reclassified as “illegal” and targeted accordingly. Now they are being deported back to their home country, which faces renewed threats of U.S. military intervention—a move that brings with it the threat of a new cycle of mass human displacement.
This pattern of suffering is not random nor new, but has been erected through bipartisan consensus and forged by a coalition of U.S. hawks and right-wing Venezuelans. While studies show U.S. sanctions are a root cause of the Venezuelan migration crisis, this reality is routinely omitted from media reports. As a result, the exodus itself is weaponized to criminalize the mobility of migrants and undermine Venezuela’s political sovereignty.
Trapped in this never-ending feedback loop of imperial violence, Venezuelans are punished at home by U.S. policies that cripple their nation with bombs and sanctions, punished for fleeing the crisis under U.S. narratives of security threats, and punished on U.S. soil as scapegoats for deteriorating living conditions.
Editor’s note: the names of Jorge and Sophia have been changed to protect their identities.
Isabel María Villalón is an independent scholar and Latin Americanist currently pursuing a master’s degree in Latin American Studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Her recent work focuses on the intersections of neoliberalism, labor, and migration in Central America.
The North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) is an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1966 to examine and critique U.S. imperialism and political, economic, and military intervention in the Western hemisphere. In an evolving political and media landscape, we continue to work toward a world in which the nations and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean are free from oppression, injustice, and economic and political subordination.
