Former President Donald Trump repeatedly debunked rumors linking Venezuelan gangs to the Colorado town during Tuesday night’s presidential debate.
Social media posts falsely claiming a Venezuelan gang has taken over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, have circulated widely in pro-Trump communities, and right-wing pundits have gained momentum in recent weeks.
Even after local officials publicly denied that the Tren de Aragua gang had taken over the building, sensationalist claims vaguely linking the rumors to Colorado’s growing immigrant population continued to circulate on social media. Trump further reinforced them last week, bringing up the rumors several times at recent rallies and interviews — and then again during Tuesday night’s debate.
“Our country is flooded with millions of people. … You are looking at the Aurora in Colorado. They take over the cities. They occupy buildings. They’re going in by force,” Trump said on stage in Philadelphia. “They are destroying our country. They are dangerous. They are at the highest level of crime. And we have to get them out.”
Viral rumors used “the most common forms of disinformation” tactics, such as reposting old videos without context, distorting existing information and “frankensteining” misleading evidence together to create a false narrative, according to the News Literacy Project, a non-profit fact-finding organization. -verified by the organization that debunked the rumor.
Roberta Braga, founder and director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas, a nonprofit organization that studies the impact of misinformation on Latino communities, told NBC News that the false claims surrounding the Tren de Aragua are just the latest examples of rumors created to fuel a larger narrative that the purpose is to demonize immigrants.
“Very often we see these claims related to immigrants being criminals or gang members, claims that portray them as the source of increased crime and insecurity in the United States broadly, in a way that directly blames them for what people see as the decline of American society,” Braga said.
Residents of the Aurora apartments, many of them immigrants from Venezuela and other Latin American countries, have denied false rumors of a gang takeover and said they feel increasingly unsafe after being unfairly labeled as criminals.
“Right now, I’m scared because of what’s been created, and all the xenophobic hate has increased against us,” Carlos Ordosgoitti, a Venezuelan man who lives in one of the Aurora buildings, told NBC affiliate KUSA from Denver in Spanish. “I’m really scared.”
How it all began
The false claim of foreclosure originated with the owner of three Aurora apartment complexes: a real estate agent sued in municipal court for years of unresolved health and safety code violations.
Rat and insect infestations, overflowing trash, sewage storage, water leaks and deteriorating infrastructure are some of the violations documented at least after February 2021, city officials have said.
But the property management company that owns the buildings blamed a Venezuelan gang for the dilapidated conditions. Over the summer, an attorney representing the company sent letters to local police and city and state officials claiming the gang had “taken over by force,” the Denver Gazette reported.
The claims were repeated by city officials, mostly conservatives, without concrete evidence, KUSA reported.
The argument escalated in the last week of August when local media outlets, including KUSA, reported video from a resident showing a group of men carrying guns inside one of the buildings and apparently trying to break open the apartment door.
Aurora police have not yet determined whether the men in the video belong to a Venezuelan gang, KUSA reports.
Aurora police have said they investigated the presence of Tren de Aragua in cooperation with Denver police. But “gang members are not taking over” the Aurora apartment complex, police said, adding that gang activity remains “isolated.”
“Every time an immigrant commits a single crime in the United States, it’s picked up and then blown out of proportion to condemn all immigrants,” Braga said.
Misinformation spreads despite being exposed
Clips from a video showing armed men inside an Aurora apartment building were used, along with footage from a two-month-old Brazilian motorcycle parade, to create an Instagram post that falsely claimed members of the outlaw motorcycle club Hells Angels were heading to Aurora “to save the city after Venezuelan gangs took over the apartments “. The Colorado chapter of the Hells Angels released a statement denying the claims.
Instagram’s parent company Meta branded the post as containing false information after its fact-checking partners debunked the claims. But that didn’t stop the spread of misinformation as new videos with the same claims but different outdated and out-of-context clips went viral on social media platforms.
Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public who studies rumors about immigrants and non-citizens, told NBC News that the false data model appears to reflect online behavior commonly known among “news reporting” social media accounts. Often hiding behind catchy usernames and cartoonish avatars, such accounts “curate and disseminate information about a crisis event” and often fabricate inflammatory content to suit a particular agenda.
Another anti-immigrant rumor that spread this week, which Trump repeated on stage Tuesday night, was a debunked claim that Haitian immigrants harmed domestic animals.
In a joint interview with KUSA, Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, a Republican, and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a Democrat, said other long-standing criminal organizations in the region remain a bigger threat than the Venezuelan gang.
But the “current environment of hysteria” will hamper their ability to ensure Tren de Aragua doesn’t gain a foothold in the region, Coffman said. Coffman even described an example where some people confused an impromptu meeting of Venezuelans awaiting the results of their country’s presidential election with gang activity.
Aurora police have arrested 10 people connected to Tren de Aragua, KUSA reports.
Despite efforts to dispel myths and rumors about a Venezuelan gang presence in Aurora, new false narratives continued to appear online, including posts by X falsely claiming that Aurora police had issued a shelter-in-place order in response to Venezuelan gang violence and that Venezuelan gangs began taking over apartments in Chicago after taking over one in Aurora.
Both messages remain in X without any label to inform users that they contain false information. The posts have collected 26.3 million views and have been republished more than 40,000 times. X did not respond to an email requesting comment.
Let’s make immigration a political flashpoint
As part of their political platform, Republicans focus on hard-line immigration policies and tighter border security. They have often focused on narratives that connect immigration and crime.
Denver is one of the cities that has welcomed tens of thousands of migrants over the past year as part of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s bus campaign to push for tighter security at the southern border.
In search of a lower cost of living, many migrants settled in nearby Aurora, where officials had said they could not help recent arrivals because they did not have the “financial capacity to fund new services related to this crisis.” Still, some of the immigrants ended up living in apartment buildings, which have been at the center of controversy recently.
After Trump repeatedly drew attention to Aurora by suggesting that a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment complex there, immigrant communities were unexpectedly drawn into a heated political debate.
“People need to realize that immigration is a common theme that misinformers are taking advantage of this election season. We should be especially careful when faced with claims that seem designed to incite anger, outrage or fear — or that are designed to divide us,” Christina Veiga, a spokeswoman for the News Literacy Project, told NBC News in a statement. “Voters can avoid having their votes bogged down by being aware of this trend and taking a few simple steps to verify whether the claims they see are true.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
