Former President Donald Trump continued to make nonsense claims about Venezuelan gangs somehow taking over apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado, ramping up his anti-immigrant rhetoric into overdrive.
However, local officials and fact-checkers—as with a number of Trump’s and conservatives’ other lies carrying across the nation—have repeatedly debunked these exaggerated assertions as baseless fear-mongering.
Because Trump and his constituents have no relation with the truth, the Republican candidate is pressing forward as if everything he vomits up for public consumption is gospel.
Presenting himself as the historical Übermensch at recent rallies, Trump declared he would “rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered” by migrants. He painted a nonsensical fiction of “an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals” destroying American cities. Trump even called for the death penalty for any migrant who kills a U.S. citizen or law enforcement officer.
As much as Trump would like it to be what he says, the reality in Aurora is far different from his utterly absurd portrayal. While the city has seen an influx of Venezuelan migrants fleeing their country’s economic crisis, claims of widespread gang activity are entirely unfounded. Aurora’s Republican Mayor Mike Coffman stated that “concerns about Venezuelan gang activity have been grossly exaggerated.” Police investigations have found no evidence of gang takeovers in apartment complexes despite viral social media posts suggesting otherwise.
In fact, major crime rates in Aurora have dropped year-over-year, according to police statistics. The uproar actually stems largely from complaints about building code violations and poor living conditions in certain low-income apartment complexes—issues related to years of negligent property management, per one report. In other words, we’re talking about bad landlords, not organized crime.
Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric echoes tactics used by authoritarian leaders and more recent segregationists throughout history, like late, racist Alabama governor George Wallace. Just as those despots in their day, by scapegoating vulnerable immigrant populations and portraying them as an existential threat, Trump aims to stoke xenophobic fears (based on nothing) among voters. This approach paradoxically casts immigrants as both deviant criminals and hapless invaders incapable of integration.
On top of the dehumanization of immigrants leading to the justification of harsh enforcement targeting and police measures, Trump’s rhetoric also ignores evidence showing immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. Trump’s calls to expand the death penalty specifically for migrants who commit violent crimes, when a white American is more likely to commit a violent crime, is an apparent attempt to narrow any idea of liberty for immigrants.
Despite the great flood of racist foolishness all over the internet, tighter voter scrutiny of candidates’ claims about immigration and crime will be paramount, making it necessary to seek out factual data from local officials and trusted news sources—versus, y’know, what your uncle heard on TikTok.
Published: Oct 14, 2024 02:53 am