Cindy Romero puts her finger in a bullet hole, showing a CBS News Colorado reporter where a projectile tore through her friend’s home before piercing the back of her car. The reporter can’t help herself from nervously glancing over Romero’s shoulder. The gunfire had just sent a man to the hospital, where he would die weeks later. Welcome to Aurora, Colorado.

Life at the apartment complex “The Edge at Lowry,” near Dallas Street and East 12th Avenue has deteriorated over the last year-and-a-half. Crime has surged, along  with seemingly unceasing waves of illegal immigration. Locals like Romero feel that they have been left to fend for themselves against wolves armed with automatic weapons and bad attitudes. “The police would call me and say they weren’t coming unless it was a severe crime,” she told the CBS News reporter Tori Mason. “When I called the police to report a shooting, one officer asked if I had considered moving. If I could have afforded to leave, I would have.” 

Maybe you’ve never heard of Romero, but there’s a chance you’ve seen the scenes captured by her security cameras. In one video, a group of armed men speaking Spanish prowl about her apartment complex before forcing their way into the home of Romero’s neighbor. In another video, two armed men rush the vehicle of a driver who claimed to be looking for a neighbor. Unfortunately for that person, the complex is now under the de facto management of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal organization. The gang’s ranks in America have been bolstered by the illegal immigration that’s been facilitated by the twin efforts of government and nonprofit entities.

Having packs of foreign gangsters terrorizing a community seems like it ought to be the top local leadership concern. But that’s a tricky needle to thread. They don’t want to invite accusations of bigotry, but they can’t totally ignore the problem. Apparently Colorado Governor Jared Polis can ignore it. Indeed, Polis initially sneered when Aurora City Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky called attention to the plight of people like Romero. His office said that the troubles are merely “a feature of Danielle Jurinsky’s imagination” and added that Polis “really hopes that the city council members in charge stop trashing their own city when they are supposed to keep it safe.”

Romero probably wishes that what her cameras recorded were figments of her imagination. The viral footage was powerful enough that it compelled the city to put out a statement on social media. It condemned what was, in the eyes of otiose officials, “misleading information” that “considerably exaggerated incidents that are isolated to a handful of problem properties alone.” One wonders how many apartment complexes criminals must claim as their turf before it is no longer an exaggeration to call it a crisis.

No, the real problem, or at least just as much of a problem as transnational gangs, is that perennial enemy of progress: the landlords. “We will continue to address the problems that the absentee, out-of-state owners of these properties have allowed to fester unchecked,” the city said. “Aurora will aggressively pursue all actions available under city code and criminal statute.” 

Aurora Police Department Interim Chief Heather Morris got in on the denialism and said that “gang members have not taken over” the Romero’s complex. “I’m not saying that there’s not gang members that don’t live in this community (sic),” she said. “But what we’re learning out here is that gang members have not taken over this complex.” 

But the public claims from city officials that all is more or less well in Aurora are contradicted by a nine-page report shared with Aurora’s top administrators in early August. The document, obtained by CBS News, was authored by the law firm Perkins Coie and is labeled “confidential.” The firm details the shockingly aggressive gang takeover of the Whispering Pines Apartments, which is about five miles from Romero’s home. Perkins Coie attorney T. Markus Funk, a former federal prosecutor, wrote:

The evidence we have reviewed indicates that gang members are engaging in flagrant trespass violations, assaults and battery, human trafficking and sexual abuse of minors, unlawful firearms possession, extortion, and other criminal activities, often targeting vulnerable Venezuelan and other immigrant populations.

The report, which was seen by Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, Aurora City Manager Jason Batchelor, and the interim police chief, says that “Tren de Aragua has threatened to kill (and, in certain instances, has apparently actively attempted to kill) members of Whispering Pines management.”

A property manager with 15 years of experience in the industry told investigators that he “had never seen anything remotely like the Tren de Aragua takeover of Whispering Pines in his entire career.” The gang began seizing control of the complex in 2023, which fits with what Romero said about Aurora’s rapid and general deterioration over the last year or so. 

The report is filled with anecdotes that paint a terrifying picture of lawlessness.

In November 2023, a consultant for the property management company was, without provocation, “so severely beaten and stomped by gang members that he had to go to the hospital.” In April 2024, a housekeeper told the property manager that two men with “large firearms” were “coming to kill him.” Both were behind on rent. Fortunately, the police arrived in time to arrest them before they could get to their would-be victim. 

But a man living at The Edge just a few miles away wasn’t so lucky. On the night of Aug. 18, residents there awakened to a cacophony of gunfire from various kinds of weapons of different calibers. Police later revealed that the victim, 25-year-old Oswaldo Jose Dabion Araujo, died of his wounds in the hospital. “Warfare,” was the term Romero used to describe the experience to reporters. “You don’t expect to hear that when you are laying your head down at night,” Romero told reporters. 

However, other residents, including some of the more recent arrivals, don’t mind laying down to cordite scents and rat-a-tat lullabies. On the same day that police confirmed Araujo’s death, protestors gathered in front of the apartments where he was shot, where they inveighed in Spanish against xenophobia and discrimination that they say has been fomented by media coverage of Aurora’s gang problem. Like city officials, they placed the blame for the trouble on the landlords rather than on the vicious gangs. “I say the only criminal here is the owner,” a tenant said. One man held up a dead rat for the news cameras. Araujo’s corpse was presumably unavailable for use as a prop during this photoshoot.

Perkins Coie documented incidents in which gang members attempted to collect rent from tenants. The property manager at Whispering Pines said he was approached by gang members who told him they’d help him “if he agreed to pay the gang 50% of everything the property management company collected in rent.” According to investigators, these criminals would seize control of vacant units and begin charging residents. One of the gang members told a housekeeper that they were merely carrying out their “business plan.” If the property manager didn’t like it, he added, they’d “fill him with bullets.”

Aurora’s scapegoating of property owners is shameful. But the city at least adopted a resolution in February affirming its “non-sanctuary” status, demanding “that other municipalities and entities do not systematically transport migrants or people experiencing homelessness to the city for temporary housing without the City first being given an opportunity to coordinate such assistance with those other municipalities.” 

Since 2022, nearly 40,000 illegal immigrants have arrived in neighboring Denver. The overflow from the immigration crisis has spilled into other municipalities, like Aurora, that have far fewer resources at their disposal than a big city. Nevertheless, one woman named Nayda Benitez, whose family left their home country and landed in Aurora, called the city’s resolution “incredible infuriating” and “anti-immigrant.” 

Also in opposition was Khalid Mhareb, who said that Aurora should subsidize the arrival of more migrants by cutting fat elsewhere, namely, law enforcement. “Why are we not taking away money from the Aurora police department?” Mhareb asked. “Aurora is supposed to be a safe haven for immigrants, even though we’re not a sanctuary city like some of our council members want to say… Aurora is an all-American city.” 

An all-American city that is transforming into a Third World one.

How these people can import their ingratitude from around the world to a city near you is often the result of collaboration between the government and nonprofits that provide food, housing, transportation, and more. One such entity is the Village Exchange Center, which provides meals, wraparound services, and vaccine clinics. “Every week, we’re serving about 3,300 people per week,” Amanda Blaurock, the group’s co-founder and executive director, told Denver7. “A big portion of those people are some of the new immigrants from Venezuela.” 

Earlier this year, the center wrote a letter that Colorado’s senators sent to FEMA requesting that Aurora be included in the next round of funding. They were joined in that effort by the Migrant Response Network, a constellation of nonprofits all working together to facilitate mass immigration and resettlement in the U.S. The network has grown from 15 or 20 entities in January 2023 to approximately 180 today. These groups work with governments but have their own agendas. It showed when Gov. Polis conceded a crisis was at hand in a fairly milquetoast statement.

“Over the last month, I have been in regular contact with the City of Aurora and the Aurora Police Department and have offered any and all state assistance to support their efforts if requested,” Polis said, in a statement released a few days after he had mocked Jurinsky. “The state has been ready for weeks to back up any operation by the Aurora Police Department needed to make Aurora safer.”

The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that advocates for immigrants, wasn’t happy about it. They accused Polis of participating in “disinformation and stereotyping.” The committee reported more than $116 million in assets in 2022 and gets funding from left-wing incubators like the Tides Foundation, which, in turn, receives substantial funding from George Soros. 

Romero told reporters that locals feel desperate and abandoned by their leaders, save a few like Jurinsky. “You are elected to protect your constituents. You fundraise off your promises, yet you left us to die,” she said. Jurinsky personally helped move people looking to escape The Edge, those who could no longer bear living in a constant state of fear and had found a way out.

But for many others, there is nowhere to run. That is the broader tapestry of which Aurora is a single thread. A nation that resigns itself to managed decline is one in which there will, at some point, be no place left to turn.   ◆