America can no longer ignore the consequences of its failed experiment with sanctuary cities and unchecked illegal immigration. The problem has metastasized beyond our southern border and now threatens communities throughout the nation. Those who continue to deny this fact need to be called out as part of the problem.

The latest outrage is happening because of the loud-and-proud sanctuary city of Denver, Colorado, where foreign gangs have found sanctuary alongside the illegal immigrants. Mayor Michael Johnston, the third-worst sanctuary mayor in America, has championed an effort to fund myriad programs for illegal aliens at the expense of police, public parks, and Department of Motor Vehicles budgets, among other legitimate concerns of citizens. As a result, nearly 40,000 aliens have arrived in the Mile High City since December 2022.

The problems created by Denver’s sanctuary policies would be bad enough if they were contained within the city limits of the citizens who voted to suffer them, but the overcrowding, crime, and drain on public resources have not done that. They have migrated, too. The nearby community of Aurora did not vote to become a sanctuary city, yet Aurora is paying for Denver’s virtue-signaling sanctuary “compassion.”

Aurora, with a population of about 400,000 and located 15 miles east of Denver, made national news recently when video emerged of what appeared to be a group of gang members brandishing handguns and a rifle, taking over an apartment complex and hacking an apartment door open. A shootout later took place that left one person severely injured. Police confirmed the men were suspected members of the notorious Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.

Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman disclosed to Fox News that the gang has pushed out the property management of several apartment buildings through intimidation, and were drawn to those complexes by a concentration of Venezuelan migrants living there.

Faced with unprecedented lawlessness and foreign gang activity, Coffman and City Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky have gone to the media to bring attention the problem. How have state leaders responded to the crisis? Despite video evidence, Colorado Governor Jared Polis’s spokesperson dismissed the takeover as “largely a feature of Danielle Jurinsky’s imagination.” 

Legal residents of Colorado should not be surprised, as Polis has recently signed legislation to allow illegal aliens to obtain drivers’ licenses, attend school, and gain access to taxpayer-funded state government programs. By signing legislation establishing Colorado as a sanctuary state in 2019, Polis banned probation officers from “providing an individual’s personal information to federal immigration authorities.”  

Denver is not the only sanctuary city where Tren de Aragua has set up operations. In New York City, the gang has masterminded a crime ring that steals New Yorkers’ smart phones, uses the financial data on them to plunder victims’ bank accounts, and then sells the phones in South America. The gang has also used the city’s migrant hotels as places to extort money from residents and to recruit new members.

In sanctuary Chicago, a 911 call has gone viral, detailing a Tren de Aragua takeover of an apartment building by 32 gang members that sounds almost identical to the incident in Aurora. In response, a video posted on X by a Chicago resident suggested that further takeover attempts by Tren de Aragua would be met with violence by homegrown gangs. So, in addition to all the other bad consequences of sanctuary policies, cities like Chicago should now brace for shootouts in the streets between American and foreign gangs. Is this part of how “immigration makes us stronger,” as sanctuary mayors have told us ad nauseam?

The many elements of our illegal immigration problem may be complex, but this much is simple: when a community provides incentives to illegal aliens and removes the threat of arrest and deportation, illegal aliens will come to that community in ever-growing numbers. As the situation in Aurora shows, even when large numbers of nonviolent aliens settle in a community, violent criminal aliens often come along with them.

While foreign gangs may prey on legal residents as well, their most frequent targets are their fellow countrymen and women. Permissive attitudes to illegal migration do not display compassion when they become the cause of the same kind of narco-terrorism in the U.S. that the migrants were purportedly trying to escape by leaving their homelands.

For several decades, too many liberal mayors have benefitted politically from their sanctuary preening with little to no cost. Now, because of Joe Biden’s irresponsible surrender of our borders and his urging of the world’s disaffected masses to “surge the border,” the sanctuary chickens have come home to roost. Crime is surging, city treasuries are tapped out, and there is no more housing available as still more aliens try to enter. America needs to seriously rethink its future immigration policy, and the sanctuary concept cannot be a part of it.