In Aurora, Colorado, a division on the largest threat to the city: migrants or Trump?

The dilapidated apartments in Aurora, Colorado, that President Trump took to insist on the fact that the city had been invaded by the Venezuelan road gangs are now embarked and almost empty. But in a building, the destroyed door of Apartment 300 captures the new divisions sown by the repression of the immigration of Mr. Trump.

On a recent spring morning, a crew of construction workers who were arranging the apartments indicated the door as proof of the violence caused by the criminals left to enter the democrats. “They allowed this absurdity of the sanctuary,” said Karl Baker, a contractor, who voted for Mr. Trump.

Jackenin Melendez, who lives nearby, had a different explanation. The door, he said, had been welcomed during an immigration raid last month. The men inside were workers, not members of the band, he said. Even the agents of the police had beaten his door that morning, terrifying his children.

“We are captured in the middle,” Mrs. Melendez said in Spanish, who is not documented and by El Salvador.

Only those who are responsible for destroying the door are unclear. What is clear is that Mr. Trump did Aurora a national stenography For migrant crime after repeatedly declaring that the vast suburb of Denver, the population 400,000 and the third largest city in the Colorado, had been detected by the Venezuelan Band Tren de Aragua. He indicated a viral video of armed men who persecute the rooms of one of the three complexes of carts in which hundreds of immigrants had settled.

Trump baptized his plan to expel the Aurora operation, although the city’s conservative republican mayor protested against the fact that Aurora had not been detected by Tren de Araguas, and the police chief said that Aurora had arrested people suspected of gang activities and had the subject under control.

Now, while Mr. Trump increases his repression by invoking the powers in war time to expel hundreds of Venezuelans without hearings in court, Aurora is divided on which he represents a greater threat: immigrants without documents or Mr. Trump.

The accessibility and proximity of Aurora to Denver made an Ellis island for a long time on the high plains, where 160 languages ​​are spoken in schools and a city slogan He declares that “Aurora is open to the world”. It has its difficult points, but Aurora also has wealth and the medical campus of Anchutz University of Colorado Anschutz – none of which has been invaded by the Venezuelan bands.

The suburb is also politically diversified. While the Denver area struggled to cope with 40,000 migrants who had come from the southern border, it They were not only rich white swick voters In the subdivisions of Cul-de-Sacs and Golf courses of Aurora who moved to Mr. Trump. Several Hispanic voters of the working class have declared that they had been persuaded to support the Republican from his promises to chase the gangs.

In the two months since Mr. Trump entered office, a handful of high -profile execution actions have rejoiced his conservative supporters in Aurora. But they also sown fear in the large immigrant population of the city and in the doubts between some Latins who voted for Mr. Trump.

In In early FebruaryTeams of federal agents, clothes with tactical equipment and transporting smoke granate, have made incursions for immigration of a day that have targeted houses and condominiums through Metropolitan Denver. They entered two ruined complexes in Aurora where immigrants had lived without hydraulic systems or heat, in apartments infested with cockroaches and bedbugs. Immigration and customs application refused to say how many people had been arrested that day – or if the agency had arrested the members of the gang.

Last weekAn activist without documents named Jeanette Vizguerra was arrested outside a destination shop where he worked in the Denver area. He was brought to a detention center for immigrants in Aurora, where the deportation is now fighting.

Mr. Trump’s approach has thrilled voters such as Robert Johnston, a republican contractor who works in Aurora and repaired the complexes of apartments now committed, in which the officials of the city say that an owner owned outside the State has exaggerated the story of a gang that acquires his responsibilities for the tenants for Shirk. The owner, the management of the CBZ, denied the accusation, but the properties were closed by the city or put in the administration on the administration of the court.

Johnston said that the raids showed that Mr. Trump was following his promises to eradicate criminal immigrants.

“He did the things he said he would do,” Johnston said. “If you come here to cause problems, if you are trying to cause chaos, this is not the place for you.”

Danielle Jurinsky, a conservative councilor of Aurora who contributed to advertising the statements on the band activity in the condominiums of Aurora last summer, praised Mr. Trump and declared that he was electrified by the posts on social media of the ice that announced the arrests of immigrants with criminal accusations.

“I helped to put them on the run from Colorado, in particular Aurora,” he said in a post on social media. “I am happy to see them arrested across the country.”

But Andres Barron, a pilot of the immigrated elevator trolley in Colorado from Mexico, said he believed that the actions of Mr. Trump were transforming all immigrants into targets. He voted for Mr. Trump in November – his first vote as an American citizen – but said Trump had been too concentrated on indiscriminate immigration raid and had ignored high prices and weaknesses in the largest economy.

“I didn’t think he would do it with immigration,” said Barron. “Many of us are starting to try some regret for our votes.”

Barron said that even if he had lost hours in his warehouse work and did not see any improvement in prices, the case of immigration of his wife Raquel had blocked himself without any explanation. Since the incursions around Denver and the arrest of Mrs. Vizguerra, her wife has become so worried about being collected by immigration agents that she refuses to make commissions alone.

“First I felt comfortable to go out to the shop without him,” said Raquel. “Now, no.”

School attendance and business in some of the Hispanic food stores of Aurora and the food rooms fell immediately after the raids, but the numbers are gradually rebounded, the city officials said. Some documents without documents said they could not stop working or keeping their children at home from school indefinitely and that they were now using the WhatsApp chat groups to discuss the safest times or the best routes to use when they ventured.

Aurora’s leaders claim to have worked to close the squalid apartments in the center of the dispute on the presence of Tren de Aragua in the city. The groups of help affirm that many former residents still live in the Safe Motel salt and have struggled to find new apartments in a region with a serious lack of accommodation at affordable prices.

“I still have mice and cockroaches,” said Javier Hidalgo, a Venezuelan immigrant who had to find new accommodations when the city closed its complex in Street’s name. “It was really difficult. I thought it was a country that welcomed immigrants.”

The Aurora Police Department has announced the arrests of more than a dozen people suspected of being in the Tren de Aragua gang, too Five armed men The police say they were captured with videos knocking on the doors in one of the buildings a few minutes before a fatal shooting.

But Aurora and Colorado continue to face public control from the Trump administration.

In his joint speech at the Congress at the beginning of this month, Trump identified Aurora and Springfield, Ohio, as a city that had been “destroyed” by immigration and had “tied under the weight of the migrant employment”.

Last week, Ice accused Aurora of refusing to help in the search for two migrants who had escaped the detention structure when a current interruption allowed them to slide out a door on the back. Aurora rejected the criticisms, saying that the city had not been informed of the escape for almost five hours.

“The problem was so exaggerated by ice,” said Mayor Mike Coffman, who spent most of the last few months trying to check the damage for the reputation of his city.

During a recent visit to Colorado, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Derek Maltz, said, said that the “command and control” of the Tren de Aragua gang was in Colorado. He called the “Ground Zero” state for some of the country’s most violent criminals. Mr. Coffman did not agree. “I don’t see him,” he said.

Each new mention of a case of immigration involving Aurora or Colorado brings a new deluge of angry e-mails and social media messages, followed by another tour of attempts by the city officials to insist on the fact that their city is not invaded and that they collaborate with the Federal police and the immigration agents within the borders established by the laws of Colorado.

“The middle way was a difficult place to be, to recognize that there was a problem and the problem was real,” said Coffman. “But the city is not invaded. We have not been invaded. Trump’s supporters have been infuriated. The president said, so he had to be true.”