In Aurora, Colo., a Split Over the Biggest Threat to the City: Migrants or Trump?

The crumbling apartments in Aurora, Colo., that President Trump seized on to insist the city had been overrun by Venezuelan street gangs are now boarded up and nearly empty. But in one building, the smashed door of Apartment 300 captures the fresh divisions sown by Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown.

On a recent spring morning, a crew of construction workers fixing up the apartments pointed to the door as evidence of the violence wrought by criminals let into the country by Democrats. “They allowed this sanctuary nonsense,” said Karl Baker, a contractor, who voted for Mr. Trump.

Jackelin Melendez, who lives nearby, had a different explanation. The door, she said, had been kicked in during an immigration raid last month. The men inside were laborers, not gang members, she said. Law enforcement agents had pounded on her door that morning too, terrifying her children.

“We’re caught in the middle,” Ms. Melendez, who is undocumented and from El Salvador, said in Spanish.

Just who is responsible for smashing the door remains unclear. What is clear is that Mr. Trump has made Aurora a national shorthand for migrant crime after declaring repeatedly that the vast Denver suburb, population 400,000 and Colorado’s third-largest city, had been taken over by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. He pointed to a viral video of armed men stalking the halls of one of three rundown complexes where hundreds of immigrants had settled.

Mr. Trump christened his plan to expel them Operation Aurora, even as the city’s conservative Republican mayor protested that Aurora had not been taken over by Tren de Aragua, and the police chief said Aurora had arrested people suspected of gang activity and had the matter under control.

Now, as Mr. Trump ramps up his crackdown by invoking wartime powers to deport hundreds of Venezuelans without court hearings, Aurora is split over which poses a greater threat: undocumented immigrants, or Mr. Trump.

Aurora’s affordability and closeness to Denver have long made it an Ellis Island on the high plains, where 160 languages are spoken in the schools, and a city slogan declares that “Aurora is open to the world.” It has its rough spots, but Aurora has wealth too and the sparkling University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus — none of which has been overrun by Venezuelan gangs.

The suburb is also politically diverse. As the Denver area struggled to cope with 40,000 migrants who had arrived from the southern border, it wasn’t just wealthy white swing voters in Aurora’s gated cul-de-sacs and golf-course subdivisions who swung toward Mr. Trump. Several working-class Hispanic voters said they had been persuaded to support the Republican by his promises to go after gangs.

In the two months since Mr. Trump took office, a handful of high-profile enforcement actions have cheered his conservative supporters in Aurora. But they have also sown fear in the city’s large immigrant population and misgivings among some Latinos who voted for Mr. Trump.

In early February, teams of federal agents, dressed in tactical gear and carrying smoke grenades, carried out daylong immigrations raids that targeted homes and apartment buildings across metropolitan Denver. They entered two run-down complexes in Aurora where immigrants had lived without working plumbing or heat, in apartments infested with cockroaches and bedbugs. Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to say how many people had been arrested that day — or if the agency had detained gang members.

Last week, an outspoken undocumented activist named Jeanette Vizguerra was arrested outside a Target store where she worked in the Denver area. She was taken to an immigrant detention center in Aurora, where she is now fighting deportation.

Mr. Trump’s get-tough approach has thrilled voters like Robert Johnston, a Republican contractor who works in Aurora and has been repairing the now-emptied apartment complexes, where city officials say an out-of-state property owner exaggerated the story of a gang takeover to shirk his responsibilities to the tenants. The landlord, CBZ Management, denied the charge, but the properties have been closed by the city or put into court-ordered receivership.

Mr. Johnston said the raids showed that Mr. Trump was following through with his promises to root out criminal immigrants.

“He’s been doing the stuff he said he was going to do,” Mr. Johnston said. “If you’re coming here to cause trouble, if you’re looking to wreak havoc, this is not the place for you.”

Danielle Jurinsky, a conservative Aurora councilwoman who helped to publicize the claims about gang activity in the Aurora apartment buildings last summer, praised Mr. Trump and said she was thrilled by ICE social-media posts announcing the arrests of immigrants with criminal charges.

“I helped put them on the run from Colorado, specifically Aurora,” she said in a social-media post. “I’m happy to see them being arrested all over the country.”

But Andres Barron, a forklift driver who immigrated to Colorado from Mexico, said he believed Mr. Trump’s actions were turning all immigrants into targets. He voted for Mr. Trump in November — his first vote as an American citizen — but said Mr. Trump had been too focused on indiscriminate immigration raids and had ignored high prices and weaknesses in the larger economy.

“I didn’t think he’d do this with immigration,” Mr. Barron said. “A lot of us are starting to feel a little regret about our votes.”

Mr. Barron said that even as he had lost hours at his warehouse job and seen no improvement in prices, the immigration case of his wife, Raquel, had stalled without any explanation. Since the raids around Denver and the arrest of Ms. Vizguerra, his wife has become so worried about being picked up by immigration agents that she refuses to run errands alone.

“Before, I felt comfortable going out to the store without him,” Raquel said. “Now, no.”

School attendance and business at some of Aurora’s Hispanic grocery stores and food halls fell immediately after the raids, but the numbers have gradually rebounded, city officials said. Some undocumented immigrants said that they could not stop working or keep their children home from school indefinitely, and that they were now using WhatsApp chat groups to discuss the safest times or best routes to use when they ventured out.

Aurora leaders say they have worked to shut down the squalid apartments at the center of the controversy over Tren de Aragua’s presence in the city. Aid groups say many of the former residents are still living in subsidized motel rooms and have struggled to find new apartments in a region with a severe shortage of affordable housing.

“I still have mice and roaches,” said Javier Hidalgo, a Venezuelan immigrant who had to find new housing when the city closed his complex on Nome Street. “It’s been really hard. I thought this 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, including five armed men the police say were captured on video knocking on doors in one of the buildings minutes before a fatal shooting.

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

In his joint address to Congress earlier this month, Mr. Trump singled out Aurora and Springfield, Ohio, as cities had been “destroyed” by immigration and had “buckled under the weight of migrant occupation.”

Last week, ICE accused Aurora of declining to help in the search for two migrants who had escaped the detention facility when a power outage enabled them to slip out a back door. Aurora rejected the criticism, saying the city had not been notified of the escape for nearly five hours.

“The issue was so exaggerated by ICE,” said Mayor Mike Coffman, who has spent much of the past months trying to do damage control for his city’s reputation.

On a recent visit to Colorado, the acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Derek Maltz, said the “command and control” of the Tren de Aragua gang was in Colorado. He called the state “ground zero” for some of the country’s most violent criminals. Mr. Coffman disagreed. “I don’t see it,” he said.

Every new mention of an immigration case involving Aurora or Colorado brings a fresh deluge of angry emails and social-media messages, followed by another round of attempts by city officials to insist that their city is not overrun and that they cooperate with federal law enforcement and immigration agents within the boundaries set by Colorado laws.

“The middle ground was a hard place to be, to acknowledge that there was a problem, and the problem was real,” Mr. Coffman said. “But the city’s not being overrun. We’ve not been invaded. Trump supporters were enraged by that. The president said it, so it had to be true.”