The profanity-filled text message called them “animals” and warned them to “be ready” for a militia gearing up to fight — because “everyone who hates illegals know where you live.”
Jerson, a Venezuelan who came to Colorado in December, had been selling empanadas, arepas and Gatorade to people living in his apartment complex as they finished their work day, and he had included his phone number on the green poster-board menu that he hung in his apartment window.
A photo of the menu — including his phone number — ended up on X, with the author of the post saying “Venezuelan gangs open restaurant.”
Then came the text: “I hope you know the Colorado veterans are building a militia with more fire power then you guys could ever imagine.”
It wasn’t the only vulgar, anti-immigrant message that Jerson, who doesn’t want his full name used because he fears for his life, has received in the past week as conservative local elected officials and media across the world have warned that a Venezuelan gang has “taken over” three apartment complexes in Aurora.
Unknown intruders hung signs in the hallways of one of the buildings calling it time to take back the city. A local gang graffitied the walls with their signs. Tenants say a vehicle drove by as its occupants held up guns and shouted, “F- Venezuelans!” And there were rumors for days that the Hells Angels were coming on their motorcycles to attack the residents, until the Hells Angels released a statement saying they were in fact not getting involved.
At this point, tenants interviewed by The Colorado Sun say they are more scared of white supremacists and people with animosity toward immigrants than they ever were of a Venezuelan gang.
Residents more concerned about rodents, bed bugs, leaky ceilings
The anti-immigrant backlash and the tendency to equate newcomers to the United States with criminality is nothing new, say sociology and criminology experts, who point out that it’s been happening since the first waves of Irish, Italian and Polish immigrants more than 100 years ago. This is despite the fact that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people who were born in the country, according to decades of research.
The pending presidential election — when immigration is among the most contentious issues in the nation and after more than 40,000 South American migrants have come through Denver alone in the past year and a half — brings even more hysteria to the situation, the experts said.
Anti-immigrant sentiment and xenophobia aimed at Venezuelans has escalated rapidly since the property management company running the three apartment complexes blamed their dilapidated condition on a “takeover” by the infamous gang Tren de Aragua, saying their property manager was too afraid to collect rent. A Fox News video showing armed men outside an apartment door fueled the fire. Aurora City Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky blamed “failed border policies” and helped a few residents move out of one of the apartments, then social media exploded with unfounded politically charged accusations, including that gang members were looting the local Target.
Aurora police said they have identified 10 people linked to the Tren de Aragua gang, including six in custody. There have been no arrests related to extorting rent from residents of the apartment complexes, though two brothers who are gang members were arrested in connection with a shooting near one of the apartments this summer. Aurora Police Chief Heather Morris said the apartments had not been taken over by any gang, contradicting the mayor and other city officials.
There are 36 known gangs operating in Aurora, according to a 2023 report.
Tenants of three apartment complexes, including one condemned and cleared out by the city last month, say they were already worried about the rats, bed bugs, cockroaches, leaky ceilings, mold and exposed wires in their apartments. Now they are the target of racism on a level they had not experienced since coming to this country.
“It 110% involved racism”
Jerson, 30, has stopped selling food from his apartment because of the threats. He’s been assembling furniture to help earn the $1,200 in monthly rent for the apartment he shares with his uncle and two cousins. Jerson said he’s been looking for more work, but potential employers have turned him away when they find out he is Venezuelan.
“I don’t even feel safe,” Jerson said in Spanish, describing how a local Mexican gang came to the apartments this week offering to sell him guns. “And every day people are coming here to record with their phones, like this was a zoo or something. You feel like you’re exposed.”
Most of the 1,500 people in the three apartment complexes are immigrants, including families from Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras and Puerto Rico, said V Reeves, an advocate with Housekeys Action Network in Denver. “All of these families with children, they’re working, they are going to be crucified and end up on the streets,” Reeves said.
The living conditions in the apartments, including lack of trash pickup, mold and broken appliances, have been bad for years, so when the property management company distributed a news release blaming a Venezuelan gang for the issues, Reeves was shocked.
“It was a pretty disgusting press release and it was very offensive and untrue,” Reeves said. “The statement was an incredibly racist one.”
Now people who had to leave the condemned building last month are struggling to find housing, and residents of the other two complexes are worried about where they will live if their buildings are also shut down. “No one is accepting them because they are seeing their address and saying they are from the gang apartments,” Reeves said. “They’re worried about finding jobs. Children are having nightmares.”
Meanwhile, some city officials sided with the landlord and “blamed an ethnicity group,” Reeves said.
“It’s gross,” Reeves said.
Nadeen Ibrahim, who is the organizing director for the East Colfax Community Collective and has been helping people in east Denver and Aurora find housing, said the way the Venezuelan gang story blew up across the internet “110% involved racism.”
Tenants believe the public now thinks they are associated with criminal activity and that their apartment buildings are so dangerous that “people shouldn’t even go there without a police escort,” Ibrahim said.
“When people were talking about organizing and what action they needed to take, they kept repeating the phrase ‘We need to clear our name,’” Ibrahim said. “These families support each other. No one is afraid of anyone else. They are taking care of each other’s children.”
The way she sees it, the New York-based property management company CBZ Management, made the Venezuelans the scapegoat. “All this rhetoric has been another out for the landlord,” she said. “This story caught national attention with the focus on the Venezuelan gang rather than the slumlord.”
“Exploited for political gain”
CBZ Property Management did not return a request for comment through its attorney. But in a June 28 letter to the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, the property management company said that the three complexes — Whispering Pines, Aspen Grove Apartments and Edge of Lowry — had been “forcibly taken control of by gangs that have immigrated here from Venezuela.”
The property manager, the attorney wrote, had “taken refuge” because he was “concerned for his life” and the company had complained to the Aurora Police Department and requested to meet with Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman.
Coffman told Fox News last week that the apartments had “fallen to these Venezuelan gangs” and that they have “kind of pushed out the property management through intimidation and then collected the rents.”
The mayor said it differently Thursday when he told The Sun that he does “not believe that a gang is in control of the apartment complexes and is forcibly collecting rents from the tenants.”
“I’m concerned that the situation, although serious, has been exploited for political gain,” Coffman said via email, after spending time at the apartments talking to tenants this week. “I fully understand that there is a problem at the properties associated with a cultural pattern that whenever there is a concentration of Venezuelan migrants that there is often a Venezuelan criminal element that follows to exploit them.”
Instead, Coffman said, it seems the tenants stopped paying rent after property managers left the premises and no longer offered services.
Tenants at one complex near Helena Street told The Sun on Thursday that trash service had stopped and no one was responding to requests to fix a leaky ceiling or mold growing behind the refrigerator. At another complex, on Dallas Street, the lowest floor was covered with about 2 inches of water from Wednesday night’s storm.
"Hoards,” “Takeover” and “Overrun” used throughout history
Even former President Donald Trump is talking about what’s happening in Aurora.
“Take a look at Aurora in Colorado, where Venezuelans are taking over the whole town, they’re taking over buildings, the whole town,” Trump said during a Fox News town hall Wednesday night. “You saw it the other day they’re knocking down doors and occupying apartments of people.”
The “perceived threats of immigrant newcomers and this sense that they are prone to criminality is not new,” said Lisa Martinez, a sociology and criminology professor at the University of Denver. “That’s always been the case with new arrivals. It’s also not surprising with the lead up to the presidential election.”
Martinez watched the hysteria play out close to home, after a post on NextDoor from a neighbor who was scared about the Venezuelan gang and “using the language of fear and xenophobia,” or dislike of people from other countries. “There were some neighbors who pushed back against it,” she said.
The story of the gang aligns with long-standing tropes that dehumanize immigrants, she said. “It’s almost easier to dehumanize people, and one of the ways to do that is to say they are criminals,” Martinez said.
In the 1920s, after significant immigration from southern and Eastern Europe, Congress set up commissions to study the “immigrant crime problem,” said Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a professor of constitutional and immigration law at the University of Colorado. A 1926 report could not substantiate any link between immigration and crime, and numerous subsequent studies also have failed to find a correlation, said Gulasekaram, who has spent the past four months studying the subject.
“We have endemic public policy concerns that exist in the United States,” Gulasekaram said. “When you have a racially distinct, national origin group of people, it seems like the easiest thing to do is to blame the endemic public policy problem on that group. It has an innate appeal to people. But the problems existed before and will exist after.”
Throughout history, when the U.S. is concerned about immigration, politicians and the media use the same sensationalistic language: “hoards” of immigrants, a “takeover,” being “overrun,” Gulasekaram said.
“It’s a worn story” and it’s “evergreen,” he said. In the early 1840s, Irish immigrants fleeing famine were depicted in editorial cartoons as subhuman. Later, Chinese immigrants coming to San Francisco, Oregon and Washington were accused of corrupting the morals of white women. And Mexican immigrants smoke marijuana, according to the well-worn trope.
“We came here because of a dream”
The apartment Francy Rodriguez and Anthony Brabo moved into in January had no working shower, black mold behind the refrigerator and no heat. Gaps around the broken air-conditioning unit in the wall made their apartment especially cold, so the family slept huddled around a space heater.
With no maintenance or trash service for weeks at the complex on Helena Street, the residents have started putting all of their garbage together and taking turns hauling it away. Their apartment, which they share with seven cats and kittens they rescued as strays, has exposed wires, electrical outlets that shoot sparks and water leaks. They were paying $1,800 per month until the property management left, and said they have received no assistance from the city of Denver or nonprofits that have helped thousands of migrants with a few months rent.
The couple’s two daughters go to high school and middle school in Aurora. Brabo and Rodriguez, who operated a restaurant while living in Peru, used to sell homemade food in Aurora but stopped after they said someone falsely reported that they were selling drugs and alcohol. Brabo occasionally finds work while waiting outside a Home Depot.
When they moved in, Brabo painted and did other maintenance in the apartment complex in what he thought was an exchange for decreased rent, but he did not get a break on the rent, he said. He also was not reimbursed for the supplies he used to repair holes in their apartment walls, or the door he bought for the bathroom because it didn’t have one.
It’s been a struggle since they arrived in Colorado nine months ago. It’s gotten even harder over the past week, they said.
“We’ve been through so much to get here and other people are judging us all,” Rodriguez said. “That’s what everyone’s worried about. We came here because of a dream, for a dream, a new life. And because of xenophobia, everyone treats us like this.”
Brabo said his biggest concerns now are people who hate Venezuelans or blame them for the actions of a few bad people. Neighbors in the complex help take care of each other, he said, because that’s what it’s like in their South American culture.
“We know each other here and we don’t fight,” Brabo said. “We don’t do harm to anyone so that no one does us harm.”
Jennifer Brown is a reporter for The Colorado Sun. Her work frequently appears on-air at KUNC 91.5 FM and online at KUNC.org. Contact Jennifer at jennifer@coloradosun.com.