Donald Trump on Friday intensified his politics of nativism and racism by announcing a sweeping plan to deport Venezuelans he says have “infected” a once-peaceful town in Colorado.
The Republican presidential candidate held a campaign rally in Aurora on a stage decorated with posters displaying mugshots of people in prison-orange uniforms with descriptions including “gang members who immigrated illegally from Venezuela.”
Trump told the crowd: “I am announcing today that, upon inauguration, we will conduct 'Operation Aurora' at the federal level to accelerate the elimination of these brutal gangs.” He promised to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to deport any non-citizen from a country the United States is at war with.
“We will send ice elite teams [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]”Border Patrol and federal law enforcement officers will hunt down, arrest and deport every last illegal alien gang until there is even one left in this country,” he continued to the crowd's applause.
If they return to the U.S., they face an automatic 10-year sentence without parole, Trump said. “I hereby call for the death penalty for any immigrant who kills an American citizen or law enforcement officer. With your vote, we will achieve complete and utter victory over these monstrous monsters. It goes by very quickly.”
The rally represented a detour for Trump in Colorado, which is not a battleground state and seems certain to vote for his Democratic challenger, Kamala Harris. But recent events have given him an opportunity to use the local rumor mill to push his anti-immigrant message.
Aurora, a city of about 340,000 people near Denver, hit headlines in August after a video showing armed men walking through an apartment building housing Venezuelan immigrants. Trump expanded the story and falsely portrayed the city as being taken over by members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, or TDA.
Officials say the incident happened on the same block and that the area is safe again and the local crime rate is actually going down. Mike Coffman, the Republican mayor of Aurora, also called Trump's claims “grossly exaggerated.” asserted: “The story is not accurate by any stretch of the imagination.”
TDA traces its origins to more than a decade in a notorious prison. In July, the Biden administration cracked down on gangs, adding MS-13 from El Salvador and the mafia-style Camorra from Italy to its list of transnational criminal organizations and offering $12 million rewards for the arrest of the three leaders. .
At Friday's rally, Trump played a series of news clips detailing the crimes of the DTA and the killing of American citizens by undocumented immigrants, accompanied by dramatic music. Criminal in the history of the country” and “the worst border tsar”.
“My message today is very simple,” he said. No person who has inflicted the kind of violence and terror that Kamala Harris has on this community can ever be allowed to become president of the United States.
The former president promised that November 5, when the elections would be held, would be “Liberation Day”, saying, “America! America!” From the crowd.
“I will redeem Aurora and every city I invade and conquer. These cities have been captured and we will imprison these brutal and bloodthirsty criminals or drive them out of our country and we will be very effective in doing that. It happens very, very fast. We are going to drive them out of our country.“
Throwing red meat to his base, Trump later added: “We talk a lot about Venezuela, because Aurora is actually affected by Venezuela, but they come from all countries.”
The comment recalled Trump's past dehumanizing language in which he said undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” and earlier this week suggested murder suspects “have bad genes.”
In similar fashion on Friday, Stephen Miller, a former top aide expected to take on a senior role in the White House if Trump wins, pointed to posters on stage while addressing a crowd ahead of Trump's appearance.
“Look at all these photos around me,” Miller said. “Are these your grown children? Are these the neighbors you grew up with? Are these the neighbors you want in your city? The crowd answered “No”.
The former president has long made immigration his signature issue and has vowed to mount the largest deportation crackdown in US history if he returns to the White House. In recent months, he has targeted specific small communities that have seen significant influxes of immigrants, rising local tensions over resources and some longtime residents expressing skepticism about the sudden population changes.
More than 40,000 immigrants have arrived in the Denver metro area in the past two years, including many Venezuelan families fleeing poverty and violence. But Colorado's Democratic leaders accuse Trump and other Republicans of exaggerating problems in Aurora.
Congressman Jason Crowe told The Associated Press: “The occurrence is very small and isolated. And to be clear, that is never acceptable, is it? We do not claim that any position is acceptable. But it's not an upheaval. This is not a change. No acquisition of any part or any apartment complex in this city. It didn't happen. It is a lie.”
Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, have spread false information about a community in Springfield, Ohio, where they say Haitian immigrants have been accused of stealing and eating pets. The disinformation campaign led to bomb threats, school closings and forced evacuations.
Trump has said he will revoke the temporary protected status that allows Haitians to stay in the United States because of widespread poverty and violence in their home country.
Democrats have criticized Trump for tanking a bipartisan border security bill in the Senate that may have neutralized immigration as an issue. Harris said at a Univision town hall in Nevada on Thursday: “He wants to run a problem rather than fix a problem.”
