Trump Wildly Claims Migrant Gangs Will Soon ‘Take Over the Whole Damn State’ Of Colorado
Former President Donald Trump claimed during a campaign stop in Georgia on Tuesday that a migrant gang from Venezuela will “take over the whole damn state” of Colorado if he’s not reelected president.
Trump’s remarks were meant to be primarily about the economy but he veered off onto a tangent, in which he slammed Vice President Kamala Harris over immigration. Trump pulled no punches as usual, claiming, “We have to tell this woman has allowed record numbers of people into our country. They’re from all over the world. They’re now creating criminal havoc throughout the country. Aurora, Colorado, you saw that, where Venezuela gangs are taking over real estate, they become real estate developers. How nice?”
“They’re taking over real estate and they have weapons that even our military has said, who’s giving them these weapons? But Aurora is a mess. The governor’s a mess. You know, the governor is a Democrat and he’s a radical left Democrat. And he’s not too popular right now because they’re going to take over a lot more than Aurora. They’re going to go through Colorado, take over the whole damn state by the time they finish, unless I become president, they won’t last long,” Trump said to applause, adding:
In Springfield, Ohio. So you have a town of 50,000 people. They have 32,000 migrants put into the town almost overnight. And the people are so nice, you know, they want to be nice. They say, well, where the mayor is actually looking for interpreters. He’s looking all over for interpreters because they can’t understand the language is totally different than… What the hell? I’m sorry. You have to move the people back to the country from which they came.
“You have to. You have to,” Trump repeated to applause.
The claims coming out of Aurora were initially pushed by the mayor, Mike Coffman, during a Fox News interview in late August, where he claimed several apartment buildings “have fallen” to the gang Tren de Aragua and gang members were now collecting rent from the residents.
A week later, interim Aurora police chief Heather Morris refuted those claims publicly and Coffman, a former GOP member of Congress, eventually conceded he was “not sure where the truth is in all of this.” The claim was widely spread on social media and fueled by video of criminal activity caught on doorbell cameras, which appeared to show armed men trying to break into an apartment. Coffman has since made public statements to reassure his community that they are in fact safe.
NBC News took a deep dive into how the now-debunked claims spread through the community, social media, and eventually the GOP presidential nominee.
“The viral rumors used “the most common forms of misinformation” tactics, such as reposting old videos without context, misrepresenting existing data and “frankensteining” together misleading pieces of evidence to fabricate a false narrative, according to the News Literacy Project, a nonprofit fact-checking organization that debunked the rumor,” noted the NBC report.
The debunked claims of the migrant gang taking over apartment buildings in Colorado paralleled those pushed by Trump during the debate regarding Haitian migrants in Ohio eating household pets, which community leaders have also disavowed as baseless.
