Q&A of the Day – Illegal Immigrants & Venezuelan Gangs
Each day I feature a listener question sent by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
Social: @brianmuddradio
iHeartRadio: Use the Talkback feature – the microphone button on our station’s page in the iHeart app.
Today’s Entry: Today’s note was submitted via talkback asking for more attention to be paid to the Venezuelan gang activity that’s been playing out in Aurora, Colorado.
Bottom Line: Right, so recently there was a viral video that emerged from a surveillance camera in an Aurora, Colorado apartment complex. The video showed young Hispanic males with long guns drawn reportedly breaking into an apartment. Other accounts quickly emerged that the suspects were part of a Venezuelan gang that had effectively “taken over the complex”. The situation was made worse due to reports that police had largely been unresponsive. That was according to the accounts of the resident who took the surveillance video, and a local councilwoman who’d been attempting to draw attention to the growing issue of gang activity fueled by illegal immigration into the country. The resident and councilwoman detailed regular gunfire at the complex, including a bullet hole in the side of the resident’s car, and she described criminal activity as being so rampant that she was on a first name basis with the 9-1-1 operators.
The local councilwoman said she believes that the condition had been allowed to persist due to political considerations. Quoting her: There's human suffering on the other side of some of these doors and these apartment complexes, but there's a big election coming up, and nobody wants to talk about this. Because if they start talking about this, someone has to admit there's a problem somewhere. Specifically, it’s believed that the Venezuelan gang that goes by the abbreviation TdA is behind the criminal activity.
Following the national attention the story received the Aurora Police Department put out this statement: It would be improper at this time for the city and APD to make any conclusory statements about specific incidents or provide details about law enforcement strategy and operations. Based on our initial investigative work, we believe reports of TdA influence in Aurora are isolated. But this story may not be as cut and dried as it may seem. At least as far as political considerations are concerned. What’s been learned in the days since this story broke is this...
The Aurora mayor, who is a Republican, and who opposes illegal immigration and has refused to provide local assistance to illegal immigrants/asylum seekers, unlike neighboring Denver, has launched an investigation into the situation along with APD. What the early returns have shown are this quoting the mayor:
Those people that came and talked to [me], They gave a lot of explanation as to why they weren't paying rent. There wasn't the property management there... I thought that the people who were the so-called gang members were extracting the rent from them, but the people that came up to me said that was not the case... They wanted to stay there, but they wanted the place maintained. I think there's a pattern on all these properties. I mean, you know, I'm going to be blunt that I think it's an out-of-state slumlord and hasn't maintained the properties.
So that’s the first wrinkle in this story. The initial investigation has shown that the three apartment buildings in question weren’t being properly maintained by an out-of-state owner which appears to have created a vulnerability for the residents at those buildings. Here’s the second significant wrinkle to this story. It’s about the alleged Venezuelan gang members. Quoting the mayor once again:
I believe that an investigation will show that you had nonprofit organizations who, unbeknownst to us and didn't go through us, but were a recipient of state and or federal funds to provide assistance to migrants who were predominantly Venezuelan, and to place them in apartments. We didn't know where they placed them, but I believe that they placed them in these apartments in such concentrations that have created a problem.
Right, so as we’re learning more information from the ongoing investigation in Auroa, it appears as though the Venezuelan gang members who are said to have “taken over” the apartment complexes...are actually residents at the apartment complexes who were placed there by NGO’s who’ve been placing illegal immigrants crossing the southern border. There’s not currently evidence of these gang members breaking into the apartments, but rather entering their apartments. In the absence of proper property management at these complexes it’s created an environment in which they effectively do whatever they please on the premise.
And that takes us to the final quote for now from the mayor as he said:
There is a tendency, inherently, to exaggerate and to say this incident that's isolated to three buildings under the same ownership with the same people — concentration of Venezuelan migrants — is the city of Aurora, that the entire city is unsafe. And that narrative isn't true.
So that’s why this story has faded a bit from the news for now. It’s much more complicated than it originally seemed. But it is also a warning to all communities about what can happen when the opportunity is presented. Since the onset of the Biden-Harris administration there have been over 800,000 illegal immigrants who’ve entered the US from Venezuela alone. That includes over 330,000 in the last year alone. Numerous reports exist that Venezuela has sent much of its prison population to the US Southern border and over 100 investigations of crimes attributed to the TdA gang are currently active in the United States – including in South Florida. Palm Beach County Sheriff Rick Bradshaw has warned throughout this year of the growing threat posed by Venezuelan gangs that first established a presence in Miami but that have since expanded elsewhere.
In July, the Justice Department designated the TdA as a “transnational criminal organization” and currently is offering rewards of up to $12 million for information leading to the arrests of top leaders operating within the country. Ironically gang leaders operating a transnational criminal organization, that the Biden-Harris administration allowed into this country due to its open border policies. And this is independent of the MS-13 gang members repeatedly allowed into this country by the Biden administration, including the 26 year-old gang member who recently stabbed an Indiana girl at a baseball game this week.