How ICE Turned Venezuelan Migrants Into Enemies of the State

A few months after their arrival, Moises, a skilled electrician and handyman, earned enough money to pay a sixteen-hundred-dollar deposit on a one-bedroom apartment. He worked two jobs—on a construction crew, from seven in the morning till three in the afternoon, and at a pizzeria, from four till midnight—but the money he earned barely covered other costs such as food and a used car, without which he couldn’t get to work. That spring, the family learned that cheaper apartments were available at a housing complex in Aurora, a city of four hundred thousand people outside Denver.

The property, on Dallas Street, was an unsightly cluster of brick buildings, each with a run-down interior courtyard. The problems began shortly after the family moved in. There were infestations of mice, bedbugs, and cockroaches. In the winter, the heat didn’t work. One evening, Moises and Carmen returned home from dinner to find the entire apartment flooded from a leak in the ceiling. The lobby doors wouldn’t close, because of busted locks. At night, the entranceway filled with homeless people who came inside to sleep; addicts smoked fentanyl in unoccupied apartments.

The complex’s management company, CBZ, which owned nine properties in the Denver area, had been receiving regular complaints and citations for building-code violations since 2020. The owners of CBZ, brothers from Brooklyn named Shmaryahu and Zev Baumgarten, had expanded their holdings to Colorado around the time that a tenant-protection law passed in New York in 2019. The legislation, Maureen Tkacik wrote in The American Prospect, “triggered a landlord diaspora toward more permissive regions.” But, even in Denver, CBZ racked up tens of thousands of dollars in penalties. (CBZ did not respond to a request for comment.)

At the Dallas Street property, small cliques of armed men, mostly Venezuelans and Mexicans, fought an ongoing turf war. Some of them, according to Moises and Carmen, moved friends and family into the building. These apartments, the residents said, were tomados, or taken over. Many of the tenants were forced to pay a tax known as a vacuna, or vaccine, because it inoculated them from harassment. “You couldn’t come back late, because you didn’t know what you were going to find,” Moises said. “The guys had weapons.”

Between 2022 and 2024, the Denver metropolitan area received more new immigrants, per capita, than anywhere else in the country—some forty thousand, the vast majority of them from Venezuela. At first, the Venezuelans found their own way to the city. But beginning in May of 2023, around twenty thousand Venezuelans arrived on a fleet of buses chartered by Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who claimed that his state had been “invaded.” Many residents were unnerved by the sudden arrival of so many people. Venezuelans washed car windows for tips at stoplights and congregated in the parking lots of Home Depot and other stores, looking for work. “You wouldn’t see it, and then all of a sudden it was all you’d see,” a Mexican pastor of a local ministry told me.

Certain events contributed to the impression that the city had lost control of its newest residents. On July 28, 2024, thousands of people gathered in the parking lot of a Target in Aurora to celebrate what was widely forecast to be the defeat of the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in that day’s election. Many of the Venezuelans I met in Aurora had been there, including Moises and Carmen, who painted their car in yellow, blue, and red, the colors of the Venezuelan flag. Maduro appeared to lose the election but claimed victory anyway, and protests erupted in Venezuela. In Aurora, some of the attendees became drunk and rowdy. Someone fired gunshots into the air. “It allowed people to see a whole cross-section of the Venezuelans in Aurora,” Jesús Sánchez Meleán, the editor of El Comercio de Colorado, the state’s most prominent Spanish-language newspaper, told me. “The families who came out to celebrate, and others who were up to no good.”

That same day, a gunfight broke out at a CBZ residence on Nome Street, injuring three people. By then, the city of Aurora was already planning to condemn the property. The three to four hundred people who lived there were given a week’s notice to vacate the premises. CBZ, meanwhile, was delinquent on a series of loan payments and mired in lawsuits. The company began to argue that Tren de Aragua members had prevented it from maintaining the property and collecting rent. On August 5th, journalists in the area received an e-mail from Red Banyan, a Florida-based public-relations company that CBZ had hired as part of its legal campaign. “An apartment building and its owners in Aurora, Colorado, have become the most recent victims of the Venezuelan Gang Tren de Aragua’s violence, which has taken over several communities in the Denver area,” the e-mail said. “The residents and building owners of these properties have been left in a state of fear and chaos.”

On August 18th, Cindy Romero, an American tenant of CBZ’s Dallas Street property, recorded a video of six men with rifles storming a hallway in her building. The footage from her doorbell camera, which was later broadcast on the local news, went viral. Right-wing media seized on the story, using it to attack President Joe Biden. Danielle Jurinsky, a first-term city-council member, had been accusing the Aurora Police Department of failing to take the Venezuelan gang threat seriously. She visited the apartment complexes to interview residents and made regular appearances on Fox News. “It got to a point where I could identify a lot of these gang members myself,” she told me. Art Acevedo, then the chief of the Aurora Police Department, told me, “Was there Tren de Aragua presence? Yes. Were parts of the city overrun? Total hyperbole.” (All told, the Aurora Police Department has arrested ten people alleged of being tied to the gang.)