What a Tren de Aragua apartment takeover looks like, up close from the inside

 Democrats and their allies in the press have been denying there's much of anything to the systemic takeover of apartment buildings by Tren de Aragua illegal migrant gangs in Aurora, Colorado.

Here's the kind of reporting that went on from the Associated Press on Sept. 5:

AURORA, Colo. (AP) — Police in the Denver suburb of Aurora say a Venezuela street gang with a small presence in the city has not taken over a rundown apartment complex — yet the allegation continues to gain steam among conservatives and was amplified by former President Donald Trump in a Wednesday Fox News town hall where he said Venezuelans were “taking over the whole town.”

The unsubstantiated allegation gained momentum following last month’s dissemination of video from a resident in the complex that showed armed men knocking on an apartment door, intensifying fears the Tren de Aragua gang was in control of the six-building complex.

However, city officials indicate the buildings, along with two other apartment complexes, were run down because of neglect by the property manager, CBZ Management.

See, if city officials say it's not happening, then it must be true because the government said so. Government wouldn't have any motives for saying this, everything they say is clean and pure and true.

That's kind of the opposite of what I was taught in journalism school, which was to question every lead and official statement. But this is a different era.

Notice also that smear of the apartment management as slumlords, CBZ Management, by these self-same, purely motivated, (and unnamed), government officials.

They weren't slumlords. They were victims of a monstrous crime, and the local government did nothing, other than blame the victim so that the flow of illegals could keep coming.

CBZ put out this huge string of damning tweets describing their ordeal with the Tren de Aragua migrant gangs, and how neither city officials nor the press did anything to help them -- with employees injured, tenants shaken down for 'rent,' people chased out of their homes, security cameras smashed, and nobody from the city listening to them as they pleaded for help. The press repeatedly claimed they were making it up and nothing was going on.

That's why they took to Elon Musk's Twitter to get their story out there and it was a doozy:

They were a reputable apartment management company whose work was restoring old apartment buildings to increase their value for the owners. In 2019, they started renovating the apartment buildings in Aurora. Crime started appearing, and it got bad at the height of the border surge in 2023, when a CBZ employee was asked to inspect a vacated three-bedroom apartment building and found it occupied by a group of gangsters and apparently in a pigpen state. He was offered $500 by the gang to pretend he saw nothing, but refused to take the bribe, prompting the thugs to beat him bloody. The tweet string has a disturbing photo of the man's bloodied face and body after that encounter. After that, he got texted threats.

Soon, they were finding illegal tenants all over, and suspected it was migrants taking advantage of squatting laws. But actually, when they tried to get rid of them, the migrants claimed to have paid rent -- and they did -- to Tren de Aragua, which put them there. They called the cops and nobody could or would do a thing. Even a tenant who slipped away on vacation returned to find these migrants living in his home -- he had to flee for his life.

Once they realized what was happening, they appealed to city officials, only to get smeared or ignored. CBZ wrote:

Instead, we were left helpless, watching as violence, bullets, and destruction overtook our buildings. Many of our legitimate tenants fled out of fear. Despite the obvious crisis, several city officials refused to acknowledge the reality. Instead, they blamed us, citing "code violations" as the reason for shutting down our property—violations we couldn’t resolve for tenants who weren’t even ours. 

One tenant, whose security camera had not yet been smashed by the gang, was able to get a video clip of the armed gang busting down doors of the apartment, which was when this began to make the news after it was presented to a city councilwoman.

They concluded with this powerful point summing up the problem.

Yes, gangs did take control of our apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado, and the government did nothing. That is the real story.

Now that the video is out, they are getting some vindication.

The local government suddenly admits that something is going on, albeit not very much, and here's a tiny concession to the truth of the matter from a CNN contributor.

Suddenly, it's gotten impossible to look the other way now that President Trump has come to town, denouncing apartment takeovers by foreign gangs.

This disingenuous exchange with a local reporter must have been so galling to the apartment managers who had been victims, given the smears out there:

The federal government, of course, denies anything unusual happening. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, calls it 'not new,' meaning, nothing to see here, move along to the next news cycle:

But the truth is now out, this first-person account from CBZ absolutely has the ring of truth, underlining that the federal government, the city government, and the press are enablers of the migrant surge which has brought heretofore unseen crime to the U.S., as they may even be making money through NGOs from this surge as we have seen in places like Chicago. The real victims are the hardworking people who are trying to do their jobs in a lawless atmosphere.

J.D. Vance certainly had the kind of empathy that this situation required when confronted by another media horseface:

He challenged the garbage media narrative that it all was just a spot of bother, now so amply laid out as false by CBZ.

Darn right an apartment takeover is a major problem, that kind of takeover is the kind of thing that hasn't happened here, it's the kind of thing that up until now happens in places like Venezuela, Brazil or Ecuador, to the huge detriment of those countries.

The imported gang, Tren de Aragua, is one plague after another. In Colorado it's apartment buildings. In New York, it's armed child gangs, and in Texas, it's home burglaries and the recruitment of children from local schools. In Chicago, it's murder.

They've denied it and covered it up, and even smeared the victims. Thankfully, CBZ knows it's the internet age and was not going to take it. Its account is compelling reading for this new and evil criminal dynamic that harms so many Americans.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/10/what_a_tren_de_aragua_apartment_takeover_looks_like_up_close_from_the_inside.html