Former President Donald Trump plans to hold a rally in Aurora on Friday, the Republican’s presidential campaign announced Monday.

Trump is scheduled to deliver remarks at 1 p.m. at Gaylord Rockies Resort & Convention Center, near Denver International Airport, his campaign said.

In the last month, Trump has repeatedly cited Aurora to attack the Biden administration’s immigration policy, claiming that a Venezuelan gang has “taken over” the Colorado city of nearly 400,000 residents. 

Aurora officials, who initially denied the claims, have since acknowledged that members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang known as TdA, have been responsible for criminal activity at a group of apartment buildings. City officials and the police maintained that the gang’s influence is limited.

After initially mentioning Aurora during the Sept. 10 presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump vowed at a campaign event that he would start the “largest deportation” of undocumented immigrants in the country’s history in Aurora and Springfield, Ohio, where Trump asserted that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets.

“In the next two weeks I’m going to Springfield and I’m going to Aurora,” Trump said on Sept. 18 at a rally on Long Island in New York.

Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, a former Republican congressman, said that he welcomed the chance to clear up Trump’s misconceptions about the city.

“I’m very excited that the former president wants to visit our city to see for himself that the narrative that we are being overrun by TdA gang members is false and for our police chief to have the opportunity to brief the former president on our successful efforts to identify and arrest TdA gang members,” Coffman said.

In a release announcing Trump’s impending visit, his campaign maintained that Aurora “has become a ‘war zone’ due to the influx of violent Venezuelan prison gang members.”

The gang’s members, the Trump campaign said, have “infiltrated multiple apartment complexes in Aurora,” and the city’s police have arrested eight TdA members for crimes “ranging from shootings to assaults.”

“These violent criminals are destroying the safety and security of Aurora’s apartment complexes, and yet, the Harris-Biden administration continues to allow illegal immigrants to cross the borders unchecked,” the Trump campaign said.

Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, said earlier that Trump’s depiction of Aurora was not only inaccurate but was harming the city economically.

“The reality is, Donald Trump continues to tell economically damaging and hurtful lies about Aurora,” Polis said in a statement, adding that Aurora has “people from all over the world who contribute every day to making it the dynamic, amazing place that it is.”

During his remarks at the Long Island rally when he said he would campaign in Aurora, Trump also took aim at Polis.

“We’ve got to save our country. Our country’s going down,” Trump said. “If you look at what’s happening with the Venezuelans taking over, they’re taking over large pieces of real estate in Colorado. You have a Democrat governor who’s petrified of them. He’s afraid. I’ve never seen anything like it. He doesn’t want to talk about it. They’ve taken over your buildings and your land. You got to do something about it.”

Trump’s rally falls on the same day Colorado county clerks plan to start sending mail ballots to most voters.

It will be Trump’s first public event in Colorado since early 2020, when he packed an arena in Colorado Springs. Trump attended a private fundraiser in Aspen in August, and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, is scheduled to headline a private fundraiser in Denver on Tuesday.

Recent polling shows Harris has a double-digit lead over Trump in Colorado, whose voters haven’t delivered the state’s electoral votes to the Republican nominee since George W. Bush carried the state in 2004.

Trump lost Colorado in 2020 to Democrat Joe Biden by 13.5 percentage points.

In August, 300 people were evicted from the Aspen Grove apartments in Aurora in an urgent dispossession that officials claimed was for the safety of the residents. Mountains of trash had overflowed into the parking lot, which brought rodents. Residents also complained of heat issues, water leaks, broken windows and burned out kitchens.

The city boarded up and fenced off the complex.

Initially, local officials dismissed the assertion by the property management company that the presence of gang members precluded it from doing its work at Aspen Grove and that it feared for the safety of its staffers and residents. The city called it an “alternative narrative” to the numerous code violations and the poor condition of the building.

Officials began walking back their statements after the video of armed men barging into apartment units surfaced and a cache of letters from a law firm representing CBZ Management — written a month before the federal government acknowledged TDA had extended its tentacles into Denver — became public.

More recently, a national law firm that investigated the claims said that, through violence and intimidation, the gang took over Whispering Pines — another complex owned by CBZ Management — and sought to collect up to half of the rent from leaseholders, drying up collections for the landlord, according to a law firm’s investigation.

Aurora officials also acknowledged that authorities had arrested people suspected — though not yet confirmed at the time of their apprehensions — of being members of the Venezuelan gang long before the media spotlight on the city. The gang’s activities also “significantly affected” apartment complexes in the city, officials said.

Editor’s note: This developing story will be updated. Reporters Nico Brambila and Carol McKinley contributed to this article.