Aurora City Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky took the stage during former President Donald Trump’s Aurora rally on Friday afternoon to talk about how police officers came to her, asking for help because an international gang was operating in her city.

The police officers told her about the gang’s activities and how its members have “taken over” apartment complexes in Aurora, she said. 

“And we need help,” she quoted the officers as saying. “That’s pretty serious — to have police officers come to a city councilperson and ask for that help.”

In the last month, Trump has 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 of intense gang activities, have since acknowledged that members of Tren de Aragua, a gang that originated in the prisons of Venezuela, have been responsible for crimes at a group of apartment buildings. City officials and the police maintained that the gang’s influence is limited.

At the rally on Friday, Jurinsky said she helped “expose the broken immigration system to the entire country.” 

“These mugshots you see,” she said, pointing to two mugs of alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua on display on the rally stage, “this is not a feature of my imagination.” 

When she started asking questions, she was told about “code enforcement violations,” she said, referring to the city’s stance that the apartment complexes had violated building codes.

“Let me tell you something. I have never met a police officer in my life that is scared of code enforcement violations,” she said. 

Last 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.

Jurinsky said she went to the apartments and helped move people out. 

“I witnessed it with my own two eyes. I saw how these people were living in my city, in my hometown,” Jurinsky said. “I have been in Colorado for my entire life. I own businesses in Aurora. I’m a community college graduate of Aurora. Everything about Aurora is my home. And let me tell you something: If you come into this city and you threatened the residents of Aurora, Colorado, I will come for you.”

Aurora is not a sanctuary city, Jurinsky said, and the immigrants “came in through Denver.”

Prior to speaking at Friday’s rally, Jurinsky said the gang activity has been “overstated” but that it is a problem.

“It has been grossly overstated that the entire city of Aurora has been overrun by gangs,” Jurinsky told The Denver Gazette days before the rally. “But I don’t want the situation downplayed because even one apartment complex taken over by this Venezuelan gang is one too many for me, and we have three.”

Jurinsky ran for office following COVID-19 pandemic regulations that affected her business, which she blamed on She accused Gov. Jared Polis of the move, saying when he “shut my business down, he woke me up.”

“This is when I decided to run to represent my hometown,” she said at Friday’s rally. “Make no mistake of it, folks. They can threaten me. They can try to silence me. They can lie about me. They can do whatever they want. I’m not going anywhere.”

When Trump first declared he would visit 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.