Police Sweep of Aurora, Colorado Apartment Complex Nets 14 Suspected Venezuelan Gang Members

A home invasion at Aurora, Colorado that involved stabbing and kidnapping is “100 percent gang activity” and likely affiliated with the notorious Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, local police say.Aurora police announced Tuesday 14 individuals had been detained in connection with an “armed home invasion” at The Edge at Lowry Apartments — a site that went viral earlier this year as video footage emerged indicating the gang members were terrorizing the apartment complex. The city became a central one to Trump’s immigration rhetoric on the campaign trail, as he compared it to a “war zone” and promised to enact “Operation Aurora” nationally, as NPR reported. Trump said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport illegal aliens.The gang, which was formed in a Venezuelan prison a decade ago, has set up shop in at least 16 states since infiltrating America via its southern border in recent years, including Colorado, according to reports from the Department of Homeland Security.Tuesday’s incident is already thrusting the city back into the national immigration spotlight, as President-elect Trump’s incoming border czar, Tom Homan, told Fox News on Tuesday that federal immigration authorities should be standing “shoulder to shoulder” with local Aurora police. Police say the two victims in the attack, one male and one female, are in the hospital being treated for non-life threatening injuries, including a stab wound that the male sustained.The victims were both “held against their will” by the likely gang members, Aurora’s police chief, Todd Chamberlain, said in a press conference on Tuesday. The victims, which appear to be Venezuelan immigrants, were bound and tortured, he said: “They were pistol-whipped, they were beat, they were victimized, they were terrorized.” Mr. Chamberlain acknowledged that the apartment complex has become a high-profile one nationally and promised that Aurora was not going to “tolerate” the criminal activity there or “allow the victimization of our community members.“We have proactively been focused on that apartment complex, as everybody here knows, and as the nation knows, this complex is an incredibly problematic complex, it is an incredibly crime-riddled complex,” he said. He also said that the attack on the victims was “100 percent gang activity” and that there were “Venezuelans involved.” Police also have a “high assumption that they may be affiliated with the TdA gang,” he said, while clarifying that police aren’t 100 percent certain that the suspects are affiliated with the TdA gang. “I can guarantee you, I will give you my expertise and my knowledge of what I believe, this is without question a gang incident,” Mr. Chamberlain said. “ I don’t know which gang they are affiliated with yet, it might be TdA it could not be TdA, we will determine that and we will find that out.” He also said that gangs involved in this type of activity “victimize their own race and their own ethnicity” because it makes for easy victims who aren’t likely to go to the police since they are undocumented.

Police Sweep of Aurora, Colorado Apartment Complex Nets 14 Suspected Venezuelan Gang Members

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