Former President Donald Trump repeated again and again debunked rumors related to Venezuelan gangs in a Colorado town during Tuesday night’s presidential debate.
Social media posts falsely claiming a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, have circulated widely in pro-Trump communities and been boosted by right-wing pundits in recent weeks.
Even after local officials publicly refuted that the Tren de Aragua gang had taken over the building, sensationalist claims vaguely tying the rumors to the growth of Colorado’s migrant population continued going viral on social media. Trump amplified them further over the past week as he brought up the rumors several times in recent rallies and interviews — and then again at Tuesday night’s debate.
“We have millions of people pouring into our country. … You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently,” Trump said on the debate stage in Philadelphia. “They’re destroying our country. They’re dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality. And we have to get them out.”
The viral rumors used “the most common forms of misinformation” tactics, such as reposting old videos without context, misrepresenting existing data and “frankensteining” together misleading pieces of evidence to fabricate a false narrative, according to the News Literacy Project, a nonprofit fact-checking organization that debunked the rumor.
Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas, a nonprofit organization that studies the impact of misinformation on Latino communities, told NBC News that the false claims related to Tren de Aragua are just the latest examples of rumors created to feed a broader narrative meant to demonize immigrants.
“We very often see these claims associated with migrants’ being criminals or gang members, claims that portray them as the source of increased crime and insecurity in the U.S. broadly, in a way that puts blame directly on them for what people frame as a decline of American society,” Braga said.
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Residents at the Aurora apartments, many of them immigrants from Venezuela and other Latin American countries, have denied the false rumors of the gang takeover and said they increasingly feel unsafe after having unfairly been deemed criminals.
“Right now, I am scared because of what’s been created, and all the xenophobia hate has increased towards us,” Carlos Ordosgoitti, a Venezuelan man living in one of the Aurora buildings, told NBC affiliate KUSA of Denver in Spanish. “I’m really scared.”
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How it all started
The false claim of a takeover began with the owner of three Aurora apartment complexes: an embattled property manager who was facing charges in municipal court because of years of unresolved health and safety code violations.
Rat and bug infestations, overflowing trash, sewage backups, water leaks and deteriorating infrastructure are some of the violations documented since at least February 2021, city officials have said.
But the property management company that owns the buildings blamed a Venezuelan gang for the rundown conditions. Over the summer, an attorney representing the company sent letters to local police and city and state officials claiming the gang had “forcibly taken control,” The Denver Gazette reported.
The claims were echoed by city officials, mostly conservatives, without concrete evidence, KUSA reported.
The allegation picked up steam during the last week of August after local media outlets, including KUSA, reported on a video obtained from a resident showing a group of men carrying guns in one of the buildings and seemingly trying to break an apartment door open.
Aurora police haven’t yet determined whether the men in the video belong to a Venezuelan gang, KUSA reported.
Aurora police have said they have been investigating the presence of Tren de Aragua in coordination with Denver police. But “gang members are not taking over” an Aurora apartment complex, police said, adding that the gang’s activity remains “isolated.”
“Every time there’s an instance of an isolated crime performed by a migrant in the U.S. it gets cherry-picked and then blown out of proportion to essentially castigate all migrants,” Braga said.
Misinformation spreads despite being debunked
Fragments of the video showing the armed men inside the Aurora apartment building were used in combination with clips from a two-month-old motorcycle parade in Brazil to create an Instagram post falsely claiming that members of the Hells Angels, an outlaw motorcycle club, were on their way to Aurora to “save the city after gangs from Venezuela took over apartments.” The Hells Angels’ Colorado chapter released a statement denying the claims.
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, labeled the post as including false information after its fact-checking partners debunked the claims. But that didn’t stop the false information from spreading as new videos with the same claims but different outdated and out-of-context clips proliferated across social media platforms.
Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public who researches rumors about immigrants and noncitizens, told NBC News that misinformation pattern seems to reflect an online behavior commonly known among “newsbrokering” social media accounts. Often hiding behind catchy usernames and cartoonish avatars, such accounts “curate and disseminate information about a crisis event” and often fabricate inflammatory content to make it fit a specific agenda.
Another anti-immigrant rumor that spread this week and was repeated by Trump on the debate stage Tuesday night was the debunked claim about Haitian immigrants harming household pets.
In a joint interview with KUSA, Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, a Republican, and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a Democrat, said other long-standing criminal organizations in the area remain greater threats than the Venezuelan gang.
But an “environment of hysteria right now over this” is complicating their ability to ensure Tren de Aragua doesn’t gain a foothold in the area, Coffman said. Coffman even described an example in which some people conflated an impromptu meetup of Venezuelans awaiting the results of their homeland’s presidential election with gang activity.
Aurora police have arrested 10 people connected to Tren de Aragua, KUSA reported.
Despite attempts to dispel myths and rumors about the Venezuelan gang’s presence in Aurora, additional false narratives continued to emerge online, including posts on X falsely claiming that Aurora police had issued a shelter-in-place order in response to Venezuelan gang violence and that Venezuelan gangs started taking over apartments in Chicago after having gained control of one in Aurora.
Both posts remain on X without any kind of label letting users know they include false information. The posts have gotten 26.3 million views and been reposted over 40,000 times. X didn’t respond to an email requesting comment.
Making immigration a political flashpoint
As part of their political platform, Republicans are focusing on hard-line immigration policies and stricter border security. They have often focused on narratives connecting immigration and crime.
Denver is among the cities that have received tens of thousands of migrants over the past year as part of a busing campaign by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, to seek stricter security at the southern border.
Searching for a lower cost of living, many migrants settled in nearby Aurora, where officials had said they couldn’t help those who had newly arrived, citing a lack of “financial capacity to fund new services related to this crisis.” Still, some migrants ended up living in the apartment complexes that have been at the center of recent controversy.
When Trump repeatedly called attention to Aurora by suggesting a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment complex there, immigrant communities were unexpectedly thrust into a heated political debate.
“People need to be aware that immigration is a common theme that misinformers are exploiting this election season. We should be extra cautious when they come across claims that seem designed to provoke anger, outrage, or fear — or that seem designed to divide us,” Christina Veiga, a spokesperson for the News Literacy Project, told NBC News in a statement. “Voters can avoid having their votes co-opted by falsehoods by being aware of this trend and taking a few simple steps to confirm whether the claims they’re seeing are true.”
This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News:
