Find another name for your mass deportation agenda, Mr. President-Elect, because Aurora, Colorado, is a safe haven for immigrants who are prospering in a community that has embraced their culture, heritage, and sometimes their tenuous legal status.
Ripping the community asunder with an anti-immigrant sting executed by military personnel or federal agents under a presidential order called “Operation Aurora” would upend the city’s hard-fought safety and stability.
According to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, almost 23% of the residents in Aurora were born outside of the United States. That statistic is likely an undercount given the understandable reluctance among immigrants without legal status to participate in any government survey or census.
President-elect Donald Trump has relentlessly tried to paint the city of 386,000 people as a violent hell-hole needing drastic federal action to save it from the scourge of illegal immigration. In a clear nod to the white supremacists backing his campaign, Trump repeatedly said recent migrants were “poisoning the blood” of America by flooding across our borders from around the world. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The median household income in Aurora is $89,000 and 63% of the city owns their own home. The rate of violent crime is significantly lower than that of similarly sized cities across the nation, and it is slightly lower than the average rate in Colorado. When looking at all crimes, Aurora did see a spike in 2021 along with the rest of the nation, but a conservative policy group found that those property crimes have been decreasing rapidly as things have stabilized again post-COVID.
Aurora is the light, not the blight, of diversity
Aurora is a community made richer because of its diversity. The sprawling suburb is a culinary mecca for the slew of immigrant-owned restaurants. Minority-owned small businesses thrive in the community and the schools are a rich tapestry of cultures that frequently overperform their socio-economic status.
Aurora is a place where immigrants can still buy a home and attain the American dream of building equity, and a nest egg for retirement while sending their children, many of whom are U.S. citizens born and raised in the community, to college.
None of that prevented Trump from standing on the stage at the Gaylord Rockies Hotel amid the jail photos of gang members and pledging to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1789 to bypass due process and round up suspected foreign-born gang members, detain them, and quickly deport them. Trump dubbed his plan “Operation Aurora.” How cruel to name the operation after the very community it would harm the most and that along with Springfiled, Ohio, is among the least deserving of this slur.
Aurora police and surrounding supporting law enforcement agencies, in conjunction with federal bureaus, have already made progress in shutting down the Tren de Aragua gang, an international criminal organization that The Denver Post had exhaustively covered long before Trump started freaking out about their criminal activities. Aurora police have arrested nine individuals related to 14 separate criminal activities over the past 10 months. A 10th member of the gang was identified but has not been charged with any crimes. The crimes range from attempted murder and assault to intimate partner violence. Two other men affiliated with the gang were arrested in Aurora for a murder in Texas. Police say there aren’t many more members than that — 12 people — in Colorado.
Those 12 people are a tiny fraction of the thousands of immigrants who call Aurora home. Trump will not be satisfied when he realizes the criminal element in Aurora is a mere couple dozen people who entered the U.S. illegally or abused the asylum system. Then who will he target?
Anyone with temporary legal status is at risk
Trump may think voters gave him a mandate to deport millions of people, but we aren’t certain that all Trump voters understood the depth of his plan.
Trump doesn’t just want to target violent criminals or even just petty criminals. He has pledged to strip Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from more than 800,000 people living in the United States legally and deport them back to their home countries. Past presidents have used TPS to allow people whose home countries had become unsafe to remain in the United States even after their visa or travel permit expired. President Joe Biden recently expanded TPS to some Venezuelans, but there are people living and working in the U.S. who have fled conflicts in Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, and Haiti. For some going home will be a death warrant.
And he won’t stop at ending TPS.
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Trump’s attempt to repeal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was one of his first actions as president in 2017. If Trump repeals DACA for dreamers, friends and neighbors who have attended Colorado schools since kindergarten and are now working legally and paying taxes will be deported. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that Trump’s administration had failed to properly revoke DACA calling the decision arbitrary and capricious, but stating clearly that the Department of Homeland Security could revoke DACA if it followed proper procedures. We have little faith that the court, now stacked with another Trump appointee, would stand up for dreamers.
We cannot think so ill of Colorado’s 1.3 million Trump voters to think they want communities like Aurora to be devastated by the fear of deportation and the reality of families separated when mothers and fathers, grandparents and siblings are stripped of their temporary legal status and sent to countries that many of them hardly know. We hope we are wrong and Trump doesn’t execute the drastic anti-immigration policies he’s outlined.
But if he goes forward, Trump cannot name his cruelty after Aurora — a place of hope and light for immigrants. He should name it Amache after a place of dark shame for the last American president to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1789 to round up foreign-born Japanese Americans during World War II. The families put in Camp Amache were not criminals or enemies of America, but that didn’t stop President Franklin D. Roosevelt from making the order for internment.
It may prove fitting that Trump unveiled this “Operation Amache” only 200 miles north of Colorado’s Amache National Historic Site.
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