Aurora, Colorado (pop 386,261), is the largest municipality in the Denver metropolitan area. Like its neighboring cities, Aurora has been beset by an influx of illegal aliens over the past few years, not a few of which are members of Venezuelan gangs, in particular the Tren de Aragua.
That gang has effectively taken over from its owners a 99-unit apartment building on 1568 Nome Street in Aurora called Fitzsimons Place or Aspen Grove. Before being seized, the building was run by CBZ Management, a company that operates other apartments in Colorado and also New York. CBZ “lost control” of the facility during the previous months as the Tren de Aragua moved in and began threatening employees with violence. A company spokesman told WestWord.com that no one from the management company has been at the property for the past six weeks.
As conditions on the property deteriorated, calls to the Aurora Police Department doubled from 2022 to 2023 and are on track to double again in 2024. Officers investigated 41 crimes on the property — including reports of robbery, sexual assault and drugs — in 2022, 84 in 2023, and 64 so far this year. Last September, the police declared the property a criminal nuisance, and now infested with rats and bed bugs, overflowing with garbage and sewage, and “guilty of substantial, longstanding, unresolved code violations,” Fitzsimons Place has finally been condemned by the Aurora city government. The city is now attempting to evict the unknown numbers of migrants still living there, thought to be mostly Venezuelan.
Residents are told they must leave by 8 a.m. Tuesday, August 13, at which point the city will “turn off the water, board up the building and fence it off.”
Long-term residents, such as Norena Ordoñez, are protesting. Ordoñez, a Venezuelan migrant, told WestWord, “It doesn’t seem fair to me. The government should know that the people who have been here for more than a year or two — there are some who have been here for five or ten years — those people should have a limited time to be able to leave, to save up, to see what kind of solutions come up.”
Another resident, Javier Hidalgo, 26, who arrived in Colorado a couple months ago from Venezuela, said, “If they evict us, we’re going to have to get some tents. It’s not fair what is happening to us here.”
The illegals took what was a decent apartment complex and turned it into a South American-style slum. That’s the way of things these days.
For more, see WestWord.