ICE agents conduct operations in multiple Denver, Aurora locations
Chase Woodruff
(Colorado Newsline) Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal law enforcement agencies conducted operations beginning early Wednesday at least four locations in Denver and Aurora in what appeared to be the most concentrated effort yet to pursue President Donald Trump’s aggressive deportation agenda in Colorado.
A video posted to social media by the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Rocky Mountain Division showed agents deploying a smoke grenade outside an apartment building, as part of what it said was an execution of a “search warrant in support of (Department of Homeland Security) operations taking place throughout the metro area this morning.”
A separate post from ICE’s Denver field office confirmed that agents from the DEA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Customs and Border Patrol, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals participated in the operation, which it said was targeting “100+ members of the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.”
ICE representatives didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment Wednesday, including inquiries regarding the number of people detained, their identities and where detainees will be held.
Locations where federal law enforcement agents were present included several apartment complexes at the center of months of local and national controversy over the alleged influence of the Tren de Aragua gang, or TdA, including the Edge at Lowry complex at 12th and Dallas Streets.
Denver and Aurora police officials have characterized TdA’s presence in the metro area as isolated and relatively small, with its criminal activity — including a December kidnapping at the Edge at Lowry — mostly targeting victims within the Venezuelan immigrant community itself. Immigrants residing at the apartment buildings in question have placed blame for the situation on an absentee “slumlord,” CBZ, which records show had let the properties fall into abject disrepair long before the arrival in the area of large numbers of migrants in early 2023.
But Trump and his allies — pursuing a mass deportation campaign and a nationalist vision of “America for Americans only” — have made a series of sensational allegations that the gang has “invaded and conquered” Aurora, a sprawling and diverse suburb of 400,000 residents to the east of Denver. Far-right political figures have falsely claimed that crime has “skyrocketed” in Aurora since the new immigrants arrived. In fact, consistent with national trends, crime rates have declined there and in Colorado as a whole since 2022.
The Colorado Rapid Response Network, an immigrant advocacy organization that oversees an ICE activity hotline, posted to Facebook a live video of federal operations in Aurora on Wednesday.
“Officials have shown no warrant, are asking people for citizenship status and IDs when they leave their apartments. They have been asked to leave and continue to be there. We are advising people of their rights and asking them to leave,” the group said in the post.
Crystal Murillo, an Aurora City Council member and executive director of Colorado People’s Alliance, which supports immigrant justice, said reports she received indicated that federal agents detained more than half a dozen people in the area of Hinkley High School and another CBZ property, Whispering Pines, on Helena Street.
A photo she shared with Newsline shows what appeared to be federal agents in an armored vehicle, which Murillo said was located just north of the school.
“It looked like a checkpoint in the middle of the street,” Murillo said.
Activists with the Party for Socialism and Liberation gathered in a shopping mall parking lot near Interstate 25 and Colorado Boulevard, the site of a reported staging area for law enforcement involved in the raids. Eliza Lucero, a PSL organizer, said at one point she saw roughly 50 law enforcement agents at the site, including ICE officers, and “at least five big trucks.”
Newsline had received no reply from ICE to an inquiry about the site as of the time of publication.
“It’s most important to us right now that we are doing two things, letting ICE know that they are not welcome in our community, and, two, letting immigrants who are in these buildings know their rights,” Lucero said, adding, for example, that people targeted by ICE do not have to speak to law enforcement and they can refuse vehicle searches when officers don’t have a warrant.
PSL organizers witnessed at least five people being being taken into custody at the residences near Hinkley High School, Lucero said.
“We’re setting the narrative straight, that the immigrants are not a majority of criminals, that they’re being blamed for the problems in this country,” Lucero said. “They’re being blamed for real problems that do exist, which is that people can’t get good jobs, that people are struggling to afford to buy groceries, and that our social services have been gutted … and they’re being blamed by the very people that are the ones who actually created these problems by gutting unions, by gutting the social services in this country, by outsourcing jobs for cheaper labor.”
She added, “That is the fault of these evil rich men who are now in this presidential administration, like Donald Trump and Elon Musk.”
Last month, the DEA conducted a raid of what it said was an “invite-only TdA party” at a makeshift nightclub in Adams County. Forty-one people alleged to be in the country unlawfully were taken into custody, but the agency subsequently acknowledged many of them were from countries other than Venezuela, including some European countries. The DEA has refused to release the names of the people taken into custody, say how many of them are suspected TdA members or disclose other details of the operation.