Former President Donald Trump announced Friday that if he won a second term, he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 under a program he has dubbed “Operation Aurora” to deport immigrant gang members.
Trump, who is campaigning in Aurora, Colorado, said that the operation would “expedite the removal of these savage gangs” and called “for the death penalty for any migrant that kills an American citizen or a law enforcement officer.”
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The rally, while not in a state that is one of the seven battleground states that will decide the election, featured Trump repeatedly railing against the illegal immigration crisis at the southern border and casting blame on Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) over the alleged Venezuelan gangs overtaking Aurora.
But Republican Mayor Mike Coffman and local police have disputed Trump’s claims.
The visit to the state that will likely not vote for Trump is meant to appeal to voters in battleground swing states such as Arizona, which shares a border with Colorado.
The former president repeatedly warned their communities could be overtaken by immigrants who entered the nation illegally if Harris is elected.
“Kamala has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the Third World,” Trump said on Friday, blaming Harris for the illegal immigration crisis and denouncing her as the “border czar.”
“She has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens,” Trump said. “That’s what they’re doing, and no place is it more evident than right here, because in Aurora, multiple apartment complexes have been taken over by the savage Venezuela prison gang known as Tren de Aragua.”
In a reprise of his usual campaign stump speech, Trump said he would solve the crisis.
“I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered,” Trump told the crowd. “These towns have been conquered. Explain that to your governor — he doesn’t have a clue they’ve been conquered. And we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them out of our country.”
But before Trump’s visit, Coffman, the mayor of Aurora, took to Facebook to say that Aurora is a “safe city.”
“The reality is that the concerns about Venezuelan gang activity have been grossly exaggerated. The incidents were limited to several apartment complexes in this city of more than 400,000 residents,” Coffman said.
Coffman, along with Aurora Council Member and Public Safety Chairwoman Danielle Jurinsky, another Republican, previously rebuked Trump over the Tren de Aragua gang claims he made during the presidential debate last month.
“TdA has not “taken over” the city. The overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations are simply not true,” the pair wrote in a statement. “To date, APD has now linked 10 people to TdA and has arrested eight of those people.”
Trump also blasted Polis over Colorado’s attempts to remove him from the primary ballot over his actions related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, which the Supreme Court overturned in March.
“It was Polis who led the move to take me off the ballot because I was leading in the polls against all of the Democrats,” Trump said before asking the crowd to vote for him in the reliably blue state.
The effort to remove Trump was led by the left-leaning group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, which brought the case to Colorado last year.
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“So I think Colorado will show a tremendous protest vote for what they did to try and keep me off the ballot and, more importantly, what they have done to the fabric of your culture,” Trump said. “And remember, I believe Colorado is, you know, we’re very close. We’re very close.”
Harris sat down for a town hall with the Spanish-language television network Univision, where she discussed the “broken immigration system” of the United States and blamed Trump for scuttling a border security bill.
