McClung, who’s lived in Aurora for 29 years, came with her roommate to protest.
“It is a much bigger turnout than I expected it to be,” she said of rally-goers.
Inside, as Trump wound down his rally on the day that Colorado clerks began mailing ballots to voters for the Nov. 5 election, he urged people to vote and — returning to previous descriptions of the state’s third-largest city as a “war zone” — promised to “liberate Colorado.”
“We will reclaim our sovereignty,” he said, “and Colorado will vote for Trump as a protest and signal to the world that we are not going to take it anymore.”
Staff reporter Jessica Alvarado Gamez contributed to this story.
Addressing thousands of supporters in a cavernous Aurora ballroom, former President Donald Trump on Friday described the migrant challenges faced by his host city in near-apocalyptic terms.
His solutions to what he portrayed as lawlessness amid a national crime wave by undocumented immigrants — by exaggerating the “limited” problems acknowledged by Aurora city officials and seizing on isolated incidents elsewhere — were equally stark. The repeat Republican presidential nominee promised to use the death penalty on migrants who kill American citizens and said he would dust off a 200-year-old law previously used to create the Japanese internment camps.
“We will send elite squads of ICE, border patrol and federal enforcement officers to hunt down, arrest, and deport every last illegal alien gang member until there is not a single one left,” the former president said to cheers, invoking authorities that included U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Trump spoke for about an hour and 20 minutes in the Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center, 15 minutes from Denver’s airport on the northern edge of Aurora. The rally was 12 miles or more away from the dilapidated apartment complexes that sparked a national firestorm and drew Trump to Colorado.
Much of his speech in the mostly full ballroom, which had a capacity of 10,000, focused on illegal immigration. His lectern was flanked by mugshots of Venezuelan gang members arrested in Aurora, and the two large screens next to him recurringly played news montages describing crimes allegedly committed by migrants across America.
He promised to launch “Operation Aurora” as president. He said it would involve invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to deport any noncitizen from a country that the U.S. is at war with. Trump said he would use it to “expedite the removal of the savage gangs.” The law previously was used to establish American internment camps in World War II, in which thousands of Japanese-Americans were detained. One of the camps, the Granada Relocation Center, also known as Amache, was located in southeastern Colorado.
As Trump spoke, members of the thousands-strong audience yelled “Deport them!” and “Send them back!” Many waved signs that read “Secure our border.”
Immigration is a key issue for Republicans this cycle as they criticize the record of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. That’s been true, too, for Colorado congressional candidates like Gabe Evans and Jeff Crank, both of whom spoke Friday; so did U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert.
Trump’s Aurora trip, the first public campaign visit by a major presidential candidate this campaign cycle, marked the zenith of his repeated exaggerations of the gang and migrant situation in the city of 400,000 people.
Supporters of former President Donald Trump stand in line to enter a Trump campaign rally at the Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center in Aurora on Friday, Oct. 11, 2024. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)
Concerns “have unfairly hurt the city’s identity”
Some local officials and Democrats pushed back hard on Trump’s characterizations of Aurora, both …read more
Source:: The Denver Post – Politics
