Social media posts falsely claiming the Tren de Aragua gang took over an apartment building went viral, and former President Donald Trump repeated the claims in the debate.
Former President Donald Trump repeated again and again debunked rumors related to Venezuelan gangs in a Colorado town during Tuesday night’s presidential debate.
Social media posts falsely claiming a Venezuelan gang had taken over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, have circulated widely in pro-Trump communities and been boosted by right-wing pundits in recent weeks.
Even after local officials publicly refuted that the Tren de Aragua gang had taken over the building, sensationalist claims vaguely tying the rumors to the growth of Colorado’s migrant population continued going viral on social media. Trump amplified them further over the past week as he brought up the rumors several times in recent rallies and interviews — and then again at Tuesday night’s debate.
“We have millions of people pouring into our country. … You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently,” Trump said on the debate stage in Philadelphia. “They’re destroying our country. They’re dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality. And we have to get them out.”
The viral rumors used “the most common forms of misinformation” tactics, such as reposting old videos without context, misrepresenting existing data and “frankensteining” together misleading pieces of evidence to fabricate a false narrative, according to the News Literacy Project, a nonprofit fact-checking organization that debunked the rumor.
Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas, a nonprofit organization that studies the impact of misinformation on Latino communities, told NBC News that the false claims related to Tren de Aragua are just the latest examples of rumors created to feed a broader narrative meant to demonize immigrants.
“We very often see these claims associated with migrants’ being criminals or gang members, claims that portray them as the source of increased crime and insecurity in the U.S. broadly, in a way that puts blame directly on them for what people frame as a decline of American society,” Braga said.
