Aurora landed on the national map in 2024, and Colorado’s third-largest city paid the price in 2025.
And no one paid a higher price than Danielle Jurinsky, the then-Aurora City Councilmember who put herself in the national spotlight in the fall of 2024 as she pushed the wildly exaggerated claim that Aurora had been taken over by gangs of violent Venezuelans, a byproduct of Denver welcoming up to 43,000 migrants in the preceding two years.
That claim originally came from a landlord who’d neglected three apartment complexes in Aurora. New York-based CBZ Management was about to see its property at 1568 Nome Street shut down by the city when one of its listed owners, Zev Baumgarten, told media that members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua had muscled him out of control of the apartments with violence and threats (U.S. federal prosecutors in New York indicted the leader of TdA on Thursday, December 18)…