By Ben Johnson
The Washington Stand
The intentional open borders immigration policies of Kamala Harris bear the blame for videos that showing heavily-armed South American gang members terrorizing residents of multiple apartment buildings in Colorado, a U.S. congressman has said.
Video footage leaked out last week showing criminals threatening the largely foreign-born tenets and barging inside apartments in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado. Local officials confirmed members of the Venezuelan-based Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang had taken over three apartment buildings in the area. The nearby Denver Police Department added it found “reasons to believe that members of this gang are tied to crimes in this area.” In July, the Biden-Harris administration designated Tren de Aragua a transnational criminal organization and offered a $12 million reward for its three leaders. The 5,000-member TdA’ motto is “Real until death.”
Federal officials consider TdA’s menacing presence on U.S. soil another fruit of the Biden-Harris administration’s lax border enforcement policy. “You have a completely open border that anyone can go through,” including “drug dealers, criminals,” and those seeking to take jobs from U.S. citizens, said Rep. Alex Mooney (R-W.Va.) on “Washington Watch” last week. “When criminals, drug dealers, gangs see an open border — and Vice President Kamala Harris has refused to close it — they’re going to take advantage of it.”
As the videos of TdA’s intimidation broke, Aurora City Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky (R) spoke openly about the South American gang’s actions. Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman (R) also revealed that “several buildings … have fallen to these Venezuelan gangs.” Residents of the three buildings, made up of “a concentration of Venezuelan migrants,” watched helplessly as TdA “pushed out the property management through intimidation and then collected the rents.”
“I think we’re a victim of a failed policy at the southern border,” Coffman told Fox News.
Despite video evidence, the office of Governor Jared Polis (D) initially dismissed the story. “According to police intelligence this purported invasion is largely a feature of Danielle Jurinsky’s imagination,” asserted Polis’s spokeswoman, Shelby Wieman, last Wednesday. “It’s illegal to take over buildings in Colorado,” she noted in remarks to the New York Post, but the governor’s office is “ready to assist.” Over the holiday weekend, and after public backlash, Polis confirmed the invasion to CNN.
“We’ve taken it very seriously,” said Polis, adding that Aurora local police are “on the front lines” and Colorado will “assist” only if requested.
The impact on Aurora seemed doubly unjust to Coffman, since his city “took a position early on that we were not going to participate in the migrant crisis; we were not going to provide taxpayer support, and we were not even going to be a conduit for federal dollars,” he said. He suspected illegal aliens from Venezuela settled into Aurora thanks to the “federal government, perhaps using some of our local nonprofit partners as a conduit.”
“These people didn’t just go there on their own; somebody put them there,” said Coffman. “Who made this decision to put them there?”
Although Aurora has rejected the illegal immigrant invasion, former Colorado State Senator Ted Harvey told Newsmax host Carl Higbie Thursday that Denver-area officials posted a banner on county property which proclaimed, “We love immigrants.” Their policies encouraged illegal immigration to the area.
Illegal immigrants “are sleeping 10 to a room in government-paid-for hotels, and now we are having them being terrorized by illegal immigrants that their countries don’t even want there, so they’re pawning them off on the United States,” Harvey told Higbie. He revealed his own area had 44 cars stolen in July, and “a lot of those were tied back to Venezuelan crime.”
The Biden-Harris administration has chartered planes and buses to undisclosed locations throughout its four years in office, settling illegal immigrants across the United States often without the knowledge of local officials.
Human traffickers have made a record-setting number of illegal entries across both the northern and southern borders since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021. Biden put Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris in charge of slowing or stopping illegal immigration across the southern border, a role the media referred to as “border czar,” during a public press conference three months later. Harris’s office later tried to pare back the task to dealing with the “root causes” of illegal immigration from three Central American nations. Immigration watchdogs say the overall levels of immigration from those countries has hardly budged, and may have increased, on her watch.
Few in Colorado seemed surprised the gang brought its deadly ways to the United States. “There’s a lot of criminality in Venezuela. It’s basically a failed state,” Coffman told local media. That and the Biden-Harris administration’s border policies make “a terrible combination.”
Mooney said international criminal syndicates know “they can profit now. They can traffic drugs. They can traffic human beings. They can traffic arms, because nobody’s protecting our border. So, the gangs can get more power now, more money. They’re not being fought.”
They will stop if the president, or Vice President Kamala Harris, begin extracting a legal cost for killing U.S. citizens or otherwise violating the border. “Criminals do evil things. But they’re not stupid,” said Mooney.
Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) previously called Harris’s tenure as Border Czar “one of the most catastrophic failures in American history.”
As a presidential candidate, Harris has promoted a “bipartisan” border bill, which includes some funding for border construction. Immigration experts say the bill is unacceptably, and irreparably, flawed. The bill ‘required DHS to process and release 1,400 inadmissible a day into the United States,” noted NumbersUSA.
Yet Harris has largely skated on her poor border record, said Mooney. “The mainstream media these days is trying to downplay [the] role” of Harris as Border Czar, but “She was put in charge of this three years ago. She is directly responsible for” the border’s “lawlessness and chaos,” said Mooney. “Kamala Harris and President Biden have jeopardized our country intentionally.”
As bad as things are, experts worry about the future, in the next four months, or another four years. “What we’re seeing right now could just be a preview of much more to come,” said “Washington Watch” guest host, and Mooney’s former House colleague, Jody Hice. The administration needs to “get tough on crime and, in this case, get tough on the border. We’ve got to stop letting these people come in.”
“I think this is just the beginning” of what could lie in store, agreed Mooney. “I think there are sleeper cells that have come in from Iran and other places.”
The conservative Republican said Congress has some tools at its disposal to hold the administration accountable — if it has the courage to use them.
“The power of the purse is the most important thing invested in the U.S. House of Representatives, where I serve and served,” Mooney told Hice. “Our chamber needs to guard that power and make sure for the people who elected us that we use it to restrict the president when [he gets] out of control.”
Unfortunately, the House has whiffed so often that no one takes it seriously, he said. “Frankly, you’re seeing Democrats don’t really care. And weak Republicans who are just so afraid of a Democrat-caused government shutdown, just cave in and give the Democrats all the money they want with no restrictions.”
GOP leadership could be the silent partners to the Biden-Harris administration’s open borders policies, he stated. “It’s like we’re enabling Kamala Harris to have an open border, because we don’t punish them,” he said. “The president has just assumed to themselves all these powers they don’t have, and the House of Representatives has allowed it, because we keep giving them the money. We just shouldn’t give them the money. It’s really that simple.”
Republican congressmen have lobbied Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) to at least attach the SAVE Act — which would take practical steps to prevent illegal immigrants from registering to vote in U.S. elections — to a continuing resolution funding the government.
In the meantime, Harris’s decision to flout the law has created “a constitutional crisis. You have a president and Vice President Kamala Harris who think they can just ignore the law,” Mooney told Hice. “We have a process by which laws are made. And for the president to just say, ‘I can do whatever I feel like doing’ — ignore student debt, not secure the border — that’s really a problem for our system of government, in addition to what’s happening with the invasion at the southern border.”
As soon as possible, Americans must make their voices heard at the ballot box, border security advocates say. “This is why Donald Trump must be elected,” said Harvey. “This is why we must make sure that Kamala Harris and the other Marxists who have taken over our government right now are thrown out.”
Originally published at The Washington Stand!
