2 weeks Ago By Maureen Tkacik
Earlier this month, a middle-aged woman with shaggy, silvery hair and a pleasant smoker’s contralto flew from Denver to Washington to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. “My name is Cindy Romero,” she began. “I am a wife, a mother of five, a grandmother of three, a part-time worker and student, and a former resident of Aurora, Colorado.
I am one of the many victims across the nation of the violent transnational terrorist organization Tren de Aragua.” Romero’s journey from anonymous apartment dweller to MAGA heroine began last August, when she showed a local news reporter doorbell video footage of six young men with enormous guns storming into her hallway and beating down the door of the apartment opposite hers, sparking a half-hour-long gunfight. The men were among the tens of thousands of newly arrived Venezuelans who had flooded into the Denver area starting in late 2022.
When the video went viral, the right-wing media ecosystem greeted it as “smoking gun” evidence that lax immigration policies had reduced crunchy idylls across the nation to what the termed a “ ”—and that the libs, as usual, were in denial about it. By the time Trump showed up for an in Aurora last fall, Romero was there onstage. In the weeks before the election, she appeared on a half-dozen national news shows to discuss the folly of Joe Biden’s “open borders” policy, and earlier this year even filmed a spot for the local NRA affiliate thanking her husband’s guns for keeping them safe from Venezuelan gangbangers.
But as the first weeks of the Trump presidency unfolded, the assignment shifted. The hearing she testified at was not about immigration policy , but the long list of federal judges seen as interfering with Trump’s most aggressive actions, among them his invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify a nationwide expulsion of Venezuelans who had been mostly living in the country legally. Sitting to Romero’s left, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich accused 15 judges of attempting to stage a treasonous “judicial coup d’état.
” If the notion that a midsized mountain state borough had been “invaded” had struck the non-MAGA mind as campaign season hyperbole back in October, the godfather of modern conservatism now apparently considered it self-evident truth that America was not only in the throes of war, but a war it was not winning fast enough. As “Sun Tzu observed in 5000 B.C.
,” Gingrich reminded the audience: “speed is the essence of war.” Then Romero told her personal story of the invasion, in which dozens of Venezuelan men had moved into her apartment complex in spring/summer 2024 and transformed it into a squalid hellscape of rampant drug use, loud overnight parties, stolen vehicles, overflowing trash, apparent child prostitution, and random shoot-outs. “I feel safer every time they fill up a plane and fly away,” she answered a question about the policy of sending supposed gang members to Earth’s most terrifying prison, the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in Tecoluca, El Salvador.
“This is not just an isolated incident,” she concluded. “People have forgotten September 11.” Romero later elaborated on the reference in a chat with the .
It wasn’t that her experience was analogous to the coordinated hijacking that took down the World Trade Center and killed 3,000 people. It was about the sense of “unity, pride in our home and trust in our elected officials” she felt with her fellow Americans in the aftermath. Throughout 2024, Romero felt increasingly alienated from mainstream American society: too broke to move, too scared to leave the house, too scared to go home at the end of her shifts at a Denver Amazon returns kiosk, and trapped in a section of town where the police refused to respond if they didn’t have three cars and an armored vehicle.
Her one “friend” among the male migrants, a guy across the hall who assured her he would use his guns to “protect” her, was murdered in his apartment in the August shoot-out. (She didn’t even know his name, learning it was “Oswaldo” only after he died.) But if a sense of common purpose and societal trust was the source of Romero’s 9/11 nostalgia, the Trump administration has deployed the rhetoric, reasoning, and extralegal modes of operation of the high “war on terror” in a much more literal sense.
They invoke the term “Tren de Aragua” as though it were ISIS or al-Qaeda, render random Venezuelans to CECOT on the premise that TDA represents a “foreign terror organization” that has effectively declared war on the United States, and dispatch surrogates to soften up the America First crowd for a bit of “regime change.” On Don Trump Jr.’s Triggered podcast, the president’s son exiled right-wing Venezuelan politician whether the Venezuelan government had “opened the prisons to invade America with criminals.
” She demurred a bit before declaring that President Nicolás Maduro was the leader of Tren de Aragua, and that he had promoted migration from his own country to facilitate the invasion. two weeks before the hearing, an ex-CIA station chief and Florida-based security consultant named Gary Berntsen, who claims to be leading a small team advising Trump administration officials on the topic, said the Tren de Aragua scare was the manifestation of a deliberate plot, in which Maduro had dispatched 5,000 gang members across the Texas border, including a smaller elite unit trained in paramilitary tactics, to wage “hybrid warfare” and “destabilize” the country. But as frightening as it felt watching teenagers parade guns around her block, the kids didn’t seem like a disciplined force to Shannon Peterson, a longtime ESL teacher and neighbor of Romero’s who had become attracted during Invasion Summer to the cause of deporting Venezuelan gang members.
“It was more like racing down the alley with a blunt and a beer in your hand, music blaring and no plates, no fears, no fucks given,” she told the with a rueful laugh. “Not something that was super ..
. organized. I think it was more like a franchise model.
” What was, by contrast, well organized and centrally coordinated was the public relations rollout by which Tren de Aragua metamorphosed from an arcane obsession of organized crime buffs into an existential threat to the American way of life. That’s because it was masterminded by a politically connected, $475-an-hour crisis communications firm at the apparent behest of Romero’s landlord. But not all PR is misinformation and not all lies are devoid of truth.
A handful of abandoned and neglected apartment buildings in Aurora had been de facto “occupied” by a legitimately violent and vindictive group of actors, and the peculiar insistence of Aurora’s , its , and most emphatically its regional housing advocacy organizations that Venezuelan gangs were simply “not a thing” was politically and substantively unwise. In the short term, the “gaslighting” seems to have offended the gangs’ previously woke neighbors far in excess of the crime itself; in the long term, the underlying crises at the heart of the hysteria were the products of foolish political decisions that had gotten virtually no media attention, much less sober analysis. And those foolish decisions, culminating in the buildup of Venezuelans with no criminal record languishing in CECOT while documented violent criminals and gang leaders enjoy at least a modicum of due process in domestic detention centers, could easily lead to much more foolish ones in the lunacy of the current political moment.
to this story, but as is often the case, the root causes behind the great “Tren de Aragua invasion” of Denver-area multifamily housing are economic. In 2017, the Trump administration began sanctioning countries that sold oil refining agents to Venezuela. The country’s documented oil reserves are the most bountiful in the world by a factor of four, but strangling its already compromised production capacity roughly doubled the GDP contraction already under way due to a mix of plunging oil prices and corruption, and triggered a mass stampede from Venezuela that would ultimately envelop one-third of the population.
As “getting out of Venezuela” became the nation’s sole growth industry, so grew the fortunes of the local underworld that knew how to transport illicit goods and humans across hostile terrain. That same year, an aspiring Brooklyn real estate mogul named Shmaryahu Baumgarten made his first apartment building acquisitions in Colorado, having soured on New York City amid widespread landlord revulsion toward then-mayor Bill de Blasio, who made his name disseminating an annual list of the worst landlords in each of the five boroughs. Baumgarten’s company, CBZ Management, was nowhere near the worst; the 1,500 violations his 201 properties have amassed over the years is about average for a portfolio of its size.
But in Colorado, CBZ stood out. For example, in 2018 Baumgarten acquired a $9 million affordable senior living community and promptly evicted every tenant, which the local newspaper as “unlike anything in recent memory for Colorado Springs.” CBZ renovated the units, tripled the rent, renamed it Luxe Tower, and badly neglected the building, according to online that remain the only apparent consequence of these actions.
Neither Shmaryahu Baumgarten nor his brother Zev responded to repeated requests for comment from the , nor did multiple of their attorneys and publicists. Migrations of both Venezuelans and big-city landlords intensified in 2019. Amid the Trump administration’s relentless operations to replace Maduro with a relatively obscure right-wing opposition leader named Juan Guaidó—which ranged from a Hail Mary military invasion managed by a Canadian-born former Green Beret recruited by Trump’s Keith Schiller, to a string of paralyzing and protracted blackouts that even before the Nord Stream pipeline attack an American appetite for infrastructure sabotage when it wants to get its way, to the criminal indictment (and placement of multimillion-dollar bounties on the proverbial heads) of Maduro and various cabinet members on drug trafficking charges, in an attempt to incentivize the efforts of private coup plotters—Tren de Aragua burst into the headlines when two of the gang’s members in the Venezuelan air force, alongside several soldiers and police officers.
Until then, it was broadly assumed that TDA, which had been essentially allowed to self-govern a thriving underworld empire—replete with a nightclub and baseball field and a zoo featuring two tigers—from the Tocorón prison 80 miles southwest of Caracas, was politically aligned with Maduro, who tapped low-ranking members to quash opposition demonstrations. But the assassination’s motives were unclear, according to the 2023 book by international crime journalist Ronna Rísquez. It’s possible Maduro ordered the hit out of fear that the general might be disloyal, or that TDA was simply taking advantage of Venezuela’s existential chaos to assert domination.
Whatever the case, the attack the shocking “impunity” Venezuelan organized crime networks enjoyed amid the country’s downward spiral. Meanwhile, the New York and California state legislatures passed tough new tenant protection laws, triggering a landlord diaspora toward more permissive regions and sending the volume of multifamily transactions in 2018 to a then-record $193 billion. Baumgarten put all his New York properties up for sale, and entities related to CBZ acquired seven more properties in Denver, Aurora, and nearby Edgewater by early 2020, later adding a final Aurora property, Whispering Pines, in 2022, by which point it owned roughly 500 units in greater Denver.
Baumgarten’s younger brother Zev, now co-owner of CBZ, moved to Colorado to manage the burgeoning empire. After a pause during the pandemic, the multifamily housing market roared to $335 billion in 2021 amid bottom-barrel interest rates and a surge in interest from YouTube personalities preaching the “ ” of property-flipping that inflated per-unit valuations to an eye-popping $212,000—not much more than the average price of a single-family home ten years before. Many of these landlords were deeply underwater on their New York mortgages, a state of affairs that would contribute to the eventual failure of Signature Bank.
The bubble would not end well for anyone, but it would be particularly excruciating for tens of thousands of renters like Cindy Romero. into the Edge at Lowry complex, studio apartments were going for $600. But she paid $1,200 for a one-bedroom.
CBZ had bought the six buildings comprising the apartment complex for $6.9 million in mid-2019, and it was jacking up the rent. By nearly all accounts, CBZ was unusually neglectful from just about day one.
A former tenant who moved into Denver’s William Penn Apartments about a month after Baumgarten acquired it in 2019 that CBZ, which he called “just horrible, horrible, horrible,” would “never, ever, ever fix anything.” A former tenant at Romero’s complex moved out almost instantaneously upon moving in, after her mother found water seeping up through the floor upon entering the bathroom. CBZ proceeded to bill thousands of dollars to an insurance policy it required tenants to purchase in lieu of security deposits, which in turn attempted to destroy the tenant’s credit, a practice numerous other tenants have detailed in and .
And dozens of CBZ tenants complained to Denver and Aurora authorities that the company forced them to go without heat and hot water for months and even, in the case of one tenant at the Edge at Lowry, two whole , in a region where the average early-morning temperature is 33 degrees in . Even Romero, who generally maintains that CBZ was perfectly respectable “as low-income apartment landlords go,” says she went without heat for three weeks in February after the boiler broke down, though the manager brought space heaters and it didn’t bother her much. In 2021, CBZ was the subject of a about tenants at its Bahamas Apartments building (the name was later changed to Aspen Grove) who had started withholding rent on the grounds that their homes had been overrun by rats and roaches and management was unresponsive even to emergencies like the of one tenant’s bathroom.
In the piece, a maintenance man chastises a disgruntled resident for failing to make rent, while she retorts that she refuses to pay for such “nasty” accommodations. A reporter tries and fails to contact CBZ for comment from the tenant’s cracked phone, as the call repeatedly drops. CBZ had acquired the complex just two years before the segment aired for about $125,000 per unit, more than quadruple the value it had changed hands for just seven years before.
But the complex seemed almost apocalyptically desolate in the news segment. The following October, a tenant complained to the city that no one had come to clean out the home of a woman who had in her apartment more than three months earlier. All that was the Venezuelans started showing up.
By all appearances and legal filings, CBZ was suffering from a liquidity crisis. Shmaryahu Baumgarten’s brother-in-law (and Ted Cruz mega-donor) Ben Nash, whose mobile phone empire PCS capitalized at least some of their investments, appeared to owe money throughout the country. In 2018, a vendor called Brightstar filed a federal lawsuit claiming to have not been paid on $8 million in inventory and Nash of “using PCS to run what is, in essence, an illicit kiting or Ponzi scheme.
” And between 2021 and 2023, of Nash’s personal in to recover more than $17 million they had loaned him as much as a decade ago. With one exception, the lawsuits were settled out of court; in the 2023 case, the judge Nash to pay $7 million. There is also evidence that the Baumgartens refinanced some of their Colorado properties.
U.S. Bank alleged last June that CBZ and affiliates defaulted on a $2 million loan it took out on a property it purchased for $1.
5 million with a 30 percent down payment in 2020, and in September filed a lawsuit claiming three CBZ affiliates were more than $7.25 million delinquent on a building it bought for $7.68 million in January 2022, which was transferred to another LLC six months later and subsequently refinanced in September 2023, at which point CBRE granted the CBZ entities an adjustable-rate loan.
Frequent and aggressive refinancing has long been common among commercial real estate investors, of course; but in mid-2022, interest rates began climbing, property values began declining, and suddenly refinancing was no longer a solid option. A generation of multifamily property investors was deeply underwater and on the brink of losing everything. As luck or fate would have it, though, just as interest rates began to soar, the first of hundreds of buses full of Venezuelan migrants pulled up to the Denver homeless shelter, in desperate need of a place to stay.
the Denver area between December 2022 and December 2024. Yoli Casas, a physical therapy trainer and founder of a small health nonprofit, was tapped to match migrants with apartments willing to house them, and she described the situation in language similar to what’s used by : a humanitarian disaster of biblical proportions. “They all showed up in the same flip-flops they had worn to walk through the [Darién Gap],” she told the .
“One of the kids drew a picture of a stream in the jungle with what I thought was a log floating in it, and I asked her, is that a log in the water? But it wasn’t a log, actually, it was a dead body.” Casas says she and her associates ultimately found homes on behalf of about 8,000 migrants, using funds from the city and the 2021 American Rescue Plan. A few dozen, they estimate, wound up in CBZ’s properties, and at one point Casas’s sister organization Papagayo Foundation set up a formal relationship with CBZ, which was desperate to fill its 500 units, according to a pseudonymous employee of the company by a journalist for a newsmagazine show produced by the conservative group Turning Point USA.
But both organizations cut CBZ off around June 2023, after Casas says she got a call from her bank reporting that her CBZ contact, a property manager who did not respond to multiple requests for comment, had tried to cash a check that had already been deposited. She almost dismissed it as a fluke, until she got another call not long afterward reporting that the property manager had tried the same trick at another branch. The pace of migrant arrivals had picked up considerably, and Casas didn’t have time for anyone she thought might be trying to cheat her, especially given the horrific photos of caved-in ceilings and squalid common areas some of her clients had sent.
Around the summer of 2023, Romero says, the of Venezuelans coming to live in her complex began to shift. “The first wave was families with young children, who packed in three to a room, saved money, worked long hours,” she told the , almost wistfully. The programs only entitled those folks to two free months, after which they departed to somewhere they knew family or friends.
The people who replaced them were less mobile in every way, Romero claims. They had fewer small children and a more palpable air of “desperation” about them. A few hung out in the parking lot drinking and tinkering with cars all night, blocking other residents from getting to work in the morning.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who pioneered busing migrants to blue cities and states, had gone out of his way to export only migrants who were not authorized to work, meaning they had not taken advantage of a Biden administration program that granted immediate work permits to migrants from certain countries who made appointments and underwent screening before they attempted to cross the border. By definition, migrants who were not authorized to work were far likelier to owe money to whoever had helped them navigate their border crossings, which almost inevitably involved gangs.
It’s worth pointing out here that Cindy Romero is not . Her pre-MAGA Facebook feed consists of self-deprecating quips (“I don’t know who needs to hear this but: Slow down. You’re going through your weed too fast”) and reminders to help the homeless.
Her mother was a live-in nanny, and she and her sister grew up in the guest room of the family she babysat; she ran away from home at 13, got pregnant and dropped out of school at 17, and after finally summoning the courage to leave the abusive father of her children, she spent years abusing drugs and alcohol and periodically getting arrested for dealing drugs or writing bad checks. She stopped drinking and took her GED exam; her score was so high she got a partial scholarship to Austin Peay State University, where she majored in social work before a counselor advised she switch to English because actually a social worker was too depressing. At one point, she told me she was surprised to learn no one in the Republican Party or at Fox News or the NRA had run a background search on her, perhaps curious to know if the had.
(We had.) “I have opinions about criminals because in my youth, I a criminal,” she said with a laugh. “But I was forced to learn from my mistakes, because that’s what you do when you grow up.
” By September 2023, Tren de Aragua had “taken over” Aspen Grove, the property CBZ had paid $12.38 million to acquire four years earlier. The Aurora police chief sent CBZ a officially designating the property a “criminal nuisance,” citing 108 incidents over the previous year in which the Aurora Police Department had been called to the property, including shootings, stabbings, and gun manufacture, and warning Zev Baumgarten that the city reserved the right to shut down the property if it continued to be a haven for criminal activity.
The department dispatched an officer trained in a philosophy called Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design to compose a detailed survey of the property, ultimately reporting that gangs were “using threats and coercion to control the apartments.” But gangs weren’t the only new arrivals; the officer noted that on the day he had begun his survey, “seven homeless [individuals] were sleeping in the lobby of the apartment complex” surrounded by “alcohol containers and drug paraphernalia.” The report recommended CBZ change the lobby locks and upgrade security systems; fix the lighting and establish communal areas targeted at law-abiding tenants, ideally with basic amenities for children; and remove the abandoned cars and mushrooming trash piles from the parking lot.
An Aurora spokesman later told the city’s procedures for dealing with property managers were “designed to be educational and informative, not punitive.” In CBZ’s partial defense, Baumgarten maintains that he tried to fix some of his properties’ problems in November 2023, only to be viciously assaulted by a delinquent tenant; though he reported the crime, he did not cooperate with the follow-up investigation, according to released by Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation, and the assailant continued to terrorize his fellow tenants for a year. By that point, it was far too late to reform the worst properties in CBZ’s portfolio without overwhelming police backup.
But that was hardly the Aurora Police Department’s fault. , Tren de Aragua had used its lucrative human trafficking and illegal gold mining operations to build a walled special economic zone inside Tocorón prison. But in September 2023, Maduro sent 11,000 soldiers to invade the prison and bust up the mega-gang “once and for all.
” Berntsen, the former CIA station chief, says he believes Maduro’s crackdown was cover for a deliberate gambit to dispatch gang members to 20 states to wage a “criminal insurgency” in America. But Berntsen is a professional regime change mercenary. During the Obama administration, he established a consultancy with the founder of a CIA-linked charter airline implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal that attempted to sell a disgruntled member of the Kuwaiti royal family on a plot to dethrone the emir, detailed in a lengthy PowerPoint presentation that included the memorable bullet point: “The stakes are very, very high ($30+ billion) and are easily worth killing over.
” After Trump’s election, Berntsen worked as a consultant to the Justice Department on its drug trafficking indictment against Maduro, which the website InSight Crime, then helmed by Tren de Aragua biographer Rísquez, as a “simplified and occasionally distorted ...
Hollywood version” of reality. Without access to refining capacity or global financial markets, it is easy to understand why the Venezuelan regime would resort to selling drugs to finance its operations. But it’s harder to fathom why it would deliberately litter the global hegemon with drunk-driving, gun-toting rapists, drug dealers, and kidnappers.
It’s always possible Maduro cracked down on TDA simply to “get tough on crime” in advance of the next year’s election, and avoid falling into the trap that ultimately vanquished Joe Biden. Following the Tocorón operation, the Venezuelan government issued an Interpol Red Notice advising nations to be on the lookout for a dozen or so TDA-affiliated fugitives, among them (also known as “Fresa”), wanted for extortion, sex trafficking, arms trafficking, and terrorism. As it happened, Fresa had escaped to the United States, where he’d applied for asylum under his real name in Lubbock, Texas, a month before Maduro’s raid.
It’s not clear what Fresa did during the year that passed between obtaining his work permit and his arrest for lying on his asylum application in North Carolina. But if Tren de Aragua was involved in half the crimes to which the gang was linked in that time, it was a terrifyingly productive year. In 2024 alone, TDA was blamed for the murder of University of Georgia student Laken Riley, the shooting of a Brazilian tourist and security guard inside a Times Square sneaker store, the murder and rape of a Houston 12-year-old, the kidnapping of a Dallas man and two kids, and a drive-by of two New York cops by a 19-year-old scooter driver, who later confessed he’d been smuggling guns into a migrant shelter on behalf of TDA.
By July, the Biden administration issued a statement declaring Tren de Aragua a “transnational criminal organization,” and offering rewards totaling $12 million for information leading to the capture of its three top leaders. The declaration came just as Aurora officials started playing hardball with CBZ, with an assistant district attorney floating a 60-day jail sentence for Zev Baumgarten if he failed to testify, according to a motion he recently filed in one of his criminal code enforcement cases. It was in Denver that the gangs seemed to have established their most conspicuous presence.
As Aurora tried to turn up the heat on the Baumgartens, four suspected members of TDA robbed a Denver family-owned jewelry shop and made off with $2.5 million in merchandise; the same store would be robbed again in November. Four days later, some 4,000 Venezuelans converged on a Target parking lot in Aurora to celebrate what they wrongly assumed would be a landslide electoral shellacking for Maduro.
The gathering apparently spooked many shoppers, some of whom found themselves trapped by double-parked revelers. Later that night, a major shootout at Aspen Grove involving roughly a dozen men would leave one man with permanent brain damage. A local city councilwoman and Republican rising star named Danielle Jurinsky took notice.
“I need you to know the severity of and the flat out truth about what is going on in Aurora,” she on Facebook, posting a gallery of panoramic photos of the spectacle. “This is in the United States of America ..
. this is in YOUR city.” The following week, Jurinsky received an email from CBZ’s new crisis communications firm, Red Banyan.
“My name is Kara, I work alongside a mutual client of JJ Slatkin, who we hear you’ve spoken to regarding what’s happening in the community with regard to apartment complexes and gang violence,” it read, describing CBZ as an owner that had been “completely shut out” from its own properties by Tren de Aragua, and whose employees no longer felt safe to even enter their own lobbies. “We are aiming to bring media attention, both locally (well underway) and nationally, to help provide immediate political and public pressure to address this ongoing and widespread crisis.” Another Red Banyan staffer had sent a similar pitch to Denver’s Fox affiliate, depicting the Aurora Police Department as hopelessly overwhelmed and outgunned.
City spokesman Ryan Luby, a longtime investigative reporter, announced in response that the APD and code enforcement would be CBZ’s worst and most crime-infested building, detailing hundreds of code violations ranging from “rodent infestations to a lack of heat and electricity to sewage backups to trash pileups to water leaks to shattered or missing windows.” The email alleged that CBZ and Red Banyan had responded to every effort at remediation by seeming to “engage in diversionary tactics, fight the city in its city charter-mandated duties to enforce city code, and fabricate alternative narratives with reporters.” But no one at City Hall appreciated that Red Banyan isn’t just any PR firm; it is something like an extension of the Israel lobby.
Its founder Evan Nierman spent the first seven and a half years of his career at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and he frequently contributes long quotes and op-eds about Israel’s long-suffering “image,” the valiance of celebrities who risk cancellation for defending it, the scourge of antisemitism, and the masterful propaganda of Palestinians. Among the firm’s current is the Middle East Forum, a think tank whose founder Daniel Pipes has for three decades the Oklahoma City bombing was financed by jihadist groups in the Middle East. Another early client was a who lobbied bitterly against the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran in 2015.
Nierman launched Red Banyan in 2010, and an early hire was the late Jarad Geldner, a fellow AIPAC alum; senior vice president of strategic communications Monika Levin came from the media relations department of the Anti-Defamation League. Three other senior Red Banyan officials had spent a combined 25 years at AIPAC and the anti-BDS campus offshoot StandWithUs; one now serves as director of development for the , a Washington think tank closely aligned with the Likud Party of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Red Banyan senior account manager Jared Sorhaindo spent half his career doing research and social media for the American Enterprise Institute and the now-defunct Israel Project, one of Red Banyan’s first clients.
, who now runs the firm’s “vertical” division, spent five and a half years directing communications for the Republican Jewish Coalition. There are many more such examples. Red Banyan did not respond to requests for comment.
Some of this past experience seeped into the CBZ case. Zev Baumgarten recently claimed selective code enforcement motivated by “ ” in an “affirmative defense” motion in his criminal case, which accused Aurora officials of explicitly telling Baumgarten they were singling him out for rough treatment “because you are an Orthodox Jew.” (The officials in question deny making any such statements, and the “evidence” Baumgarten furnishes to bolster his assertion largely suggests that his buildings were simply in far worse condition than others in the area, which is borne out by tenant advocates, lawsuits, Google reviews, and interviews with current and former tenants not named Cindy Romero.
) Perhaps more significantly, the Israel lobby is inextricably linked to the Venezuela regime change lobby, both by explicit alliances like that between Likud and the right-wing party of Guaidó, and ideological biases like their shared and abiding hatred for Iran, which has helped Maduro circumvent U.S. sanctions to buy food and refine limited quantities of oil.
Tactically, however, Nierman treated his client’s crisis not as a geopolitical phenomenon but a simple cancellation, which he describes in his book as senseless attacks by “cancel vultures” who “do not care too much about what kind of prey they find, so long as they can feast.” In Jurinsky, an attractive, sometimes blond sports bar owner elected to an at-large Aurora City Council seat in a high-dollar, low-turnout 2021 race designed to turn Denver’s innermost borough into a for a conservative backlash to COVID-19 lockdowns and defund-the-police politics, Red Banyan found a kindred spirit. Jurinsky immediately took up CBZ’s cause.
“None of us buy that story, that this is based on a code enforcement violation,” she said during a meeting of the city council public safety committee. She believed CBZ was being crucified by the cancel vultures, and that was all she needed to know. Tren de Aragua, and did not understand what was happening to her apartment complex.
A third wave of migrants—let’s call them the Edge Lords—had showed up in late spring 2024. They carried big guns, stayed up all night drinking and occasionally firing weapons, and had their own stable of electricians, contractors, and locksmiths who changed the locks on all the doors, cut holes in walls, and rejiggered the wiring to steal electricity. CBZ later alleged that the gangs were actually taking out online advertisements posting rooms for rent and placing their tenants in vacant properties.
Very young women who “looked like they were wearing their moms’ lingerie” would stand outside the buildings in heels and walk up to any random car that approached, according to Romero. A recently filed from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) about a group of self-professed TDA gangsters operating out of Ivy Crossing, another troubled complex owned by an overleveraged out-of-state landlord, suggests the criminal ambitions of at least some members of the migrant population were as lofty as suspected. During a monthslong undercover sting operation, one of the gangsters allegedly told undercover ATF agents he would only charge them $3,000 to furnish a large number of prostitutes for a party, chosen from a photo gallery he kept in his phone of “girls who appeared to be young in age,” at least one of whom was “holding an AR style firearm” in her shot.
The prostitutes themselves, the affidavit notes, were required to pay the gangsters $20,000 a head for the service of trafficking and pimping them. The operation also revealed the gangsters had steady supplies of semi- and fully automatic weapons mostly trafficked to Mexico, in exchange for prostitutes willing to pay them $20,000 a head to pimp them to American customers, and a mix of ketamine, cocaine, and fentanyl dyed pink and called “tusi,” and methamphetamine, ten pounds of which the men were able to furnish for the undercover cops. The experience that summer created something of an ideological conversion in Shannon Peterson.
She had once founded a group called Teachers United for Immigrant Rights and says she “never, ever, ever had a negative experience with any immigrant” until the Venezuelans populated Romero’s apartment complex, with which her house shares a back alley, and she started to hear gunshots literally every night. After a man jumped over her next-door neighbor’s chain link fence and shot off his gun next to their nine-year-old daughter’s face and the police took several hours to come, Peterson began trying to get help from her congressman, her city councilwoman—anyone she could find. No one wanted to talk about it, much less help her collect local crime data or facilitate some kind of solution.
Romero had renewed her lease at the Edge at Lowry in June after management promised to fix the problems in the parking lot, but she hadn’t heard from them since. No one had come around to unload the dumpsters, no one would pick up the phone, and after the Aspen Grove shutdown she and her husband Ed began to think about withholding rent so they could save money for a deposit on a new place. They knew they’d need evidence to break the lease, so she started snapping photos and scouring doorbell footage to build a case.
And then came the shootout, a crime violent enough for the whole SWAT team to show up. Vicente Arenas from Fox 31 showed up the next morning to interview neighbors about what had gone down, and Romero invited him in to see the five locks on her door and her three guns. She showed him the doorbell camera footage of the gun-toting Edge Lords busting down doors.
“But you can’t use it until I’m out of this place,” she told him. The next day, she got a call from Danielle Jurinsky. When Arenas showed Jurinsky the video, she knew it was exactly what she and her followers needed to make the TDA propaganda a success.
Romero had no idea who Jurinsky was, but she seemed like an honest-to-god angel. CBZ had a new apartment for her, Jurinsky said; they could move out that weekend. John Fabbricatore, a former MMA fighter who would soon be running the Denver ICE office, helped move her stuff.
The video went predictably viral, boosted by Elon Musk, who was deep in the throes of an online troll-off with Maduro, whom he demeaned as a “donkey.” But three days later, then-interim police chief Heather Morris gave a press conference outside the Edge promising she had spoken to residents and was pleased to report that contrary to popular belief, “ ” the complex. Aurora’s new police chief Todd Chamberlain, a Los Angeles Police Department veteran sworn in just ten days later, would take a more pragmatic approach to messaging, that the gang could flourish into the next MS-13 if officials continued to ignore its growth, while for its proliferation in Aurora on the Baumgartens.
“It appears to me, based on all the information that I have, that the management company is using” the furor over Venezuelan gangs, Chamberlain said, “to say, ‘Hey, we’re stepping away from a place that we mismanaged basically into ruin.’” At an open city council session following the shootout, a crowd of activists literally booed Peterson as she tried to give testimony. She didn’t go to the Trump rally, but stood outside carrying a sign that read, “I BELIEVE CINDY,” and felt more than a twinge of vindication when he announced he was naming his mass deportation plan “Operation Aurora.
” Romero actually felt bad for Morris, who she says “was set up to take the fall.” The Aurora Police Department had been reeling since the tragic and bizarre accidental killing of Elijah McClain, an endearing massage therapist and violinist with no criminal record who’d been essentially detained for wearing a face mask and acting funny, then fatally tranquilized with an overdose of ketamine. The state attorney general had imposed a consent decree, morale was in the sewer, and Morris had been forced to take a job no one wanted.
Forces more shadowy and important than the APD were working to suppress the truth of what Venezuelan gangs had done to her apartment complex, Romero believed; the “slumlord” storyline was the diversionary tactic. I told her I saw things differently, through the lens of the great multifamily housing bubble that popped when interest rates began hiking in 2022, sending mortgage holders deeply underwater. The owners have essentially given up on these buildings, but the bank lenders aren’t quite ready to foreclose and write off the losses.
Roughly 13 percent of all multifamily mortgages outstanding are officially in distress right now, a figure that more than quadrupled over the past year, and in once-torrid Sun Belt markets like Houston and Phoenix, literally hundreds of apartment buildings are plagued by deferred maintenance and overflowing trash, green pools and festering crime. It’s Criminology 101 that “fixing broken windows” is a foundational ingredient of controlling crime, and while cities must serve as the handyman and cleanup crew of last resort, it is very literally the legal and fiduciary responsibility of multimillionaire developers to maintain their properties. But when their mortgage balances are three or four times above what they’d fetch in a foreclosure auction, those same developers suddenly have a fiduciary responsibility to get out of Dodge.
(Zev Baumgarten, for his part, has moved to Florida; last month, a Denver judge issued a .) This is a glaring and dangerous “market failure” that most municipal bureaucracies are not set up to correct, but which our federal housing and banking regulators could very easily combat, if they weren’t captured by the . Nature abhors a vacuum, as we see in zombie apartment buildings across the country.
In San Antonio, a massive 600-unit apartment complex purchased in 2022 by a Dallas mega-investor with a from notorious lender Arbor Realty was similarly “invaded” by Venezuelan gangs, who busted open doors and changed the locks of hundreds of vacant properties, and placed their own migrant tenants there. In El Paso, similar gangs occupied an illegal hotel neglected by another absentee landlord. The “invasion” of Aurora was the result of a series of conscious political market interventions: the Trump administration’s decision to vaporize what was left of the Venezuelan economy, the Biden administration’s decision in 2022 to loosen work authorization restrictions under pressure from corporations reeling from “labor shortages,” Denver’s decision to brand itself a “sanctuary city,” Texas’s decision to punish sanctuary cities with hundreds of buses of migrants who can’t legally work, Denver’s decision to quietly outsource the problem of housing new residents to a handful of community activists with no systems of governance or oversight.
There is likely more blame to be distributed at this point than there is food and housing, and it makes sense that more Americans than ever feel that it is time to examine the evidence, correct the excesses, close the loopholes, and throw out some of the bums. But that is not quite what is happening. gang members in a dozen or so states have been arrested and detained since TDA was designated a transnational crime organization, including five of the six men on Cindy Romero’s viral video, one of whom was indicted on gun and conspiracy charges this week along with 19 alleged co-conspirators.
Prosecutors now say they belong not to Tren de Aragua, but a rival sex- and ketamine-trafficking gang called “Anti-Tren,” consisting primarily of former TDA members who “basically decided they didn’t want to keep sharing their earnings with Venezuela,” according to John Fabbricatore. Many of these suspects have developed shockingly extensive rap sheets for people who have been in the country for such a short time. Law enforcement authorities repeatedly let them go for reasons that likely boil down to lack of resources but should be studied further.
One of Romero’s old neighbors amassed 38 charges stemming from five incidents in eight months. The brother of Laken Riley’s killer has been linked to TDA on the dubious basis of his , but what is more troubling is that he was arrested and let go after assaulting two border patrol officers shortly after crossing the border, then let go again after getting stopped for driving under the influence of marijuana, methamphetamine, and possibly seven beers, then let go a third time after shoplifting groceries from Walmart. Back in November, Big Oil saw the Venezuelan gang scare as an opportunity to convince Trump to paradoxically soften his Venezuela policy.
Allowing the country to refine and sell more oil could gain the Maduro regime’s cooperation in Trump’s mass deportation plans. And initially, it looked like “oil for migrants” pragmatism might work. After former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell returned home from a successful visit during which he assured Maduro his boss no longer sought “regime change” in his country, Venezuela of deported migrants after a year of rejections.
But Marco Rubio undid the diplomatic success. Six years earlier, Rubio, a central-casting South Florida anti-socialist extremist, had illustrated a tweet calling on Maduro to resign with a photo of Muammar Gaddafi soaked in blood after having been sodomized with a bayonet. Now, in El Salvador, the newly confirmed secretary of state fielded an intriguing alternative to appeasing his old foe, when Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele suggested: Why not send Tren de Aragua to CECOT? Law enforcement officials appear to have had other plans.
Of nearly 100 suspected TDA members whose names were either publicized when they were charged with crimes, or released in a document dump to America First Legal, an advocacy group founded during the Biden administration by Stephen Miller, was on the list of men sent to Bukele’s famous dungeon. The only name the recognized on the list of 238 was that of Nixon Azuaje Perez, a 20-year-old former resident of an apartment complex owned by Romero’s landlord who was accused of hiding evidence in a gruesome shoot-out last summer, though his mother says he was scapegoated and police never added his name to its public list of “confirmed members” of the gang. During the congressional hearing Romero appeared at, House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) that three— !—of the 238 men “on that plane” to El Salvador were known to have traveled through the Denver area, which seemed an alarmingly low number for a state whose capital Romero’s law enforcement sources have assured her is the official “headquarters of TDA in America.
” Perhaps law enforcement officials are keener to continue investigating and prosecuting cases than disappear their information sources, which is understandable. But the fact that 80 percent or more of the men disappeared to El Salvador have no apparent criminal record in any country suggests that Trump’s own law enforcement apparatus saved hardened murderers and human traffickers from the horrors of the gulag and condemned hundreds of innocent beauticians and day laborers to hell on earth in their place. All for a sadistic PR stunt? Surely no one would put it past the Trump administration.
But there are signs of (even) more sinister forces at work. One of the few people on the manifest indicted for any crimes was César Humberto López-Larios, an in MS-13 arrested last summer at the Houston airport who was allegedly involved in between the gang and Bukele to clamp down on murders and whip votes in exchange for certain financial and territorial concessions. López-Larios’ trial was to shed light on the details of that secret truce, first revealed in 2020 by the website El Faro, which pieced together the negotiations through hundreds of prison intelligence reports.
But last month, the DOJ abruptly dismissed the case, “sensitive foreign policy considerations.” (Bukele denies the existence of the truce, and his administration corroborating the reports immediately following the publication of El Faro’s report.) Similar foreign-policy considerations are clearly at play with TDA, which the Maduro government claims is being spearheaded in America by Leopoldo López, a Colombian-based key conspirator in many of the Trump administration’s coup attempts; and Gilber Caro, a longtime right-wing dissident and Washington cause célèbre who has been laying low since his September arrest in Miami for leaving the scene of a crash he allegedly caused by running a red light at 4 a.
m., in which a 29-year-old man died. (Caro’s name was not on the El Salvador manifest either.
) Maduro has even said the in which Caro directs a TDA leader to , which notably dovetails with the timing of a Homeland Security Investigations memo obtained by the relaying that gang leadership had supposedly given its deputies a “green light” to shoot at law enforcement officers. Maduro, whose adopted nephews served nine years in U.S.
federal prison for cocaine trafficking and who self-evidently put up with the mega-gang for years while clinging to power as corruption and imperial sabotage sucked his nation into an economic black hole, is obviously an unreliable narrator. But so is just about everyone else in this story. At least in Maduro’s version of events, the madness has a plausible motive.
to maintain that the TDA affair is a hoax. Three Denver housing rights nonprofits have made Operation Aurora counterprogramming their core business, even hosting a barbecue at the Edge during the Trump rally to showcase the community’s kinder, gentler side. According to Peterson, the barbecue featured a piñata, “which is not Venezuelan,” along with an Aztec shaman cleansing attendees with copal.
“It was just really flagrant cultural appropriation,” she said. But the city in February, much to the chagrin of activists and the ACLU, which announced in January it was launching an into the APD’s conduct during its response to a grisly November home invasion at the property. (When Aspen Grove was , several of its Venezuelan residents moved to the Edge, only to see that shuttered.
) The groups, which raised $76,000 to move many of the residents, including migrants, into new units, held a last-ditch press conference hailing their “efforts to change the national media narrative that Edge at Lowry was taken over by gangs such as Tren de Aragua, and that the building was a hotspot for criminal activity.” It seemed like a strange kind of victory speech. Natasha Bar Shalom, a homeless rights activist who lives in a CBZ building called the Courtyard on Vine Street in Denver, is spiritually in sync with the groups.
At the first Aurora City Council hearing after Romero’s viral video, Bar Shalom depicted the reality of CBZ living. “The ceiling in my bathroom is caving in, I’ve got mice coming from my ceiling, my dog is completely covered in bites, I have no working stove, I’ve got no working oven, I have no A/C,” she told the crowd. “The narrative is wrong, Venezuelans aren’t gang members, people are slumlords and you’re okay.
” Raucous applause. But after the Edge shut down, Bar Shalom said she understood why. “The gangs are real,” she told the .
“But so are the Crips and the Bloods. That’s why the narrative is wrong. We do this to people.
” She used to live in Colombia, where she trained call center workers, 95 percent of them Venezuelan, 100 percent of whom had big plans of making it in America. “I tried to tell them, don’t do it! place is paradise, you’re already there. But America is really effective at selling this dream where this is a place of opportunities where you can change your life and provide for your family, and they don’t realize there is no fucking moral compass taught to us here, Americans are just taught to hate each other and to isolate.
” The morning after Bar Shalom’s appearance at City Hall, she’d woken up to a 5 a.m. email from Jurinsky, offering to relocate her out of the Courtyard and offering cash assistance if needed.
Bar Shalom understood the terms of the deal; a dramatic housing subsidy, so long as she was willing to “shut up.” In that moment, she says, she also felt she understood the Baumgartens’ endgame. “All they’re going to do is condemn the building and then build some modern fucking apartment that they charge $3,000 a month for, one minute away from a block that’s saturated in drugs and mental instability.
” CBZ had abandoned its buildings , she suspected, because they would be more valuable with no tenants at all. But Bar Shalom has a motto: “The measure of your worth is not defined by your material reality in this moment.” She decided to organize her fellow tenants.
“We pick up the trash. We vacuum the hallways. If one of us has hot water, that’s where everyone will take a shower.
We have to be our own landlords,” she said. “But I’m staying right here.”.
