President Donald Trump on Saturday invoked an alleged gang incident at an apartment building in Colorado as part of his justification for invading Venezuela.
But his recitation of a handful of unrelated facts omitted that prosecutors have yet to prove anything to a jury. Still the handful of alleged crimes allegedly involving Venezuelan migrants in Colorado was a big part of Trump’s stated rationale for going to war.
“In addition to trafficking gigantic amounts of illegal drugs … (Venezuelan President Nicolas) Maduro sent savage and murderous gangs including the blood-thirsty prison gang Tren de Aragua to terrorize American communities nationwide,” Trump said in a national address Saturday morning after the U.S. carried out strikes against the country and took the president and his wife into custody. “They were in Colorado, they took over apartment complexes. They cut the fingers off people if they called police. They were brutal. But they’re not so brutal now.”
Peter McNeilly, Colorado’s U.S. Attorney, has charged several people in the last year for criminal activities related to what he has called major Tren de Aragua operations that took place in Colorado. None were related to an apartment building, and Maduro is not among those charged here, nor is he mentioned in the indictments as ordering, controlling or even being aware of any of the activity. US intelligence agencies have said Maduro and Tren de Aragua are actually at odds.
The first indictment in August was a sweeping drug and gun case that included several months of charges against more than two dozen defendants.
At the time, the press announcement was billed as a massive Tren de Aragua bust, though officials acknowledged only eight of the 28 people charged were members of the gang and two of those were actually living in Colombia - not Colorado or Venezuela.
Court documents show McNeilly’s office will seek extradition for those two men to face charges in federal court here, though it is not clear whether they are yet in custody anywhere.
That case, with so many defendants, defense attorneys and various charges ranging from murder for hire to possession of firearms and ammunition by undocumented immigrants, along with trafficking, methamphetamine, cocaine and Ecstasy, is moving along on the federal docket, albeit slowly. There are a number of “change of plea” hearings scheduled in the next six months, indicating possible plea deals, according to federal court documents.
The criminal charges filed in that case don’t include any organized gang activity, so federal prosecutors won’t have to prove any gang affiliation in court.
Another indictment filed in December is an organized gang crime case and is related to the finger-mutilation allegations the president mentioned on Saturday.
The case itself sprawls nationally with firearms offenses, robberies and conspiracy to commit kidnapping. The two men who are accused of being the gang ringleaders have never been in the United States, according to federal authorities.
Instead, the grand jury in that case alleged that they worked from likely Colombia or Venezuela to steer large-scale gang and drug operations that touched a number of cities, including Denver.
The indictment also tells a different story than Trump did on Saturday. On Oct. 17, 2024, according to the indictment, one of those men, Brawnis Dominique Suarez Villegas, “directed and approved the torture and disfigurement of victim 1 to secure ransom from victim 1’s family” in Colorado.
Suarez Villegas directed associates to cut off the victim’s fingers when the family failed to pay a $30,000 ransom, federal prosecutors said, not because the person called police, according to the indictment.
The federal government is working to bring Suarez Villegas and the other alleged gang leader, Giovanni Mosquera Serrano, to the United States, where they will face firearms, racketeering, kidnapping and other charges, according to court documents. It’s not known whether they are in custody overseas.
The apartment building Trump was likely talking about in Colorado is a story line he first started repeating in 2024, while he was campaigning for election to a second non-consecutive term and falsely asserted that Tren de Aragua had taken over Aurora.
A video that went viral from August 2024 showed six armed men arriving and entering an apartment at The Edge at Lowry Complex, where 25-year-old Oswaldo Jose Dabion Araujo was shot and killed. It was one of 28 homicides in Aurora in 2025, a significant drop from the 37 the year before.
Aurora police officers made a handful of arrests related to the case and the building was eventually ordered closed by the city for multiple code enforcement violations and because the police department considered it a criminal nuisance.
But the incident became a national issue when Trump made a campaign stop in Aurora, but far from those apartments, to argue that the city had been taken over by Venezuelan gangs.
At the time, local police and the mayor acknowledged that while there was Tren de Aragua activity in Aurora, it was isolated.
That didn’t stop Trump from continuing to talk about it, even after he was elected.
In his March 2025 State of the Union speech, he said that Aurora had “buckled under the weight of migrant occupation.”
In its first year, the Trump administration dubbed its mass deportation efforts “Operation Aurora” and conducted a couple of high-profile raids in the Denver metro area and Colorado Springs.
But the vast majority of the people captured in those raids never faced any criminal charges and instead were deported, which means any accusations of criminal activity, gang-affiliated or otherwise, will never have to be documented or proven in front of a judge or a jury.
ICE arrested about 3,500 people in the state in 2025, according to the Deportation Data Project. Data gathered through October showed that about one-third of those had prior or pending criminal charges.
Trump’s decision to invade Venezuela drew immediate reaction from Democrats in Colorado’s Congressional delegation, and from Gov. Jared Polis, who took a nuanced approach in a statement from his office.
“Today is a moment to celebrate the ouster of the brutal socialist dictator of Venezuela, who has cruelly impoverished this once-prosperous country that sits on greater oil wealth than Saudi Arabia,” Polis said. “ It is crucial that the United States present a clear plan for what a transition to genuine democracy and self-rule entails, and involve Congress in planning next steps to help ensure stability and freedom for the long oppressed people of Venezuela. We cannot have a failed foreign policy misadventure; the Venezuelan people and region deserve better.”
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, who is running to succeed Polis, also acknowledged that Maduro was an “illegitimate, brutal leader,” but said that alone can’t justify the administration acting without Congressional authorization.
I have seen no evidence justifying the administration acting alone,” Bennet said in a statement. “I certainly have seen no justification for putting U.S. troops on the ground to ‘run the country’ or rebuild and exploit Venezuela’s oil infrastructure for our own economic purposes.”
U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, who represents Aurora, also acknowledged Maduro’s illegitimate presidency, but said the U.S. lacked authority to act unilaterally.
“The Trump Administration repeatedly lied to Congress and the American people about Venezuela. Over and over, officials testified that this was not about regime change,” Crow said. “Congress needs an immediate briefing on the Trump Administration's strategy for the day after. Donald Trump has already done incalculable damage to America’s reputation. We have to prevent this from spiraling into another nation-building disaster.”
Among Republicans, Rep. Gabe Evans largely echoed Trump’s rationale in a post on the social media platform X.
“The arrest of Nicolas Maduro - a narco terrorist responsible for the death of countless Americans, exporting violence via gangs and cartels like Tren de Aragua, corruption and drug trafficking, sends a clear message: the United States will not tolerate regimes that poison our people and threaten our national security,” Evans said.
Rep. Jeff Hurd, who represents the sprawling 3rd district from the eastern plains to the Utah and Wyoming borders, asked that the administration’s next steps involve the legislative branch.
“Any continued U.S. military involvement must be narrowly defined, legally grounded and coordinated with Congress,” Hurd wrote in a post on X. “American strength abroad is reinforced by fidelity to the Constitution at home.”
Correction 1/4/2026: A quote from President Trump about the mutilation of a person in Aurora was initially misheard and has been corrected. It did not alter the meaning.
