AURORA, Colo. — At his rally in Aurora on Friday, former President Donald Trump announced he would launch ‘Operation Aurora’ if elected.
Trump said it would focus on removing noncitizens who've been convicted of violent crimes from the country. But supporters hope it will go beyond that.
"We will send elite squads of ICE, Border Patrol and federal law enforcement officers to hunt down arrest and deport every last illegal alien gang member until there is not a single one left in this country," Trump said.
Operation Aurora was the name given by law enforcement in San Antonio when they arrested Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members during a recent sweep.
Trump says he would invoke a 1798 law known as the Alien Enemies Act to carry out his version of Operation Aurora.
"And if they come back into our country, they will be told it is an automatic 10-year sentence," said Trump.
To support his call for deporting undocumented immigrants, Trump has used data ICE shared in a letter to Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales.
The letter states there are more than 425,000 non-citizens in the U.S. who’ve been convicted of crimes, including homicide, robbery, and sexual assault, who are non-detained.
While Trump shared the data with his followers — falsely claiming that it all happened under the Biden-Harris Administration — the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said the data is being misinterpreted.
"The data in this letter is being misinterpreted. The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration," a spokesperson from the department said in a statement to ABC News.
The spokesperson also said “non-detained” didn’t necessarily mean convicted criminals were roaming the streets freely. It means they are not in the custody of ICE. The department said many are in the custody of other law enforcement agencies.
But Trump and surrogates like Colorado U.S. Rep. Greg Lopez, who represents Colorado's 4th Congressional District, continue to blame the Biden-Harris Administration and continue to exaggerate crime in Aurora.
"We cannot have an administration continue that is not acknowledging what is happening in every state," said Lopez.
Lopez, who does not represent the people of Aurora, said he does not believe fellow Republican Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman’s statement that claims about Venezuelan gangs in Aurora have been grossly exaggerated.
"As a former mayor, I can tell you it's not grossly exaggerated," said Lopez.
Scripps News Denver sat down with Mayor Coffman for a one-on-one interview about this issue last month. You can view the entire interview in the link below.
Aurora
Aurora mayor addresses Venezuelan gang activity claims in one-on-one interview
When Denver7 asked Lopez if he had been to the properties in question, he said he had.
"Yes, I’ve been there," Lopez said. "Look, it’s important for all of us to see them."
While Trump said "Operation Aurora" would focus on violent criminals, his supporters don’t expect it to end there.
“We know who some of the bad people are. We start with them, then we move on to the next category and the next category,” said U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyoming, who served as a campaign surrogate during Trump’s rally in Aurora.
Hageman also shot back at suggestions that the U.S. would not be able to carry out the plan due to law enforcement manpower shortages.
A report from the American Immigration Council showed a mass deportation program would cost the U.S. $315 billion, with a majority of that being spent to build detention camps to temporarily house the immigrants.
We broke down some key findings from that report in the infographic below, which can you also view here.
"I think it's completely disingenuous to allow the Democrats to create this kind of a crisis and disaster and then turn around and say, 'Well, there's nothing we can do about it,'" said Hageman. "Now, I don't buy that for a minute."
Besides calling the cost of mass deportations "incalculable" in the long-term, critics also told Denver7 data shows it wouldn’t reduce crime.
"There's also a lot of really good research on impacts of mass deportations on crime, and it's very clear that mass deportations do not reduce crime," said Chloe East, an associate professor of economics at CU Denver. "If anything, they make it harder for local law enforcement to do their jobs because people are afraid of interacting with local law enforcement because of fear of deportations as a result, and so crimes are less likely to be reported, and more crimes go unsolved when we have these mass deportation efforts."
Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel for the Brennan Center — a nonpartisan law and policy institute — wrote in a piece last week that the Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to detain or deport people from enemy nations, has only been invoked three times in U.S. history: During the War of 1812, World War I and World War II.
It has never been used in peacetime and Ebright said using it to deport millions of immigrants would be a "staggering abuse" of power.
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