After Trump terrorized her city, a city council candidate fights back
The damage caused by last fall's chaos is still unfolding.
Welcome to a Sunday edition of Progress Report.
I am back from a few days at the beach with family, though I never really left the political grind. I’ve got a report on labor and politics that I’ll publish tomorrow, and today, I’ve got an interview with a really compelling local candidate whose election this November feels like it might indicate the mood of the country and what happens during the midterms in 2026.
It’s a sizable one, so I’ll get right to it!
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In a city scapegoated by far-right disinformation, a progressive candidate fights back
The Trump era has helped flip the old axiom that “all politics is local” on its head, turning local elections into referendums of national issues and fueling national debates with cherry-picked and out-of-context local news stories. Nowhere was this more evident during last fall’s election than Aurora, CO, where a few viral videos and a local council member’s claims that the city had been overrun by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua became a centerpiece of Donald Trump’s xenophobic campaign.
The truth was far more complicated: a slumlord property management company called CBZ had severely neglected several apartment complexes in Aurora until they descended into squalor, forcing residents to flee and allowing new arrivals — some indeed violent — to seize control. A Republican council member named Danielle Jurinsky spun the situation into a Fox News furor, and Donald Trump soon held a rally in the city, where he unleashed a torrent of racist lies about immigrants, who he said had been sent from “the dungeons of the third world.”
Nearly a year later, people in Aurora are still dealing with the fallout of Trump and the conservative media turning Colorado’s third largest city (population: 400,000) into an avatar for their apocryphal invasion fantasies. The ramshackle apartments have been condemned and shut down, but plenty of problems remain in the Republican-run city just nine miles east of Denver. Like almost everywhere else, especially in Colorado, exorbitant housing prices and economic inequality are pervasive.
Jurinsky, who serves the entire city as one of its at-large council members, is running for re-election this fall, and is being challenged by some very motivated competition. That includes Democrat Alexandra Jackson, a social worker and lifelong Aurora resident who is running a campaign built on economic populism and embracing diversity. A young mother who has long been involved in politics and activism, Jackson wants to refocus the politics and policy of a city whose leaders do not reflect the priorities of the residents, but instead the interests of businesses and donors driving the unequal growth.
I spent time talking to Jackson last week, in an interview that went to a lot of different places, weaving the national and local together in a straightforward way that nonetheless exposes far more complicated situation than what the media depicted during the cynical furor last fall. She was honest about the difficulties of running for office, including some trouble fundraising in a city controlled by developers and a national climate that has become very skeptical of Democrats.
Progress Report: What made you run?
Alexandra Jackson: I just really want to see community-first approaches in Aurora. Our city council works more with developers. They work more with oil and gas, the special interest groups, the people who donate large amounts to their campaign. And that's where their loyalties lie right now. You can see that made apparent in their policies that they pass and the contracts that they hand out for developers around our city.
Our police department is under a consent decree right now. We’ve been under that consent decree from Elijah McClain back in 2019, but there have still been three unarmed black men, one of who was 12 years old, that have been shot and killed by our police department. So we're not seeing the progress that we need.
We're not seeing our city council be culturally responsive to our diverse city where there's over 100 languages spoken in our public school system. We are a city of immigrants. And our city council is out of touch and out of date with that population.
Danielle Jurinsky, the council member who fueled the furor over the alleged gang activity, is running for re-election. She’s now pretty infamous; does she feel more powerful there, or has there been a backlash?
Danielle Jurinsky has a track record. She has raised about $200,000 and $30,000 of that money has gone to erasing her name from search engines, on Google, because she has given herself [so much] bad publicity.
Those apartment complexes that she talked about are the same poor, run down, badly managed apartment complexes that have existed in Aurora my entire life. My mom worked for the Aurora Police Department for 35 years and they're the same problems in these apartment complexes that have always existed.
She is just using the narrative of immigrants and the fear that people have when they scapegoat these issues onto immigrants to stir up fear, to drive votes, to throw this racist, xenophobic stereotype out into the world to suit her agenda. It’s completely inaccurate.
I live about three blocks from those apartments. They have been closed down, but I've lived in this neighborhood for about six years. I walk the streets at night by myself, feel completely safe. I take my daughter out with me. I take my dogs out with me and I'm not being overrun by gang members.
They did this huge sweep in Aurora and I think they got about 30 Venezuelan gang members in a state that has six million people. These are just old school narratives. When I went to Denver University for undergrad and I told people I'm from Aurora, they'd be like, “My gosh, you're from Aurora? The ghetto part?”
That is the stigma of Aurora I've heard my whole life. And it's really because of our population and our diversity. People have been conditioned to associate crime with poor brown and black people. And that is not the case, and I want to shine Aurora's light because I am so lucky to have grown up here. We are truly a world in a city with so many people coming to Aurora from all parts of the world, speaking those languages, sharing their culture.
What do you see as the long-term impact of those few months, on both Aurora and its residents? Do you think things have changed permanently in any way, now that the cameras are gone?
Trump came here on the campaign trail, there were mug shots of some immigrants that were arrested by our police department up at his rally. Our police department was recruiting at the event. And then from that, we got Operation Aurora, which we can see being carried out in D.C. right now with deploying National Guard to “clean up” the streets.
I think those narratives from Danielle Jurinsky helped Donald Trump get elected. They used Aurora as a political pawn for that win, and it's sad because we are a disenfranchised city and immigrants are very vulnerable right now. They don't want to speak out because they're being snatched off the streets. Their families are being torn apart. They probably don't want to interact with any government because they're living in fear. And a lot of our immigrants can't even be captured in our census data because they're scared and they're an invisible population at this point.
I have people reaching out to me who are like, “You're running against Danielle Jurinsky? I hate her, I can't believe the way she represents Aurora.” She's made some really off the wall comments about Jared Polis and the Jewish community being controlled by demonic Democrats. So I've gotten a lot of people reaching out to me that are like, “I'm Jewish and I really don't support the narrative that she's said.”
So it's kind of bonded our community and it's shown them that what's happening on a national level right now echoing on our local level because Danielle Jurinsky loves to brag about having Donald Trump's phone number in her cell phone and [how] she'll she's ready to use it whenever we need it.
Aurora has a “camping” ban, so right now the city treats homelessness as a crime, while not actually taking much action against slumlords. What are they doing to address the housing shortage right now?
It's not even a housing shortage: There are just huge apartments that they throw up and they sit vacant because the rent is too high, the wages are too low, and they weren't building these developments with the people who live in these neighborhoods in mind. They're trying to attract people from out of state who might come from wealthier backgrounds, who are making the decision to come to Colorado where $2,000 for a studio apartment is cheaper than wherever they are. And so they're not thinking about the people who are already here.
We've seen a lot of the affordable housing options, like trailer parks, have been completely just steamrolled over. We had a children's hospital built over trailer parks and people did not want to leave. They would show up to city council meetings and protest and city council still passed those deals, built the new development, tore down affordable housing in the neighborhood.
How do you see the city council working with these developers and landlords? And how does it prevent them from responding to these problems in an equitable way?
One of the people who's running in Ward Three is a landlord and has been accused of having slumlord conditions in their apartment complexes and that's somebody who's well connected to the City Council and City Council is not being accountable to the living situations.
Other affordable housing that exists are the motels along East Colfax. They're affordable, but they're definitely not dignified housing. There's been black mold. My first internship that I had as a social work student in my master's program was going into those motels along East Colfax, giving out things like harm reduction kits, food, basic necessities, diapers, and we would get to see into those motels where people who depend on these motels for housing.
There's families living in them. There's people who maybe made a mistake and have a felony on their record and now they don't qualify for any subsidized housing or affordable housing. So they have to live in these motels with private landlords and the conditions were just so bad and city council did not care. Their solution is more policing in the area.
So what do you see as solutions that the city council could pursue?
Currently our City Council is running a “work-first program” for people who are unhoused where they're saying you need to work in order to earn your housing. And so I really just think we need to see housing as a basic human right. Some people can't work, they're disabled. Some people have mental health issues. And you know, some people do work multiple jobs and still cannot afford rent.
So it's maybe regulating rent, freezing rents, and then also increasing that minimum wage and making it so that we can adjust wages to the inflation that we're seeing just ravage through our community.
I have also been thinking about owner occupancy only laws so that if people are selling single family homes, developers cannot come in and buy it and then rent it out. It has to go to the person who is going to live in the house. When I was looking for my house, I was constantly getting outbid by developers who have all-cash offers. If we had this owner occupancy policy, developers would have to look elsewhere and they wouldn't be able to then monopolize all the small single family homes and then rent them out at these ridiculously high rates or flip them.
I knew you were involved in social work, but I didn’t realize, until I saw your email signature, that you work in DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion. Another thing that Trump has turned absolutely upside down.
Our city council has eliminated our DEI department completely. They did that about three years ago. And when I talk about that cultural relevancy, let me tell you a story.
So they opened up a new rec center in my neighborhood, which is Ward One, East Colfax, where the apartment complexes are that drew all the national attention. We are the most dense population. We're on top of each other. We have little access to green spaces. We’re the most diverse, BIPOC-heavy and low income. We have a lot of immigrants who are from South America.
The city council funded this rec center and was really proud of it. The staff that worked at the recreation center decided to do a football league, but they didn't get anybody to sign up. They said “this was such a waste of money, we're never going to do this again.” But it turns out we needed the other type of football because the kids in that area were not accustomed to American football. They want to play soccer, futbol, you know?
They didn’t have the cultural lens that DEI gives you to look at the data, to do a community survey, to really tailor our resources to the community so we don't waste time, we don't waste money and we can make it a success because we are living in a non-homogeneous population where not everybody's the same. Had they had that lens, they would have had a huge success and huge turnout and built community. But because they don't care about DEI, they don't care about understanding someone's identity and how it translates into what they show up to or what they spend their money on or interests that they have.
So it’s sort of self-sabotage in a way; spending money on uninformed choices for the sake of political points.
We're completely missing the ball. And DEI is not just for people of color, it’s for everybody. Women who advance are benefiting from DEI, and so are people with disabilities. So I would love to bring that perspective to the council.
But it's also another reason why fundraising is so hard, because we're watching DEI officials lose their jobs and take pay cuts. People of color who have government contracts get kicked out, now they're unemployed. So it's taking a big hit, but the sentiment of it is still something that we need, especially in such a diverse community. Otherwise, we are doing a disservice in serving our population to the best of our ability.
People have to stand up and finally say enough is enough. This is not who we are. This is not who Aurora is. And we have to protect our immigrant neighbors, our trans neighbors, our black and brown and poor neighbors, our disabled neighbors, our elderly neighbors, our youth. These are all vulnerable populations that are going to take a heavy hit in the next year. And so I hope this just motivates people to stand up and fight for what they believe in.
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The writer is so right about the shit dumped by higher classes on the poor and non-white. People are so ignorant. The crime that truly debilitates the nation is that carried out by the ultra-wealthy: the tax evasion, the tax avoidance, treating employees and workers like dirt, their over-consumption of resources including energy and food. They’re disgusting. Their behaviour is detestable.