January 10, 2025 06:18 PM UTC

Mayor Mike Surrenders To Trump, Points Fingers Ahead of "Operation Aurora"

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• by: Colorado Pols

Over the summer as the issue of migrant gangs in the city of Aurora, Colorado became a national political flashpoint, co-opted by now President-elect Donald Trump as part of his election-year narrative of a city, state, and imminently nation on the brink of destruction, the Republican Mayor of Aurora former Rep. Mike Coffman has proven a problematically unreliable defender of his city’s reputation. Depending on the audience, Coffman has either correctly complained that the situation was being wildly exaggerated for Trump’s political gain much like the false claims that legal Haitian migrants are eating the pets of the population of Springfield, Ohio, or helped spread that very same misinformation in right-wing media outlets predisposed to an alarmist politicized version of events.

The exaggerations about the situation in Aurora were never intended for local consumption, since despite the efforts of a few talk-radio crackpots it was easy to disprove simply by visiting the city for ourselves. Now that the election is over, and Coffman’s protestations against Trump’s version of reality have come to naught, Coffman appears to once again be trying to get back on a MAGA message with an op-ed in the Colorado Springs Gazette pinning the blame for the situation in his city on…the city of Denver. CBS4 reported this week:

In an op-ed published in the Colorado Springs Gazette, Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman accused Denver Mayor Mike Johnston of not being truthful about how migrants, including Venezuelan gang members, ended up in Aurora…

Johnston denied the allegations, stating, “The City of Denver never places anyone anywhere.”

Johnston said he was blindsided by the op-ed that included a headline claiming, “Denver’s Mayor offloads immigrants on Aurora.”

“I’m surprised by this because Mayor Coffman and I have a collaborative relationship,” Johnston said.

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has been around long enough to know, or at least he should, that a “collaborative relationship” with Mayor Mike only lasts until it’s no longer convenient for Mayor Mike. As Johnston explains, the city of Denver wasn’t the decision-maker on where migrants arriving on the Front Range were to be temporarily housed. There shouldn’t be anything surprising about migrants being placed by those nonprofits in all parts of the metro area in addition to Denver, and as a large city with a large stock of affordable housing Aurora is naturally going to receive some of those people. This elementary social work has been fraught with misinformation ever since migrants started arriving in the city in large numbers in 2023, including a false rumor spread by Jefferson County Republicans last February that migrants were to be housed in vacant Jeffco public schools.

But as Mayor Johnston explains, this is not that, or any other fake news in circulation:

“We give [the nonprofits] dollars and they decide on housing,” Johnston said. “Every day it’s looking for where that housing is and identifying what open unit it is. You might go to Thornton, you might go to Northglenn, you might go to Denver.”

…In his op-ed, Coffman said, “Aurora has suffered from a national embarrassment that has harmed the image of our city in a way that could have lasting economic consequences. [Pols emphasis] As the Mayor of Aurora, I’m asking that Mayor Mike Johnston be transparent and tell the truth about what he did.”

After months of doing the right thing as least part of the time, Mayor Mike has apparently determined there is no value in continuing to resist the fictional narrative about his city that Trump is about to use to justify his mass deportation plans. Coffman’s new complaint still boils down to the same three apartment buildings from which the tale of an entire city of 400,000 “overrun” by gangs sprang despite Coffman’s halting attempts to set the record straight. There is no courage on display here, just an attempt by Mayor Mike to retroactively transfer blame after coming out on the losing side of an argument with Donald Trump.

If Trump had lost, perhaps Coffman might have stuck with the truth. What we have instead is the product of cowardly post-election calculation.