https://www.city-journal.org/article/chaos-in-aurora
Aurora, Colorado, is normally a quiet, nondescript suburb 30 minutes outside Denver. In recent months, however, the city has been at the center of a national scandal.
Beginning last year, a large influx of Venezuelan migrants, some of them members of the notorious Tren de Aragua street gang, reportedly had “taken over” a series of apartment buildings in Aurora—and unleashed terror. Last month, Venezuelan migrants were allegedly implicated in an attempted homicide, an arrest of purported gang members, and shocking security footage that showed heavily armed men forcibly entering one of the apartments. In response to the chaos, police mobilized en masse and vacated one of the complexes after the city, alleging code violations, deemed it uninhabitable.
An obvious question: How did members of Venezuelan gangs suddenly find themselves in suburban Colorado? To answer this, we have conducted an exclusive investigation, which leads to a troubling conclusion: the Biden administration, in partnership with Denver authorities and publicly subsidized NGOs, provided the funding and logistics to place a large number of Venezuelan migrants in Aurora, creating a magnet for crime and gangs. And, worse, some of the nonprofits involved appear to be profiting handsomely from the situation.
The story begins in 2021, when the Biden administration signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) into law, allocating $3.8 billion in federal funds to Colorado. The City of Denver, which had declared itself a “welcoming city” to migrants, drew on this reservoir of money to launch its Emergency Migrant Response resettlement program, with the goal of housing and providing services to a massive flow of migrants.
Denver, in turn, signed multimillion-dollar contracts with two local NGOs, ViVe Wellness and Papagayo, to provide housing and services to more than 8,000 predominantly Venezuelan migrants. These NGOs are run, respectively, by Yoli Casas and Marielena Suarez, who, according to professional biographies, do not appear to have previous experience in large-scale migrant resettlement.
Nevertheless, the city flooded them with cash. According to public records, between 2023 and 2024, ViVe Wellness and Papagayo received $4.8 million and $774,000, respectively; much of this funding came from the Migrant Support Grant, which was funded by ARPA. Then, in 2024, ViVe secured an extra $10.4 million across three contracts, while Papagayo received $2.9 million from a single contract to serve migrants; two of those five contracts were awarded to implement the Denver Asylum Seekers Program, which promised six months of rental assistance to nearly 1,000 migrants.