How Bad Immigration Policy Made One Colorado Democrat Into A Trump Voter

Never forget that all of politics is local

“Dems' favorability among Colorado voters fell to 39% in March from 52% last November, while unfavorability jumped to 56% from 45%,” Axios reported in April. “That's a pretty incredible reversal, and it's driven almost entirely by [Kamala] Harris voters, including both Democrats and unaffiliated who supported Harris,” Democratic consultant Kevin Ingham said.

Ingham tells Democrats that their base is disappointed, that voters believe the party should just “try harder” to stop Trump. But Harris underperformed by more than a percentage point in 2024 compared to Biden in 2020, so not all of the disappointment with Democrats can be pegged to oppositional partisanship. On the contrary, GB News has a new documentary in which they talk to Colorado residents who explain how the Democrats lost them.

Residents of an apartment complex in Aurora complained that Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, had taken over their neighborhood last year. Although wanted criminals were identified in the complex, city officials simply denied that the city had been “taken over,” saying instead that the gang was a “regional issue” that had been “grossly exaggerated.” Some media outlets declared the reports were “misinformation” and fake news even as police reports detailing how the gang “used threats and coercion to control” the residents appeared online.

Trump called Aurora a “war zone.” Democrats objected. After Election Day, the Denver Post reported that the whole thing was entirely the fault of the apartment management company, anwyay, rather than the armed criminal gang. Since then, the apartment complex in question has been shut down, while the new police chief — an LA police veteran who got the job when his predecessor could not handle the problem — has received praise for his success. Liberal outlets are still denying that Aurora was ever “overrun” by the gang, insisting that they have ‘the facts’ on their side.

This debate comes down to definitions: how do we define whether an apartment complex has been “taken over” by a gang? How do we define “gross exaggeration” when the truth is actually pretty bad? No matter how much breath Democrats and their media lackeys expend trying to explain, debate, and correct the record, Trump just keeps on winning. In fact, the more they explain, the worse Democrats perform in polling. This is because their explanations do not match the lived experiences of now- former Democratic voters.

GB News recently visited Aurora to explore this controversy. They talked to Shannon Peterson, a woman who experienced intense gang activity in her neighborhood. Peterson was a Democrat “my whole life,” she says. “I used to have a group called ‘Teachers United for Immigrant Rights.’” Asked about Trump, she cannot speak to specific policy prescriptions, “but what I will tell you is that if it was not for Donald Trump, we might still be living next to gang members, because everything changed after he was elected.” Here is a clip of the interview:

Peterson now feels safer because Trump is taking the issue “seriously,” whereas Democrats “simply ignored it. They said it was lies. They won’t talk to people who’ve been victimized by this.” She could not go outside in her own neighborhood without being called a puta. Previously anti-gun, she is now a gun owner who values the 2nd Amendment: “My husband does not leave the house without a gun.”

Instead of listening to their constituent, Colorado Democrats denounced everyone like her as racist Nazi white supremacist fake news. Beating Trump, both before and after the election, always justifies Democrats ignoring her complaints. Peterson feels gaslit and manipulated. At this point, Democratic denialism not only fails to persuade her, it makes her feel fu*king furious.

Someone could try interrogating this woman in order to undermine her story, but it would be useless, only driving her conviction deeper. One could object that the mayor of Aurora is a Republican, but that would not erase what Democrats did and said, or how those things made her feel. A digression into Trump border policies would bore her, because she knows what she feels better than any Democratic politician ever could.

“I had never had a negative experience with an immigrant before,” Peterson tells GB News. Venezuelan gangs changed her mind. “I was planning to vote for Kamala until October,” she says, but “how can I vote for people who didn’t have my back? Didn’t care about myself and my neighbors?” Her community has betrayed her, and she will never be the same.

The longer documentary is embedded below. It is well-balanced, presenting the voices of undocumented immigrants as well as Colorado residents. And immigration is just one issue on which Democrats have deliberately, willfully undermined themselves with their own base voters this way. There are others.

A border wall might be a bad engineering project, a bad policy, a bad way to deal with the problem, but it made Trump voters feel safer. When Joe Biden halted construction, paused deportations, and then reduced them to less than half of what they had been under Trump, the resulting surge in undocumented immigrants created new social tensions where none had existed before. As a result, a certain number of Democratic rank and file felt threatened for the first time. Then Democrats and once-trusted media outlets tried to make them feel bad for what they were feeling, which is always a recipe for resentment.

Colorado state Democrats have responded to their election defeat by doubling-down on special protections for immigrants, making schools and public buildings, even jailhouses, into sanctuaries against federal authority. Gov. Jared Polis has signed the legislation. They are being oppositional to Trump, which is what their base, still angry at the party’s lies in 2024, supposedly wants from them, when in fact this issue has become a wedge that divides their base. Taxpayer funds have already been allocated to defend these expensive virtue signals in federal courts.

They are taking this approach because it feels easy, whereas winning back Shannon Peterson is hard. Mending their relationship with Trump-voting Democrats would require self-reflection, plain truth, and worst of all, apologies for all the lies and gaslighting and abuse. That kind of politics is very hard work and the Democrats of Colorado clearly do not feel like doing it.