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Crime

Venezuelan Migrant Says She’d ‘Return’ To Country After Living In Housing Taken Over By Venezuelan Gang

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4 minute read

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hailey Gomez

 

A Venezuelan immigrant living in migrant housing in Aurora, Colorado, appeared to fight back tears while speaking to independent reporter Nick Shirley, saying she would return to her country after living in the U.S.

This week, the city of Aurora faced major pushback from Republicans after footage surfaced online of armed men inside an apartment complex in late August. Shirley was seen visiting various migrant housing units before stopping at the viral location to interview residents where the armed men had been spotted.

Shirley spoke with a Venezuelan woman who showed him the poor living conditions her family endures, stating she pays $1,200 per month for the apartment. The migrant stated that the electricity and hot water in her apartment weren’t working, telling Shirley that the landlord hadn’t accepted any payment for the “past couple of months.”

“Does your father still have to pay rent?” Shirley asked as they walked around her father’s apartment.

“The owner is no longer receiving any kind of payment, because he is also taking all this, that the gangs and the mafia are taking advantage of all of this to get us out as if we were dogs and it’s not fair,” the migrant stated, according to a translation.

Shirley asked if gangs had been charging people, to which the migrant replied, “no.” The independent reporter then asked if her life in the U.S. was what she expected after crossing the border.

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“No, never. I would have stayed in my country. They say that here everything is different, the laws, everyone gets a good job, you get ahead, you can save money to take back to your country,” the migrant stated. “But not everything is as they say, the American dream is simply just a dream. When you get here you wake up, it’s not like they say.”

Shirley then pressed the migrant, asking in Spanish if she would take a “flight or opportunity to go back” to her home country.

“With all the love in the world I would return to my country,” the migrant said.

Republican lawmakers on Friday sent a letter criticizing the Biden-Harris administration’s “open border policies” and local “sanctuary” policies over the reported presence of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which allegedly terrorized several apartment buildings in Aurora.

Reportedly beginning as a prison gang in 2014 within the northern Venezuelan state of Aragua, Tren de Aragua has grown into one of Venezuela’s largest criminal organizations. With around 5,000 members and stretching internationally across Latin America and the U.S., the gang has allegedly been connected to several high-profile crimes within the U.S., including the kidnapping and strangling of a Florida man last year.

This week, the Aurora Police Department announced the arrest of two confirmed Tren de Aragua gang members, Jhonnarty Dejesus Pacheco-Chirinos and Jhonardy Jose Pacheco-Chirinos, following a July 28 shooting that left two men hospitalized with serious injuries.

Break The Needle

B.C. crime survey reveals distrust in justice system, regional divides

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By Alexandra Keeler

In late August, the RCMP seized nearly 40 kilograms of illegal drugs and half-a-million dollars in cash from a home in Prince George, B.C., while responding to a break-and-enter call.

The RCMP linked the drug operation to organized crime and said it was one of the largest busts in the history of the 80,000-person city, which is located in the B.C. heartland.

“It is obvious we can no longer ignore the effects of the B.C. gang conflict in Prince George, as this is a clear indication that more than our local drug traffickers are using Prince George as a base of operations,” Insp. Darin Rappel, interim detachment commander for the Prince George RCMP, told local media at the time.

It is operations such as these that may be contributing to a perception among British Columbians — particularly those in northern parts of the province — that crime rates are rising.

survey released Sept. 24 shows a majority of respondents believe B.C. crime rates are up — and often unreported — even though official crime data suggest the opposite.

The survey was commissioned by Save Our Streets, a coalition of more than 100 B.C. community and business groups that is calling for non-partisan, province-wide efforts to establish safer communities in the face of widespread mental health and addiction issues and lack of confidence in the justice system.

“I’m glad that we have our data,” said Jess Ketchum, co-founder of Save Our Streets. “[N]ow we can show that, ‘Look, 88 per cent of the public in B.C. believe that crime is going unreported.’”

“[And] the reason that it’s going unreported is that they’ve lost faith in the justice system,” he said.

‘Revolving doors’ 

Fifty-five per cent of the 1,200 British Columbians who participated in the survey said they believed criminal activity had increased over the past four years. The survey did not specify types of crime, though it mentioned concerns about violence against employees, vandalism and theft.

But crime data tells a different story. B.C. crime rates fell eight per cent during the years 2020 to 2023, according to Statistics Canada.

Underreporting of crime may partly explain the trend. A 2019 nationwide Statistics Canada survey of individuals aged 15 years and older showed only 29 per cent of violent and non-violent incidents were reported to police. Victims often cited the crime being minor, not important, or no one being harmed as reasons for not reporting.

What is clear is many British Columbians perceive crime is being underreported: 88 per cent of all survey respondents said they believe many crimes go unreported.

Perceptions of Crime & Public Safety in British Columbia. Online survey commissioned by Save Our Streets, conducted by Research Co. with a representative sample of 1,200 British Columbians, Sept 9-12, 2024. (Graphic: Alexandra Keeler)

Mario Canseco, president of Research Co., the public research company that conducted the Save Our Streets survey, attributes the gap between actual and perceived crime rates to the heightened visibility of mental health and addiction issues in the media.

“You look at the reports, you watch television news, listen to the radio, or read the newspaper, and you see that something happened, or that there was a high-profile attack,” said Canseco. “That leads people to believe that things are going badly.”

Survey respondents, though, attributed the lack of crime reporting to a lack of confidence in the justice system, with 75 per cent saying they believe an inadequate court system is to blame. Eighty-seven per cent said they supported bail reform to keep repeat offenders in custody while awaiting trial.

“There was support [in the survey results] for judicial reform that would allow for steps to resolve the revolving doors of the justice system when it comes to repeat offenders,” said Ketchum.

Cowboys

The survey highlighted regional differences in perceptions of B.C. crime rates and views on whether addiction-related crime ought to be addressed as a public health or law enforcement issue.

Respondents from Northern B.C., Prince George and the surrounding Cariboo region were more likely to say they believed criminal activity had increased than respondents from southern and coastal regions of the province. 

Canseco suggests that drug use and associated crime are now becoming more apparent in smaller communities, as the drug crisis has spread beyond the major cities of Vancouver and Victoria. Residents of these communities may thus see these problems as more novel and alarming, he says.

Eighty-four per cent of respondents in Northern B.C. said they viewed opioid addiction as a health issue, while only 68 per cent of respondents in Prince George/Cariboo shared this perspective.

Respondents from Prince George/Cariboo exhibited the strongest preference for punitive measures regarding addiction and mental health, with nearly unanimous support for harsher penalties, bail reform and increased police presence.

“It’s one of the tougher areas in the province … somewhat more cowboys,” Ketchum said about Prince George and the Cariboo region, where his hometown of Quesnel is located. “I think there’s less tolerance.”

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Differences in each region’s demographic makeup may also help to explain differing sentiments.

Northern B.C. has the highest concentration of B.C.’s Indigenous population, with about 17 per cent of the population identifying as Indigenous, versus eight per cent in Prince George.

Indigenous communities tend to emphasize addiction as a health issue rooted in historical trauma and social inequities, and prefer community-based healing over punitive measures. Indigenous communities are also frequently distrustful of the RCMP, given its history of being used to extend colonial control.

A majority of all survey respondents favoured investing in mental health facilities, drug education campaigns and rehabilitation over harm-reduction strategies such as safer supply programs, supervised injection sites and drug decriminalization.

“People want to see a more holistic approach [to the drug crisis],” said Canseco. “[T]he voter who hasn’t been exposed to something like [harm reduction], and who may be reacting to what they see on social media, is having a harder time understanding whether this is actually going to help.”

“I was pleased to see the level of support for more investments in recovery, more investments in treatment, around the province,” said Ketchum.

But Ketchum says the preference of some respondents for punitive approaches to B.C. crime rates – particularly in the province’s more northern regions — worries him.

“I believe that if governments don’t respond adequately now, and this is allowed to escalate, that there’ll be more and more instances of people taking these things into their own hands.”


This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.

Subscribe to Break The Needle. Our content is always free – but if you want to help us commission more high-quality journalism, consider getting a voluntary paid subscription.

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Crime

Conservative MP appeals to Canadians to support bill protecting churches from arson

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St. Gabriel Catholic Mission in northern Alberta was burned to the ground

Jamil Jivani called church burnings an attack on religious freedom and said Bill C 4-11 would increase the penalty for crimes of arson by adding the targeting of churches as an aggravating factor in sentencing for these acts of destruction.

A Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MP urged support from his political opponents for a bill that would give stiffer penalties to arsonists caught burning churches down.

“This is a very serious issue. It is not just an attack on churches as buildings, it’s an attack on communities, on families and an attack on religious freedom in Canada,” CPC MP Jamil Jivani said in an X video post on October 2.

“We need to see action, we need the other political parties to realize that this is a serious problem. We need support behind Bill C -411, and we need to do more to protect churches in Canada.”

In the span of less than one week, as reported by LifeSiteNews, two more Christian churches were reduced to ash piles, one Catholic and the other Anglican.

Jivani called out the fires as attacks on freedom, saying the “pattern of destruction that we have observed of church after church after church being burned to the ground in Canada” must stop.

“Why isn’t the government doing anything about this problem?” he asked. “Well, let me tell you, conservatives have put forward legislation on this issue. Bill C 4-11 would increase the penalty for crimes of arson against churches by adding the targeting of churches as an aggravating factor in sentencing for arson crimes.”

Jivani observed that Conservatives have not seen “other political parties support this Bill C-411.”

“The Liberals, the NDP, the Bloc, all of them continue to be silent on this problem. This pattern of destruction we have not seen the other political party support our legislation, Bill C-411, and they’re not even offering their own legislation,” he said.

“We need support behind Bill C-411, and we need to do more to protect churches in Canada.”

The law, if passed, would create specific criminal offenses for setting fires to churches and for starting wildfires.

Under the new legislation, arson that directly target churches or other places of worship would be punishable by “imprisonment for a term of not more than 14 years and to a minimum punishment of imprisonment for a term of five years” for the first offense.

“For each subsequent offence, imprisonment for life and to a minimum punishment for a term of seven years,” the legislation stated.

The legislation also outlines consequences for starting wildfires of fines up to $250,000 and life imprisonment.

Since the spring of 2021, 112 churches, most of them Catholic, have been burned to the ground, vandalized or defiled in Canada.

The church burnings started after the mainstream media and the federal government ran with inflammatory and dubious claims that hundreds of children were buried and disregarded by Catholic priests and nuns who ran some of the now-closed residential schools in Canada.

LifeSiteNews reported last week that Leah Gazan, backbencher MP from the socialist New Democratic Party (NDP), brought forth a bill that seeks to criminalize the denial of the unproven claim that the residential school system once operating in Canada was a “genocide.”

As reported by LifeSiteNews in August, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet said it will expand a multimillion-dollar fund geared toward documenting thus far unfounded claims that hundreds of young children died and were clandestinely buried at the residential schools.

Canada’s Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations confirmed it spent millions searching for “unmarked graves” at a residential school but turned up no human remains.

Canadian indigenous residential schools were run by the Catholic Church and other Christian churches but were mandated and set up by the federal government. They were open from the late 19th century until the last school closed in 1996.

While there were indeed some Catholics who committed serious abuses against native children, the unproved “mass graves” narrative has led to widespread anti-Catholic sentiment since 2021.

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