Earlier this month, a middle-aged woman with shaggy, silvery hair and a pleasant smoker’s contralto flew from Denver to Washington to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. “My name is Cindy Romero,” she began. “I am a wife, a mother of five, a grandmother of three, a part-time worker and student, and a former resident of Aurora, Colorado. I am one of the many victims across the nation of the violent transnational terrorist organization Tren de Aragua.”
Romero’s journey from anonymous apartment dweller to MAGA heroine began last August, when she showed a local news reporter doorbell video footage of six young men with enormous guns storming into her hallway and beating down the door of the apartment opposite hers, sparking a half-hour-long gunfight. The men were among the tens of thousands of newly arrived Venezuelans who had flooded into the Denver area starting in late 2022. When the video went viral, the right-wing media ecosystem greeted it as “smoking gun” evidence that lax immigration policies had reduced crunchy idylls across the nation to what the New York Post termed a “migrant gang war zone”—and that the libs, as usual, were in denial about it.
By the time Trump showed up for an election rally in Aurora last fall, Romero was there onstage. In the weeks before the election, she appeared on a half-dozen national news shows to discuss the folly of Joe Biden’s “open borders” policy, and earlier this year even filmed a spot for the local NRA affiliate thanking her husband’s guns for keeping them safe from Venezuelan gangbangers.
But as the first weeks of the Trump presidency unfolded, the assignment shifted. The hearing she...