Who is Tren de Aragua? Vicious Venezuelan gang 'following in the path of MS-13' in America
In New York City, children as young as 11 are accused of robbing residents at knife and gunpoint in gang-related initiation rites.
Surveillance video from Aurora, Colorado purportedly shows an employee of a management company brutally beaten by a group of men for refusing to accept a bribe. And in the border state of Texas, two foreign nationals were arrested last month for their alleged role in a conspiracy to illegally transport firearms which were likely to be used in other violent crimes.
The suspects in these recent criminal acts, spread across the nation, are connected to a street gang from Venezuela, known as Tren de Aragua, or TdA. The outfit has grown in infamy in the United States after a spree of heinous crimes that have grabbed national headlines and raised alarm among law enforcement and policymakers, who warn that Americans are in danger so long as the gang operates in the United States.
"TdA is nothing more than a thug-for-hire organization. And that is dangerous to Americans," said Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas, who has followed the gang's activities closely. Gonzalez represents Texas' 23rd Congressional District, which comprises two-thirds of the Texas border. He has for months sounded the alarm about Tren de Aragua's growing influence in border communities that are ill-equipped to combat the gang's brutality.
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"Tren de Aragua is an invading criminal army from a prison in Venezuela that has spread their brutality and chaos to U.S. cities and small towns," Gonzales and other GOP lawmakers wrote to President Biden in March, requesting that the president designate the gang as a Transnational Criminal Organization. "If left unchecked, they will unleash an unprecedented reign of terror, mirroring the devastation it has already inflicted in communities throughout Central and South America, most prominently in Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru."
South of the border, Tren de Aragua has built an international criminal empire on corpses left in the wake of its drug and human trafficking operations. Its members are said to have committed murders, rapes, extortion, kidnapping and other horrific crimes. Now, authorities warn, the brutal gang's criminal activities are an increasing threat to American communities.
"They're the worst of the worst," Gonzales told Fox News Digital in an interview. "They have no rules or code of ethics."
Researchers have traced the origins of Tren de Aragua, which translates to "train of Aragua," to the Tocoron prison in the Aragua state in Venezuela, sometime between 2013 and 2015.
"Under the Maduro, and before him, Chavez regime, one of their ideas was to reduce incarceration and prison reform, by which they basically meant letting people out early. And this really gave the gang an enormous sort of manpower surge," said Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation's Border Security and Immigration Center.
One of the founders is Hector Guerrero, who was jailed years ago for killing a police officer, according to InSight Crime, a think tank that monitors organized crime in the Americas. Guerrero, better known by his alias El Nino, Spanish for the "boy," later escaped and then was recaptured in 2013. He fled prison again more recently, as Venezuela's government tried to reassert control over its prison population, and is believed to be residing in Colombia.
Authorities in countries such as Chile, Peru and Colombia — all with large populations of Venezuelan migrants — have accused the group of being behind a spree of violence in a region that has long had some of the highest murder rates in the world. Some of its more sensationalist crimes, including the beheading and burying alive of victims, have spread panic in poor neighborhoods where the gang extorts local businesses and illegally charges residents for "protection."
"With a particular focus on human smuggling and other illicit acts that target desperate migrants, the organization has developed additional revenue sources through a range of criminal activities, such as illegal mining, kidnapping, human trafficking, extortion, and the trafficking of illicit drugs such as cocaine and MDMA," said John Torres, a former Special Agent in Charge for Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) with 27 years experience working with DHS and the Justice Department.
Torres, who is now president of security and technology consulting for Guidepost Solutions, a global security, compliance and investigations firm, explained in comments to Fox News Digital that TdA has leveraged its transnational networks to traffic people, especially migrant women and girls, across borders for sex trafficking and debt bondage.
"When victims seek to escape this exploitation, TdA members often kill them and publicize their deaths as a threat to others," he said.
Since its founding more than a decade ago, TdA has rapidly expanded throughout South America. It has laundered funds through cryptocurrency and allied with other gangs, such as the Brazil-based Primeiro Comando da Capital.
The gang's activities eventually landed on U.S. law enforcement radar and in September 2023, Homeland Security Investigations announced a partnership with the Peruvian government to form a Transnational Criminal Investigative Unit (TCIU) in Peru to crack down on TdA operations. By then, the TdA organization had expanded into Colombia, Peru, Chile and other countries.
According to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Tren de Aragua has been operating in Texas since at least 2021, when gang affiliates were arrested for human trafficking. The governor last month designated TdA as a "foreign terrorist organization" and launched a statewide operation to aggressively go after the gang.
At a Sept. 16 press conference, Abbott said more than 3,000 illegal immigrants from Venezuela have been arrested in Texas for crimes including human smuggling, many with ties to the gang. The governor noted that more than 100 TdA members were arrested at the Gateway Hotel in downtown El Paso, a city officials have called "ground zero" for the gang's activities. The El Paso County Attorney's Office had issued a temporary and permanent injunction to shut down the hotel because of "habitual criminal activity" after 693 police calls were placed at the property in just two years for suspected illegal and gang-related activity, according to a complaint.
Abbott's action came after surveillance video went viral showing heavily armed men kicking down an apartment door in Aurora, Colorado. It purportedly showed alleged members of Tren de Aragua who had reportedly taken over apartment buildings in the city and were extorting residents for protection payments.
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The video catapulted TdA into the spotlight of the 2024 presidential campaign, with Republican nominee former President Trump vowing to "liberate Aurora" from illegal alien criminals he claimed were "taking over the whole town."
Aurora police have called allegations that gangs had "taken over" buildings in the city an exaggeration, although they have acknowledged the presence of TdA in the community.
Four people with possible connections to the gang were later arrested at the Ivy Crossing Apartments in Aurora on "a variety of charges" including drugs and stolen vehicles, according to the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office. Local officials said another 10 confirmed TdA members were arrested on Sept. 11 on charges including child abuse, attempted first-degree murder, illegal discharge of a firearm, and more.
However, CBZ Management, which operates 11 apartment complexes in Colorado, has claimed that TdA members have commandeered entire apartment buildings in Aurora by threatening its employees and tried to extort the company for a cut of rent money in exchange for their continued operation of the properties.
Video footage released by CBZ Management shows one of CBZ's representatives being assaulted after he refused to accept a bribe at the Whispering Pines Complex at the end of 2023, the company told Fox 31. Aurora police told local news station Denver 7 the department has "not yet obtained evidence of a gang takeover at any CBZ properties."
"We’ve acknowledged it’s likely gang members have and/or are residing at CBZ properties, but as you know from experience you could say the same about a lot of different gangs and a lot of different properties throughout the metro area," a representative told the outlet.
Meanwhile, Tren de Aragua's presence has been felt in cities like New York and Chicago, where the gang is actively recruiting juveniles as young as 11 to commit brazen crimes.
Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa told Fox News Digital he's witnessed TdA members congregate at the former Roosevelt Hotel, which the city has converted into a migrant shelter. More than 210,000 migrants have arrived in the Big Apple since 2022, with the largest share from Venezuela, as the Biden administration has struggled to manage an unprecedented wave of illegal migration across the southern border.
Sliwa, who has followed gang activity in the city for more than four decades, said he observed TdA members on the north side of the hotel who were "scheming, organizing, recruiting" and "pressuring the younger people to join their gang."
"And if you didn't join them, you were against them, just like in a jail situation," he told Fox News Digital.
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NYPD officials have blamed young Tren de Aragua members for a string of robberies in Times Square and other landmark locations in the city.
"It's shocking to say the least, and we've seen a progression with this group," NYPD Detective Bureau Asst. Chief Jason Savino told "Fox & Friends" Tuesday morning.
The suspected gang members have been postioning pictures and videos of their guns online, according to investigators.
"We know they have access to guns, evident by the fact that they’ve done gunpoint robberies, and they’ve been brazen enough to showcase pistols in and around their social media," Savino told the New York Post.
The gang has targeted youth in other parts of the country as well. U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) said this week that a confirmed TdA member was arrested in Houston for allegedly recruiting middle school students to become new gang members.
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Sliwa said these "Pee-Wee" criminals have run roughshod over New York City residents without consequence from the law. He cited robberies in Central Park South over the summer, saying that young gangsters operating out of the Watson Hotel on 57th Street would harass locals.
"They were coming back and forth, robbing, running back to the hotel, eventually to be caught, captured and released, and then to do it all over again," he said. "And now they're a force to be reckoned with in Times Square."
According to Sliwa, these crimes are a rite of passage for these kids to join the gang as full members. He criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office for failing to keep arrested juvenile offenders detained – but in some cases it is out of the district attorney's hands. New York raised the age to prosecute a child as an adult to 18 several years ago, which officials have said has made it difficult to keep juvenile offenders off the streets.
"We will continue to work hand in hand with our law enforcement partners to drive down crime in Manhattan, which has decreased 6% this year," a spokesperson for Bragg's office said.
Sliwa, who unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2021, losing to incumbent Eric Adams, said he intends to run for mayor again and would make cracking down on organized crime a priority for city hall.
"We have to work with ICE immediately," he said, vowing to end New York's sanctuary city policies, which prohibit local law enforcement from turning over apprehended illegal immigrants for deportation. He credits former President Trump's immigration and law enforcement policies with taking on MS-13 directly and said a similar approach is needed to defeat Tren de Aragua.
"They are following in the path of MS-13 every step of the way," Sliwa said.
Law enforcement experts warn that Tren de Aragua is more organized and vicious than even the infamous MS-13.
John Fabbricatore, who served as an ICE field director and is currently a GOP congressional candidate in Colorado, told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that TdA is not merely a gang.
"TdA is a true organization. They're not a gang. They have a better structure than MS-13 ever had," he said.
Ken Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general and acting deputy DHS secretary during the Trump administration, told Fox News Digital that TdA's growth has been "very accelerated" in South America compared to other gangs that have come to the U.S.
"They've compressed into four years what MS-13 took 20 years to do in terms of reach across the country, still connected back to their home country and operating as an organized entity," he said. "They're outstripping all the other gangs in the radical-ness of what they're willing to do to Americans in American communities."
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What can be done to stop them? "What you need to do is overwhelm the force with counter force," argues Cuccinelli. "And that means bringing in state police, typically, to reinforce your local law enforcement. To really seize all of these people, arrest them on the highest level charges you can within a state."
He suggested that prosecutors focus on gun and trespassing charges – which carry mandatory minimum sentences – to get potentially violent criminals off the streets before they can commit more crimes.
At the federal level, Cuccinelli said Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) ought to make deportations of gang members their "top priority." He also said local jurisdictions should end sanctuary policies and cooperate with immigration enforcement to deport violent criminal aliens.
"Clearly the ICE agents have jurisdiction because of the immigration component, which is necessary for them to exercise jurisdiction within the United States. But there are 5,000 HSI agents that can be brought to bear on this problem. HSI alone could bring this gang down if they turned their attention to doing it."
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Tren de Aragua's brutality and rapid growth has not gone unnoticed by the Biden administration.
Heeding the call from Rep. Gonzales and other lawmakers, the Treasury Department in July sanctioned TdA, placing it alongside MS-13 and the Mafia-styled Camorra from Italy on a list of transnational criminal organizations. Federal authorities are currently offering a $12 million reward for the arrest of its three leaders.
Multiple federal agencies across DHS and DOJ are coordinating with state and local law enforcement to combat TdA and other organized crime. In March 2024, HSI designated TdA as an agency Top Priority Network and the agency coordinates with U.S. attorneys to establish prosecution strategies aimed at taking the gang down, according to Torres.
But critics like Trump accuse the administration of not doing enough. The Republican candidate announced last week that he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target and dismantle "every illegal migrant criminal network operating on American soil."
Trump said, if elected, the federal government would "send elite squads of ICE, Border Patrol and federal law enforcement officers to hunt down, arrest and deport every last illegal alien gang member until there is not a single one left in this country."
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has defended the Biden-Harris administration's law enforcement efforts in response to GOP critics, who charge the president has permitted criminal organizations to invade the U.S. across the southern border.
"We are indeed doing everything we can to dismantle criminal gangs and transnational criminal organizations," Mayorkas said Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation." "Quite frankly, we’ve devoted an unprecedented level of resources and personnel and focus to this effort. This is not a new phenomenon."
Gonzales praised the FBI's anti-gang task force as the ideal tool to combine federal, state and local resources to combat organized crime.
"Just recently in El Paso, the FBI rounded up dozens via this anti-gang task force. We don't have to recreate the wheel," he said. "We have to utilize the tools we have to go after these people, just like we've done with MS-13 in some of these other areas."
But there is always room for improvement. The Texas congressman has proposed legislation that would require state, local and federal law enforcement agencies to share intelligence on convicted criminals, which could help identify Tren de Aragua members as targets for deportation.
"Regardless of whatever a city's policy or politics are, keeping America safe, to me, trumps all of that. And the best way to do that is to mandate that these law enforcement agencies interact," Gonzales said.
Fox News Digital's Jasmine Baehr, Christina Coulter, Michael Ruiz and the Associated Press contributed to this report.