Red state hunts Tren de Aragua terrorists as judges light ‘credibility on fire’ fighting deportations: senator
Tennessee officials are waging their own battle against members of a violent Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua as left-leaning officials push back on deportations of illegal immigrants, including gang members.
The Trump administration recently deported nearly 240 TdA members to El Salvador — an action that came despite U.S. District Judge James Boasberg's order to halt deportations of illegal immigrants under a wartime powers act that President Donald Trump invoked on Friday.
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 allows the deportation of natives and citizens of an enemy nation without a hearing and has been invoked three times before, during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II.
"President Trump has the complete, constitutional authority to deport criminal illegal aliens, especially the members of Foreign Terrorist Organizations like Tren de Aragua," Republican Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn told Fox News Digital in a statement. "With his deportation of hundreds of gang members to El Salvador, the President is fully complying with judicial orders and upholding the rule of law."
The senator added that TdA "has plagued communities across the country with violent crime—including in Tennessee, where its members established a transnational sex trafficking ring that forced women into modern-day slavery."
The Department of State designated TdA as a foreign terrorist organization on Feb. 20. The gang has thousands of members, many of whom the Trump administration says have unlawfully infiltrated the United States from South and Central America and are "conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States," in multiple states, with strongholds in places like Colorado and New York.
The White House on Sunday said TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, a Venezuelan-based, narco-terrorism gang sponsored by the Nicolás Maduro regime. The gang is known for its brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortion, human and drug trafficking. TdA's mass migration to the United States will further the Maduro regime's objectives of harming U.S. citizens and undermining public safety, according to the White House.
TdA grew significantly while Tareck El Aissami served as governor of Aragua between 2012 and 2017, when El Aissami was appointed as vice president of Venezuela.
Former DEA agent Wesley Tabor was stationed in Venezuela from 2010 until almost 2013 and was the only agent during that time to meet with El Aissami.
"What you're really looking at is the result of a permissive environment," former DEA agent Wesley Tabor said. "And so … when TdA first started coming into the United States, they were kind of collating into the big cities. You got Chicago, you got New York, you got El Paso, you got some other cities. But eventually what happened is: when the pressure was turned on after committing crimes or they had to flee for whatever reason, they were looking for a quieter area to go to."
In these "quieter" states and cities, TdA members then establish networks with family members and other connections, bringing other TdA members with them to those places.
TdA is different from other gangs like MS-13 in the sense that members do not have specific identifiers like tattoos linking them to the gang, and they commit a variety of crimes that may go undetected as being gang-related: everything from kidnapping to murder to sexual assault, Tabor explained.
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Tabor added that the Maduro regime sent groups of people from Venezuelan prisons and insane asylums through Central America and into the United States with the purpose of destroying communities.
"And then, low and behold, you find out that many of them, not all of them, but many of them, are going to be Tren de Aragua members," he said. "And then you start seeing these sporadic reportings becoming more and more frequent. And that just snowballs."
On Feb. 14, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced the arrests of eight TdA members in Tennessee, who are accused of trafficking women and girls across the border as part of a transnational commercial sex enterprise in Nashville.
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The eight defendants allegedly operated an illegal commercial sex and sex trafficking enterprise out of Nashville motels between July 2022 and March 2024, ICE said in a press release, citing court documents.
"The success of this operation to stop Tren da Aragua operating in our communities is a significant step forward in our ongoing battle against human trafficking and transnational organized crime," ICE Homeland Security Investigations Nashville Special Agent in Charge Rana Saoud said in a Feb. 14 statement. "This investigation exemplifies the importance of collaboration among local, state, and federal agencies in ending these crimes in our communities. Human exploitation leaves a trail of suffering in its wake."
TBI Director David Rausch said the state agency would not "allow TdA – or any criminal organization – to get a stronghold in Tennessee."
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"We are thankful for our local, state, and federal partners who joined us in investigating this case, and we stand prepared to continue aggressively investigating human trafficking in our state, holding traffickers and buyers accountable and helping victims take their first steps toward becoming survivors," he said.
U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee Robert E. McGuire said officials "are coming after transnational criminal organizations like TdA, but this case shows that we will also do whatever it takes to stop those who would traffic women and girls no matter who is behind their suffering."
Last year, Tennessee officials made two other significant TdA arrests.
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On Nov. 19, 2024, ICE ERO officials arrested Luis Alejandro Ruiz-Godoy, who was wanted on outstanding international warrants, a spokesperson with the Memphis Police Department said. Days later FBI officials arrested four individuals, including one Tren de Aragua member, in a Chattanooga sex trafficking sting.
Tennessee's Human Trafficking Task Force obtained information that led them to a hotel in Hamilton County, where law enforcement encountered the four suspects and confirmed that they were part of a human sex trafficking operation.
Tabor said it is "100%" more difficult for law enforcement from smaller cities and states that do not typically deal with gangs like TdA to identify and capture its members than in larger cities like New York, Chicago and Houston.
"What you're seeing is these gangs and associated criminals were capitalizing on the fact that many of these small-town sheriffs' offices and metropolitan police departments had no clue who they were," the former DEA agent explained. "They had no idea how to get help to find out who these people were because the federal government didn't care. And all that has changed since Trump came in."
By invoking the Foreign Enemies Act, the administration has made it easier to cut "through a lot of red tape" to detain TdA members, Tabor said.
Fox News Digital's Emma Colton and Alexandra Koch contributed to this report.