TheTrump administrationhas fixated on portraying aVenezuelangang called Tren de Aragua, or TdA, as a state-sponsored internationalterrorist organizationthat has invaded the US.
Donald Trump uses the argument to justify extreme enforcement measures against Venezuelan immigrants and cast a cloud across the Venezuelan diaspora, especially communities in the US.
The US president claims the criminal group “isundertakinghostile actions and conducting irregular warfare” here, which in turn should allow agents to arrestVenezuelans and exile them toGuantánamo Bayor El Salvador’sCecot prisonwithout even a court hearing.
Yet experts saythe claims do not reflectreality. Instead, Donald Trump has concocted a bogeyman to fuel his extreme immigration crackdown.
TdA is a gang that originated in Venezuela but has since expanded itsreachto other countries in Latin America, alongside a more general massdiasporaof more than 7.7 million Venezuelans fleeing autocratic rule under the president, Nicolás Maduro.
Some scholars track the group’s earlydaysto 2005, when a trade union’s members started to embezzle funds and extort contractors while working on a railroad project – hence the “tren”, or “train”, in the Aragua region.
TdA then took off in Venezuela’s Aragua state around 2014, within the Tocorón prison, where members hadaccess torestaurants, a swimming pool, a zoo, a nightclub and other amenities atypical of a lock-up. The penitentiary became TdA’s headquarters – whereleaderson the inside directed criminal activity on the outside – until 2023, when the Venezuelan governmentraidedTocorón and the gang began to fragment.
One scholarwrote: “The TdA is of modest prominence and is nowhere near as established as other gangs in Central and South America.” Some of those more influential criminal organizations, such as MS-13 andMexico’s cartels, have long had a foothold in – or even have theiroriginsin – the US.
That said, TdAhasbeen powerful enough to torment and exploit other Venezuelans at home and abroad, preying particularly on vulnerable women, who are forced into the sex industry to pay off their debt after the gangsmuggles themto nearbycountriessuch as Chile, Colombia or Peru.
TdA members have also startedworkingwith Mexican cartels, infiltrating groups of migrants and then colluding with Mexico’s organized crime networks to extort them.
Tren de Aragua does have apresencein the US, but that presence is diffuse, uncoordinated, and on a smaller scale than the Trump administration’s repeatedly sounding the alarm and citing TdA in immigration-related arrests might make it seem. Three experts put it bluntly when theywrotefor the New York Times: “Tren de Aragua is not invading America.”
That’s not to say that individual TdA members – or peoplepurportingto be TdA members for clout – haven’t caused real harm and suffering for many communities across the US. In Miami, a former Venezuelan police officer was reportedlyabductedand murdered by a TdA member. Another supposed gang member allegedlyshottwo New York police officers. And the criminal organization has seeminglyimportedits sex trafficking model, exploiting Venezuelan women who owe them for transportation into the US.
Even so,InSight Crime, a thinktank that studies organized crime across the Americas, has said that TdA is growing weaker, not stronger, and “now operates more as a loose collection of franchises than a cohesive organization”.
Sign up toThis Week in Trumpland
A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration
after newsletter promotion
Earlier this month, US authoritiesrevealedfederal charges of racketeering, sex trafficking, drug trafficking, firearm offenses, and robbery against 27 alleged current or former alleged TdA members and associates, indictments and arrests that attorney general Pam Bondisaidwould “devastate TdA’s infrastructure”.
By late last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was looking into more than600 migrantsin the US suspected of having some connection to TdA, though whether as victims, witnesses or gang members remained unclear.
That number represents fewer than 0.09% of the700,000 Venezuelanswho have resettled in the US, many of whom feel they are being smeared.
The criteria cited as justification for alleging detainees or people beingremoved from the US without due processare TdA members include suspects making hand signs, wearingChicago Bullsparaphernalia or similar, or havingcertain tattoos, which prominent researchers of gangs have said arenotstrong indicators, orindiciaat all, of gang membership.
Trump is relying onhighly controversialmeasures, chiefly the wartime1798 Alien Enemies Act, or AEA, to summarily deport people the administration alleges are TdA members, many of whom have not been charged with crimes. His justification is that the gang is acting “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela”.
That’s unlikely. TdAwasprotected by the Venezuelan government in the past, according toInSight Crime. But that agreement no longer stands, with the raid on the criminal organization’s prison headquarters a case in point.
The Washington Postreports that a recent National Intelligence Council internal assessment – which relied on information from the US’s 18 intelligence agencies – determined that while TdA has some low-level contacts in Maduro’s government, it is in no way commanded by Maduro. This makes Trump’s using the invasion argument to bypass due process flimsy – and contrary to the US supreme court’sinsistence of the rightfor individuals to challenge the government.