President Donald Trump made a very specific reference on Tuesday night to one criminal organization: the “Tren de Aragua,” a Venezuela-based gang he frequently mentioned when talking about immigration and crime on the campaign trail.
The group sprang out of the South American country in the 2010s and has been accused of setting up and running human trafficking and extortion rings in neighboring Colombia, Chile, and Peru. As border crossings, asylum claims, and migration from Latin America in general picked up since the pandemic, the group has been of particular interest for Trump and immigration hawks.
As Trump and his allies have tried to portray undocumented immigration as a threat to public safety, they’ve repeatedly highlighted the Tren de Aragua (or TdA)’s criminal activity in the US and abroad. That emphasis has coincided with TdA’s post-pandemic expansion in the US, though it’s deeply unclear how many TdA members are here — and how powerful the gang actually is.
Still, a few high-profile incidents — in which the perpetrators were accused of being TdA members — have caught Trump’s attention, and they’ve been a consistent focus of conservative media, immigration critics, and local law enforcement agencies. Those include a high-profile forced entry in an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, that Trump seized upon last summer and highlighted during his debate against former Vice President Kamala Harris.
But not much is actually known about the group, how it operates, or the extent of its reach within the United States. Still, that hasn’t stopped officials, politicians, and commentators from using real instances of crime and violence to paint a picture of a dangerous migrant “invasion.”
Trump himself did that on Tuesday night, referencing the murder of a 12-year-old Texan girl in the Houston area. Two undocumented Venezuelan men were eventually charged with her murder, and both are accused of being members of the gang — which Trump called the “toughest gang, they say, in the world, known as Tren de Aragua.”
Whether the Tren de Aragua is the toughest in the world is debatable. But back in Venezuela and along the routes that migrants follow to get to the US, it has contributed to insecurity, instability, and violence.
What is the Tren de Aragua?
While we don’t know a lot about the state of the organization in the United States right now, a lot is known about the group’s origins. The Tren de Aragua has its roots in a trade union that was formed to build a railroad in 2005, during Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s tenure. According to researchers who have studied the group’s rise and local journalists, it morphed from being a railway workers’ group into an organization that embezzled funds and extorted contractors during that construction process. The project ended up falling apart in 2011, but by then the group had morphed itself into a larger criminal organization, being led out of the infamous Tocoron prison, a detention center in the state of Aragua, Venezuela, that had been overtaken by inmates.
It was there that the groups’ current leader joined the group, and eventually led the Tren de Aragua to expand its extortion, local drug dealing, and human trafficking into other Venezuelan states, and eventually into Colombia, Chile, and Peru. It’s no coincidence that the TdA’s rise happened around the start of Venezuela’s economic crisis in 2014 and in 2017. Rising poverty, collapsing social safety nets, and political repression created opportunities for both recruitment and targets of extortion, human trafficking, and sexual exploitation among the very migrants and refugees fleeing instability back home.
After establishing itself in those neighboring countries since 2018 — and with the rise in Venezuelan refugees and other South American migrants in the United States since the pandemic, reports of people with alleged ties to the group have steadily increased in the US. Scores of news and government reports have tied supposed gang members to murders, sex trafficking and exploitation cases, and petty crime. Immigration officials, meanwhile, frequently label undocumented immigrants who have been arrested and are in the process of being deported as alleged TdA members.
But it’s hard to prove these associations, Charles Larratt-Smith, an assistant professor of security studies and researcher on transnational migration at the University of Texas at El Paso, told me. Unlike in the cases of other transnational criminal groups — like Mexico’s drug cartels or MS-13, the Salvadoran gang born in Los Angeles that ended up wreaking havoc in El Salvador after its members were deported or removed from the US — there’s no evidence or intelligence sharing between the US and Venezuela that can help identify members, and no straightforward hierarchy or line of command within this network. Essentially anyone can claim or be accused of being a member of the group, since there’s no reliable way to cross-reference membership, or for the group itself to hold its members accountable. Even the tattoos and other symbols used to try to identify group members can be inconsistent. And the group’s original base of operations, the Tocoron prison, has since been retaken by the Venezuelan government, and its leader has disappeared.
In other words, the group’s influence, reach, and actual power may have been exaggerated over the years. “If you’re comparing those organizations to the Tren de Aragua, the comparison is farcical,” Larratt-Smith said. The shadowy group just doesn’t have the same means, resources, organization, or power to compete with the groups various American government and Homeland Security officials have compared it to.
And yet both Trump’s and Biden’s administrations have argued they pose enough of a threat to warrant federal responses, Just last year, the Biden administration levied sanctions against the group and designated it as a transnational criminal organization. And in January, the Trump White House went one step further, reclassifying it as a foreign terrorist organization.
So while there are places where the group’s presence is better established, like in New York City, the shadowy description of the group also serves other political purposes.
For Larratt-Smith, the fear the Tren de Aragua, and its presence in the US, inspires in people serves to both justify the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration in general, and helps to muddy the differences between those actual TdA gang members in the US and any Venezuelan immigrants who commit crimes in the US or may have criminal records back home. “It’s a useful signifier for Venezuelan criminality — and that does exist, you would have to be naïve or delusional to say otherwise — but it’s disproportionately publicized compared to acts of criminality committed by American citizens, because it fits this broader [anti-immigrant] narrative,” he told me.
