Joe Biden’s border policies are disastrous for communities nationwide, including cities that are nowhere near United States borders. There have been at least 10.8 million encounters with illegal aliens nationwide since the start of Fiscal Year 2021 (FY2021), according to Rep. Mark Green’s September “Startling Stats” report on the border crisis. The same report indicates that 2 million more aliens have entered as “known gotaways.” According to former chief of Border Patrol Raul Ortiz, the total number of gotaways “could be underreported by as much as 20 percent.”
The devastating numbers fail to tell the whole story, however. Embedded in those historic numbers are criminal gangs like Tren de Aragua, whose members have taken root in communities nationwide. Tren de Aragua is terrorizing communities, forcing the Biden administration’s U.S. Treasury to label the gang as a U.S.-designated transnational criminal organization (TCO).
The Treasury’s announcement states that the gang has “opportunistically infiltrated local criminal economies.”
From its origins as a prison gang in Aragua, Venezuela, Tren de Aragua has quickly expanded throughout the Western Hemisphere in recent years. 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.
Tren de Aragua poses a deadly criminal threat across the region. For example, Tren de Aragua leverages 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, Tren de Aragua members often kill them and publicize their deaths as a threat to others.
Tren de Aragua “engages in particularly vicious activity in victimizing populations and maintaining sources of income, such as sex and migrant trafficking and the distribution of illegal drugs,” according to a September 20,2024 letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland from members of Congress who put pressure on the administration to put sanctions on Tren de Aragua and designate the dangerous gang as a TCO.
Primarily Venezuelans, members of Tren de Aragua control many migration routes to our borders, thereby victimizing many migrant children and families who pay gang members for passage.
Even more alarming is the foothold Tren de Aragua is gaining in American cities. The same group that has terrorized parts of Latin America is now menacing American cities like Chicago and New York City. The gang has even “resurfaced” in Tennessee, according to TBI director David Rausch.
“Tren de Aragua begins its criminal enterprise by abducting women from Venezuela and trafficking them to the U.S., which eventually evolves into organized retail crime, drugs and heinous violence,” according to the TBI.
“Recently, there was a video that they shot, where they shot a cartel member 31 times in broad daylight on video and posted it to social media,” added Rausch. “That’s the type of organization they are.”
America First Legal (AFL) has closely monitored the Biden administration’s border policies, focusing on “the flood of migrant criminal gangs into American communities.” AFL launched investigations into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security Investigations (HIS), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to look at the growth of “violent alien gang activity spreading in Aurora, Colorado, Chicago, Illinois and western Wisconsin.”
In August 2024, surveillance video showed evidence of terrifying violence in the city of Aurora. The video footage allegedly showed armed men purportedly affiliated with Tren de Aragua “forcing their way” into neighborhood homes. Escalating gang activity drove one resident, Cindy Romero, to demand action from law enforcement. She begged for help from the Aurora City Council, and Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky responded by helping terrorized community members move out.
According to AFL, similar calls have been coming in from other cities, like Chicago. In its newest release of FOIA response documents on November 14, AFL shows data and emails obtained from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and the Office of Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker. According to the documents, “persistent busloads of new arrivals have strained the community’s resources and capacities.” Among the data points published by AFL were the following:
- AFL reports that the search term “Tren de Aragua” was found in “adult arrest reports” for 30 different individuals from the CPD between January 1, 2023 and September 10, 2024.
- There were “412 buses filled with migrants” arriving in Chicago between August 18, 2023 and November 27, 2023,” doubling the new arrivals from 13,000 to 26,677.
- The city’s shelters “reported significant crime and medical needs and the surrounding Chicago Public Schools reported enrolling more than 1,000 students from these new arrivals.”
Emails sent in October 2023 from the Cook County Police in Chicago, a sanctuary city, document the “new threat developing amongst the newly arriving immigrant community,” according to AFL. The email referenced Tren de Aragua, which “has strong human trafficking operations in Latin America and are likely engaged in sex and labor trafficking in the U.S. Multiple agencies have confirmed their presence in the U.S and the [redacted] has information that the gang is here in Chicago.”
Another email from the Cook County Police “noted that the gang is embedded with South American Migrant Communities … and they engage in a wide variety of crimes.”
AFL asserts that Tren de Aragua is “exploiting the Biden-Harris policy of open borders to enter the country and hide amongst the millions of imported immigrants.” On September 25, 2024, Rep. Tony Gonzales released startling data documenting the numbers of criminal aliens now on “ICE’s national docket.” As of July 21, 2024, there were “662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories, 13,099” of whom were convicted murderers. He also stated that of the 662,566 individuals, 435,719 of them “are convicted criminals.”
Governor Greg Abbott of Texas announced in mid-September his initiative to “aggressively target the dangerous Venezuelan gang ‘Tren de Aragua’ (TdA) to disrupt their criminal operations and deny their foothold in the state.” Abbott designated TdA as a “foreign terrorist organization.” Abbott also released data showing the U.S. Border Patrol had apprehended at the southern border 499,428 Venezuelan illegal non-citizens between January 1, 2020 and September 3, 2024.
Abbott released a map showing the expansion and operational activities of Tren de Aragua. The map, taken from the National Gang Intelligence Center, shows activities including extortion, kidnapping, human-smuggling, drug-trafficking, fraud, violence and murder, and weapons. Nevada, Texas, Illinois, Florida, Georgia, and New York are listed as known locations for the gang. Other reporting shows that the gang is active in numerous other communities.
The best way to stop Tren de Aragua in communities is to aggressively address the problem, according to Robert Almonte, a former U.S. marshal and deputy chief with the El Paso Police Department.
“If we don’t get a handle on them, they’re going to become a bigger problem than they are today,” Almonte said. Almonte believes that some city officials ignore Tren de Aragua or “deny that they’re there” because “they don’t want to give their city a bad image.” According to reporting from NewsNationNow, Almonte said, “If police officers are encountering members of the gang, city leaders should identify the scope of their presence and ‘go after them.’”
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