At the country’s southern border, U.S. Border Patrol agents have been on the lookout for members of a notorious Venezuelan gang. In the nation’s heartland, police officers from Denver to Chicago have made dozens of arrests for alleged crimes linked to the group, from retail theft to murder and prostitution.
And in New York City, police detectives have spent months interviewing informants — including confessed gang members — to identify gang leaders and gather information on robbery patterns and recruitment efforts.
The gang in question is Tren de Aragua, which sprang from a Venezuelan prison and developed into a feared criminal organization focused on sex trafficking, human smuggling and the drug trade.
Its widening presence in the United States has become a political lightning rod for Republicans, especially former President Donald J. Trump, as they seek to blame the Biden administration’s border policy for allowing criminals into the country.
Mr. Trump’s accusations about the effects of migrant-fueled crime, amplified in right-wing media, are often overstated or incorrect. Yet the gang has nonetheless emerged as a growing source of concern for law enforcement officials, who have been scrambling to study its inner workings and track its members’ movement across the country.
Federal officials were working on more than 100 investigations linked to the gang at one point this year, according to a Department of Homeland Security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Officers nationwide have made more than 50 arrests related to the gang, the official said.
Among the places the gang has waded into is New York City, where more than 210,000 migrants have sought shelter since 2022. The city’s Police Department says the gang has primarily focused on snatching cellphones; retail thefts, especially high-end merchandise in department stores; and dealing a pink, powdery synthetic drug, known as Tusi, that is often laced with ketamine, MDMA or fentanyl.
Police detectives have sought to build a broad profile of the gang’s operations, from its recruitment tactics inside migrant shelters to its secret communications using invite-only WhatsApp groups.
One of the largest challenges, the police said, is how quickly gang members have blended into the city’s fabric, not just among asylum seekers in shelters, but also by posing as delivery drivers on mopeds, in some cases transporting firearms inside food delivery packs.
The gang’s size and sophistication in the United States remain unclear, but it has some officials concerned that its members may be attempting to join forces across state lines to run larger-scale operations.
Mayor Eric Adams, who has vowed to prevent the gang from creating a stronghold in New York, sent top public safety officials to Colombia this year to open a police post in Bogotá to gather information on the gang, saying that they brought back “troubling intelligence.”
“These are bad guys, and they do not represent the migrants and asylum seeker community here,” Mr. Adams, a Democrat, said in July. “This is a small number of people who are violent, and we’re going to identify them and use our practices like we use with any gang in the city.”
For Venezuelan migrants seeking asylum here, the gang’s prominence in the nation’s divisive discourse has bled into their everyday lives, creating painful stigma and discrimination.
“Any of us who have tattoos, they think that we are Tren de Aragua,” said Evelyn Velasquez, 33, a Venezuelan mother of three living in a city shelter. “I’ll go apply for a job and when they hear that we are Venezuelan, they turn us down.”
Origins in a Venezuelan prison
In one of Venezuela’s largest prisons, the police made some startling discoveries during a raid last year. Aside from finding machine guns and ammo, they uncovered several restaurants, a nightclub, a swimming pool, a baseball field and a zoo.
The prison known as Tocorón in Aragua — a state southwest of Venezuela’s capital of Caracas — had been controlled by a group of prisoners who transformed the facility into a mini-city where convicts roamed freely, according to experts on the gang.
The prisoners came to call themselves Tren de Aragua — which means Train of Aragua.
The gang was formed to impose order through intimidation: Leaders reportedly recorded the executions and tortures of rule-breakers, circulating the videos to scare other inmates.
The gang’s influence soon extended outside the prison until it became Venezuela’s most powerful criminal enterprise.
As the country fell deep into an economic and political crisis, the gang began to profit off the millions of fleeing Venezuelans, exploiting, extorting and silencing vulnerable migrants.
“They identified there’s money to be made in immigration and they’ve taken advantage of that business,” said Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan investigative journalist who published a book about Tren de Aragua.
The gang quickly expanded to neighboring Latin American countries. In 2022, officials in Bogotá, Colombia, accused Tren de Aragua of at least 23 murders after the police began to find bags with body parts. Gang members have also been captured in Chile, and in Brazil, the gang aligned itself with one of the country’s largest organized crime syndicates, Primeiro Comando da Capital.
In the United States, gang members have been accused of everything from shootings to human trafficking, mostly targeting members of the Venezuelan community.
In November, Yurwin Salazar, a Venezuelan migrant who Miami police say is part of Tren de Aragua, was accused of abducting and killing a retired Venezuelan police officer in South Florida.
In May, federal officials uncovered a sex trafficking ring they said spanned Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Florida and New Jersey, and involved Venezuelan women who were forced into sex to repay debts to smugglers who facilitated their border crossings, according to a complaint filed in federal court.
And in June, Bernardo Raul Castro Mata, a 19-year-old Venezuelan migrant who the police said told them that he was a gang member, was accused of shooting two New York City police officers who confronted him.
Republicans have pointed to the incidents as evidence that the gang was proliferating, with congressional Republicans calling it an “invading criminal army” in a letter to President Biden. It also became a target of misinformation, with Mr. Trump falsely suggesting during this month’s presidential debate that the gang had taken over Aurora, Colo.
Amid reports of the gang’s growing presence, the Biden administration designated the gang a “transnational criminal organization” in July, and announced up to $12 million for information that could lead to the arrest of three of its leaders.
Without access to the criminal histories of Venezuelans, U.S. officials said they have ramped up screenings to catch potential Tren de Aragua members at the border by conducting “enhanced interviews” of single Venezuelan men, which may include scrutinizing phones and tattoos.
Gang reaches New York City
The first indication of Tren de Aragua’s presence in New York was early in the year, when federal officials alerted local authorities that its members had reached the East Coast, said Joseph Kenny, the Police Department’s chief of detectives.
Since January, the police have interviewed at least 30 people, including gang members jailed on Rikers Island and others familiar with its workings, according to an internal police document with summaries of the interviews obtained by The New York Times.
The interviews provided insight into the contours of the gang, and suggest the police are still learning about its most basic functions.
Mr. Castro Mata, the man accused of shooting the two police officers, told the police that the gang re-establishes connections with newly arrived Tren de Aragua members who have been placed in the city’s migrant shelters, which currently house 65,000 migrants.
Members have similar identifying marks, some said: tattoos with clocks, anchors, crowns or verses with the word “Guerrero,” a reference to the gang’s Venezuelan leader; Michael Jordan brand clothing and Chicago Bulls apparel; and, for reasons unknown, an emoji of the Albanian flag on social media.
Informants told the police that the gang’s main sources of income were selling drugs, shoplifting, robberies, extortion and prostitution, and that they communicated through WhatsApp groups called La Línea, or, The Line.
One gang member held on Rikers Island, who told the police he entered the country last September, detailed the thousands of dollars the gang could collect from forcing women into sex to pay off smuggling debts.
Another incarcerated gang member, who identified 12 potential gang members, described their strategy for targeted killings: Two members typically approach the target in a car and relay information to two others riding on a moped with guns.
As of September, the police have entered the names of 24 Tren de Aragua members into their database of 496 identified gangs in the city. To label someone as a member of any gang, Chief Kenny said, members often “must self-admit, say ‘I am in a gang.’ ”
“Do we think that there’s only 24 TDA members in New York City? That would be silly,” he said, referring to Tren de Aragua. “Obviously there are more.”
Violence has also erupted with a rival crew made up of former members who call themselves Anti-Tren, according to the police document. And the police have seen conflicts between Tren de Aragua and other well-established gangs, like M.S. 13 and the Latin Kings, but also alliances with others, including the Trinitaros, Chief Kenny said.
Tren de Aragua has also developed a lucrative, niche market in organized retail theft that other gangs have not, and its members often steal phones and watches worth thousands of dollars while riding scooters.
“What’s going to become difficult for us is when they begin to really lay down roots and solidify their position as a criminal organization,” Chief Kenny said.
Some members supposedly reside or hang out at shelters in the Bronx and another by the Brooklyn Navy Yard where men on a moped fatally shot two migrants in July in an incident that the police are investigating as gang warfare.
A hot spot of gang activity also emerged on Randall’s Island, where the city is sheltering thousands of migrants in a giant tent dormitory that has been the site of several shootings and stabbings. The grounds outside the shelter are a popular gathering spot on weekends for members, who post “lookouts” to keep an eye on the police, according to one informant.
Perhaps a sign of the gang’s stealth, or its still-nascent operations, migrants living in city shelters said they had not noticed the gang’s influence there. Yet they spoke in hushed tones when Tren de Aragua was brought up.
The gang came up in casual conversations, they said, and in salacious clips on social media. But most said they could not believe the gang was actually in New York, though they expressed shame and embarrassment that all Venezuelan migrants were being associated with the group.
“I feel sometimes, as a Venezuelan, that I get a bad reputation because of certain groups that sully everyone’s name,” said Nelson, 34, who traveled to the United States with his wife and son and declined to give his last name. “I want to work, make my money and get on with my life. We aren’t all the same.”
Many echoed an oft-repeated sentiment among migrants:
“Por uno, pagan todos” — or, “For one, we all pay.”
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