Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged the reputed leader of the Tren de Aragua gang in a racketeering indictment unsealed Thursday, accusing him of orchestrating the group’s transformation into a global criminal organization.
The defendant, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, 42, remains at large, and the State Department has offered $5 million for information leading to his arrest.
The Trump administration has said that Tren de Aragua, which originated as a prison gang in Venezuela in the mid-2000s, now poses a unique threat to the United States.
In March, President Trump said in a proclamation that the group operated in conjunction with the administration of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, a conclusion disputed by American intelligence agencies. In the proclamation, Mr. Trump said Tren de Aragua had carried out brutal crimes, including murder and kidnapping, and was “threatening an invasion” of the United States.
For nearly a year, Mr. Trump has made the gang an international boogeyman, using it to push his aggressive deportation agenda and to validate his military strikes on vessels purportedly ferrying illegal drugs from Venezuela to the United States. In both of those efforts, critics have questioned whether Tren de Aragua has truly played the dangerous role that Mr. Trump says it has.
On Thursday, the Justice Department issued a news release to highlight what it called a “Nationwide Crackdown on Tren de Aragua,” citing the indictment in New York, as well as cases in Nebraska, Texas, Colorado and New Mexico.
The defendant charged in Manhattan, Mr. Guerrero Flores, originally operated from Tocorón prison, where the Venezuelan government allowed him to control day-to-day operations of the facility, the indictment says.
Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, called Mr. Guerrero Flores the “mastermind of Tren de Aragua’s evolution from a Venezuelan prison gang into a transnational terrorist organization.”
Prosecutors in Nebraska say Mr. Guerrero Flores escaped from prison in 2012, with the help of one of the defendants charged in Nebraska, Jimena Romina Araya Navarro, another Tren de Aragua leader. Mr. Araya Navarro faces a charge of providing material support to the gang, which the State Department designated as a foreign terrorist organization in February.
Under Mr. Guerrero Flores’s direction, the Manhattan indictment says, the gang pulled off violent crimes in Venezuela and elsewhere; he and other leaders enriched themselves, the indictment said, by collecting a “causa,” or fee, from the income generated by lower-level members.
“He ran this empire from prison, shielded by corruption, and in collaboration with a narco-state cartel intent on flooding the United States with cocaine,” said Louis A. D’Ambrosio, the head of the D.E.A.’s special operations division.
Mr. Trump first turned his attention to Tren de Aragua during his 2024 presidential campaign, repeatedly asserting that the gang had “invaded and conquered” Aurora, Colo., making the city a focus of his anti-immigration vitriol. The truth, however, was more complicated, with many local officials — among them, the mayor — insisting that the gang’s presence in Aurora was confined to a single apartment complex.
Nonetheless, once Mr. Trump returned to the White House, he quickly seized on fears about Tren de Aragua to push one of his most aggressive and hotly disputed deportation measures. In mid-March, he declared in a proclamation that any members of the gang discovered in the country could be summarily detained and expelled under the expansive powers of an 18th-century law called the Alien Enemies Act.
Within hours of his proclamation, nearly 140 Venezuelan men accused of being members of Tren de Aragua were placed on planes near a detention center in Texas and flown to El Salvador, where they were immediately jailed in a notorious prison built to house terrorists. Many remained there until July, when they were returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap, but not before — they claimed later — they were beaten, sexually assaulted and, in some instances, driven to the brink of suicide.
Lawyers for the Venezuelan men fought to get them back from El Salvador, arguing to no avail that many had no connection to Tren de Aragua whatsoever. The lawyers provided evidence that administration officials had accused some of the men of belonging to the gang on the basis of little more than their tattoos or the fact that clothes they wore had vague associations with the group.
Moreover, the lawyers attacked the way in which Mr. Trump had used the Alien Enemies Act, which had been employed just three other times since its passage in 1798, to arrest and deport alleged members of the gang.
The act is supposed to be used only in times of declared war or during a “predatory invasion” of the country. The administration claimed that the presence of Tren de Aragua in the United States amounted to an invasion and that its members should be considered citizens of a hostile nation because they were acting on behalf of the Venezuelan government.
But a declassified intelligence memo released in May refuted some of the administration’s claims, saying that the nation’s spy agencies did not believe the Venezuelan government controlled Tren de Aragua. Then, in September, a conservative federal appeals court blocked Mr. Trump from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport gang members, ruling that immigration to the United States — even at a large scale — was not the equivalent of an invasion.
Benjamin Weiser is a Times reporter covering the federal courts and U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, and the justice system more broadly.
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