Tren de Aragua: What is the Venezuelan gang targeted by Trump?
In September 2023, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro sent 11,000 soldiers to storm the Tocorón Prison in the northern state of Aragua. But they were not dispatched to quell a riot.The troops were taking back control of the prison from a powerful gang that had turned it into something of a resort, complete with zoo, restaurants, nightclub, betting shop and swimming pool.But the gang's boss, Hector Guerrero Flores, escaped.Now the Tren de Aragua organisation is in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump's drive to remove foreign criminals from the US as part of his campaign pledge to mass deport illegal immigrants.Here is what we do know about Tren de Aragua.
How did the gang start?
Tren de Aragua was originally a prison gang that Hector Guerrero Flores turned into a "transnational criminal organisation", according the US state department, which is offering a reward of $5m for information that could lead to his arrest.Guerrero Flores, 41, was in and out of Tocorón for more than a decade.He escaped in 2012 by bribing a guard and was then rearrested in 2013. Upon his return, he transformed the prison into a leisure complex.And he expanded the gang's influence far beyond the jail's gates, seizing control of gold mines in Bolivar state, drug corridors on the Caribbean coast, and clandestine border crossings between Venezuela and Colombia, according to the US state department.The gang's name translates as "Train of Aragua", and it may have come from a railroad workers' union.Luis Izquiel, a criminology professor at the Central University of Venezuela, told the BBC that the union controlled a section of the railway that crossed Aragua and would extort contractors and sell jobs on work sites.Tren de Aragua has under Guerrero Flores's leadership expanded into Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile and diversified from extorting migrants into sex-trafficking, contract killing and kidnapping.
How big is the gang?
By most accounts, Tren de Aragua spread out of Venezuela when the country entered a humanitarian and economic emergency in 2014 that made crime less profitable, and now is believed to have nodes in eight other countries, including the US.Ronna Rísquez, a journalist who has written the definitive book on the group, estimated last year that the organisation has 5,000 members and annual profits of between $10m and $15m.Others have estimated its membership at roughly half that figure.A prosecutor in Chile has called Tren de Aragua a "brutal organisation" that uses murder and torture to achieve its aims.While it is smaller or less wealthy than other criminal groups in Latin America, Tren de Aragua is often compared to the ultra-violent MS-13 gang from El Salvador.Tren de Aragua members have been accused of dressing up as Chilean police officers and then kidnapping Venezuelan opposition military officer Ronald Ojeda, whose body was found buried in Santiago, Chile, in March 2024.The US Treasury, under then-President Joe Biden, sanctioned Tren de Aragua last summer, saying that the gang was involved in sex-trafficking across the US border.
Is there a threat to the US?
President Trump's administration has declared Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organisation, placing the group in the same category as Islamic State and Boko Haram, Nigeria's Islamist militants.In various places such as Texas, Miami, New York and Chicago, alleged Tren de Aragua members have been arrested and charged with crimes ranging from murder to kidnapping.Last summer NBC News reported that the Department of Homeland estimated that 600 Venezuelan migrants in the US had connections to the gang, with 100 believed to be members.As of 2023, there were 770,000 Venezuelans living in the US, representing slightly less than 2% of all immigrants in the county, according to the Migration Policy Institute.Most had been given protected status by the US government.Customs and Border Protection reports encountering 313,500 Venezuelan migrants at the border in 2024.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NBC News
18 hours ago
- NBC News
Deported Guatemalan man back in U.S. after judge orders Trump administration to return him
A Guatemalan man who was deported by the Trump administration and then was ordered to be returned by a judge because of due process concerns is back in the United States, his attorney said Wednesday. The man, identified in court documents only as O.C.G., landed in the U.S. 'a few hours ago' and contacted his legal team upon arrival, Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance said Wednesday evening. O.C.G. was expected to be taken into federal custody, Realmuto said. The Trump administration deported O.C.G. to Mexico, where he had previously been held for ransom and raped as he traveled north to the U.S., in February. O.C.G. was put on a bus and sent to Mexico despite a federal judge granting O.C.G. a withholding of removal just two days earlier, court documents show. A withholding of removal is an order that prevents the United States from deporting someone to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened, based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group 'The Court has already found it likely that O.C.G.'s removal lacked due process,' U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy wrote in May, when he ordered the Trump administration to return him. Murphy, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, also wrote in that order that the government didn't put forth any evidence that due process was followed. 'The likelihood that O.C.G. is correct in asserting that his due-process rights were violated, in this Court's view, has long hovered near certainty,' Murphy wrote. O.C.G. is not the only person who has been deported from the United States only to have federal judges then order that the Trump administration return them. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a deported in March to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador, and the Trump administration has not yet facilitated his return to the U.S. as ordered by a federal judge. Politico reported in May that another man, Venezuelan national Daniel Lozano-Camargo, was deported to the same prison, and a judge has ordered the U.S. to return him as well. O.C.G. fled Guatemala, where he said he endured persecution and torture, and came to the U.S. to claim asylum in March of 2024, but was denied and deported, according to court records. He then tried again, and while in Mexico traveling north to the U.S. he was held for ransom, raped and targeted for being gay, he said in a court declaration. In May 2024, a U.S. asylum officer determined O.C.G. 'had a reasonable fear' to return to Guatemala and was taken into immigration custody to see his case through. In February, an immigration judge determined that O.C.G. would most likely be persecuted if deported to his native Guatemala, and granted him a withholding of removal, court records show. Instead, he was placed on a bus to Mexico a few days later, without any notice. Mexico then sent him to Guatemala, where he went into hiding, according to court records, before he was returned to the U.S. Wednesday.
BBC News
18 hours ago
- BBC News
Judge halts deportation of Colorado suspect's family
A US judge has temporarily halted deportation proceedings against the family of a man accused of Sunday's petrol-bomb attack on Jewish demonstrators in Boulder, Sabry Soliman, 45, is accused of a federal hate crime and other charges. Officials say his family, who are not charged in the attack, are Egyptian District Judge Gordon Gallagher, a Biden appointee, ordered deportation proceedings to be halted, a day after the White House said it had six one-way tickets to deport the wife and five children from the US. The decision was one of three immigration rulings on Wednesday against Trump by federal judges as he seeks to deliver on his pledge for mass deportations. "The court finds that deportation without process could work irreparable harm and an order must issue without notice due to the urgency this situation presents," Judge Gallagher wrote in his order on for the defence had accused the government of unfairly targeting the family, who say they were unaware of Mr Soliman's violent plans and have co-operated with investigators. "It is patently unlawful to punish individuals for the crimes of their relatives," the family's lawyers said in a lawsuit challenging their immigration detention. "Such methods of collective or family punishment violates the very foundations of a democratic justice system."The family members include Mr Soliman's wife, Hayam El Gamal, 41, as well as the couple's 17-year-old daughter, two other daughters and two sons. They are being held at an immigration detention centre in Texas, over 900 miles (1,450km) from their home in of Homeland Security officials have said that Mr Soliman arrived in the US on a tourist visa in August 2022. That visa expired the following year. He made an asylum claim in September to police documents, the suspect told officials that he "never talked to his wife or his family" about his plans, and that he had left a phone in a desk drawer with messages to his wife and children. His wife turned the phone in to of Mr Soliman's daughters was recently awarded a scholarship by a local newspaper in Colorado Springs. A profile in the Gazette newspaper noted she "was born in Egypt but lived in Kuwait for 14 years" and relocated to the US two years his arrest, Mr Soliman told police he planned the attack to take place after his daughter's high school graduation, according to the Wednesday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the agency was "investigating to what extent his family knew about this heinous attack, if they had knowledge of it, or if they provided support to it".The judge's order is the latest setback for the Trump administration on Wednesday, another federal judge ruled that over 100 Venezuelan migrants deported to a jail in El Salvador must be given a chance to challenge their removal. Judge James Boasberg said the US had "plainly deprived" the migrants of their constitutional right to oppose their the ruling does not apply Venezuelan migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native deported from the US at the same also emerged on Wednesday that the US had flown a Guatemalan man back to the US, after deporting him to Mexico. A federal judge in Boston last month found that prosecutors had incorrectly declared the man was not afraid for his safety in Mexico. The individual, identified in court papers only as OCG, was returned on a commercial flight on Wednesday, according to his lawyers.
NBC News
18 hours ago
- NBC News
Judge orders Trump administration to provide due process to some migrants deported to El Salvador
A federal judge today ordered the Trump administration to provide hundreds of migrants sent to CECOT, a maximum-security terrorism confinement center in El Salvador, habeas relief, ordering the government to provide the individuals an opportunity to challenge their detention and removal under President Donald Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. The order applies to all noncitizens removed from U.S. custody and transferred to CECOT "on March 15 and 16, 2025, pursuant solely to the Presidential Proclamation entitled 'Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of The United States by Tren De Aragua.'" It will not apply to migrants such as Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native removed from the country around the same time, but for reasons outside of Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. 'Defendants plainly deprived these individuals of their right to seek habeas relief before their summary removal from the United States — a right that need not itself be vindicated through a habeas petition,' U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg wrote in the order. 'Perhaps the President lawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act. Perhaps, moreover, Defendants are correct that Plaintiffs are gang members. But — and this is the critical point — there is simply no way to know for sure, as the CECOT Plaintiffs never had any opportunity to challenge the Government's say-so.' Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act in March to target members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang deemed a foreign terrorist organization by the administration and accused of engaging in "mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens." By invoking the war-time law, Trump was able to swiftly detain and remove immigrants he claimed were members of the gang. One day after invoking the Act, the Trump administration announced it had deported hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members across at least two planes to El Salvador, even as Boasberg in a ruling at the time blocked the deportations and ordered any flights carrying migrants subject to the presidential proclamation return to the United States. The Trump administration challenged the block on its Alien Enemies Act deportations, but the ruling was upheld by the D.C. Circuit of Appeals. The U.S. Supreme Court later faulted the administration for giving the Venezuelan detainees only 24 hours to challenge their deportations before returning the case to an appeals court for further proceedings. Boasberg in his ruling noted that the Supreme Court unanimously agreed "that those subject to removal under the Act must be allowed to challenge their removability in federal court before being deported." "Defendants instead spirited away planeloads of people before any such challenge could be made. And now, significant evidence has come to light indicating that many of those currently entombed in CECOT have no connection to the gang and thus languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations," Boasberg wrote. Boasberg has provided the government a week to propose a plan as to "how they intend to facilitate the ability of the CECOT class to seek habeas relief," making clear the Venezuelan migrants must be granted the opportunity to contest their removal under the Alien Enemies Act, but conceding that "such a remedy may implicate sensitive diplomatic or national-security concerns." The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Lawyers for the non-profit groups representing the migrants praised Boasberg's ruling as affirming that the right to due process extends to individuals in the country illegally. 'The court properly recognized that the government cannot send people to a notorious foreign gulag without due process and then wash its hands of the situation,' said ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who serves as lead counsel on the case.
