What is Tren de Aragua and has the group ‘invaded’ the United States?

The Trump administration has fixated on portraying a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua, or TdA, as a state-sponsored international terrorist organization that has invaded the US.

Donald Trump uses the argument to justify extreme enforcement measures against Venezuelan immigrants and cast a cloud across the Venezuelan diaspora, especially communities in the US.

The US president claims the criminal group “is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare” here, which in turn should allow agents to arrest Venezuelans and exile them to Guantánamo Bay or El Salvador’s Cecot prison without even a court hearing.

Yet experts saythe claims do not reflect reality. Instead, Donald Trump has concocted a bogeyman to fuel his extreme immigration crackdown.

What is Tren de Aragua?

TdA is a gang that originated in Venezuela but has since expanded its reach to other countries in Latin America, alongside a more general mass diaspora of more than 7.7 million Venezuelans fleeing autocratic rule under the president, Nicolás Maduro.

Some scholars track the group’s early days to 2005, when a trade union’s members started to embezzle funds and extort contractors while working on a railroad project – hence the “tren”, or “train”, in the Aragua region.

TdA then took off in Venezuela’s Aragua state around 2014, within the Tocorón prison, where members had access to restaurants, a swimming pool, a zoo, a nightclub and other amenities atypical of a lock-up. The penitentiary became TdA’s headquarters – where leaders on the inside directed criminal activity on the outside – until 2023, when the Venezuelan government raided Tocorón and the gang began to fragment.

One scholar wrote: “The TdA is of modest prominence and is nowhere near as established as other gangs in Central and South America.” Some of those more influential criminal organizations, such as MS-13 and Mexico’s cartels, have long had a foothold in – or even have their origins in – the US.

That said, TdA has been powerful enough to torment and exploit other Venezuelans at home and abroad, preying particularly on vulnerable women, who are forced into the sex industry to pay off their debt after the gang smuggles them to nearby countries such as Chile, Colombia or Peru.

TdA members have also started working with Mexican cartels, infiltrating groups of migrants and then colluding with Mexico’s organized crime networks to extort them.

Has Tren de Aragua ‘invaded’ the US?

Tren de Aragua does have a presence in the US, but that presence is diffuse, uncoordinated, and on a smaller scale than the Trump administration’s repeatedly sounding the alarm and citing TdA in immigration-related arrests might make it seem. Three experts put it bluntly when they wrote for the New York Times: “Tren de Aragua is not invading America.”

That’s not to say that individual TdA members – or people purporting to be TdA members for clout – haven’t caused real harm and suffering for many communities across the US. In Miami, a former Venezuelan police officer was reportedly abducted and murdered by a TdA member. Another supposed gang member allegedly shot two New York police officers. And the criminal organization has seemingly imported its sex trafficking model, exploiting Venezuelan women who owe them for transportation into the US.

Even so, InSight Crime, a thinktank that studies organized crime across the Americas, has said that TdA is growing weaker, not stronger, and “now operates more as a loose collection of franchises than a cohesive organization”.

Earlier this month, US authorities revealed federal charges of racketeering, sex trafficking, drug trafficking, firearm offenses, and robbery against 27 alleged current or former alleged TdA members and associates, indictments and arrests that attorney general Pam Bondi said would “devastate TdA’s infrastructure”.

By late last year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was looking into more than 600 migrants in the US suspected of having some connection to TdA, though whether as victims, witnesses or gang members remained unclear.

That number represents fewer than 0.09% of the 700,000 Venezuelans who have resettled in the US, many of whom feel they are being smeared.

The criteria cited as justification for alleging detainees or people being removed from the US without due process are TdA members include suspects making hand signs, wearing Chicago Bulls paraphernalia or similar, or having certain tattoos, which prominent researchers of gangs have said are not strong indicators, or indicia at all, of gang membership.

Is Tren de Aragua working with Venezuela’s government?

Trump is relying on highly controversial measures, chiefly the wartime 1798 Alien Enemies Act, or AEA, to summarily deport people the administration alleges are TdA members, many of whom have not been charged with crimes. His justification is that the gang is acting “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela”.

That’s unlikely. TdA was protected by the Venezuelan government in the past, according to InSight Crime. But that agreement no longer stands, with the raid on the criminal organization’s prison headquarters a case in point.

The Washington Post reports that a recent National Intelligence Council internal assessment – which relied on information from the US’s 18 intelligence agencies – determined that while TdA has some low-level contacts in Maduro’s government, it is in no way commanded by Maduro. This makes Trump’s using the invasion argument to bypass due process flimsy – and contrary to the US supreme court’s insistence of the right for individuals to challenge the government.