Along 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 from Denver to Chicago have made dozens of arrests for alleged crimes linked to the group, ranging from shoplifting to murder to prostitution.
And in New York City, police detectives have spent months interviewing informants — including admitted gang members — to identify the organization’s leaders and gather information about robbery patterns and recruiting efforts.
The gang in question is the ‘Tren de Aragua’, which emerged from a Venezuelan prison and developed into a feared criminal organization focused on human trafficking, human smuggling and drug trafficking.
Their growing presence in the United States has become a hot political issue for Republicans, especially former President Donald Trump, who are seeking to blame the Biden administration’s border policy for allowing criminals into the country.
Trump’s accusations about the effects of immigration-fueled crime, amplified in right-wing media, are often exaggerated or incorrect.
However, the gang has emerged as a growing source of concern for law enforcement officials, who have rushed to study its internal operations and track the movement of its members 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 condition of anonymity. Nationwide, agents have made more than 50 gang-related arrests, according to the official.
Among the places the gang has targeted is New York City, where more than 210,000 migrants have sought refuge since 2022. The city’s Police Department says the gang has focused primarily on stealing cellphones, shoplifting — especially luxury merchandise from department stores — and selling 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 at migrant shelters to its secret communications through invitation-only WhatsApp groups.
One of the biggest challenges, according to police, is the speed with which gang members have blended into everyday life in the city, not only among asylum seekers in shelters but also posing as delivery men on motorized bicycles, in some cases transporting weapons inside food delivery packages.
The gang’s size and sophistication in the United States remain unclear, but some officials fear its members may be trying to band together across states to operate on a larger scale.
Mayor Eric Adams, who has vowed to prevent the gang from gaining a foothold in New York, sent top law enforcement officials to Colombia this year to open a police station in Bogota and gather intelligence on the gang, saying they brought back “disturbing information.”
“These are bad guys and they do not represent the migrant and asylum-seeking community here,” Adams, a Democrat, said in July. “This is a small number of people who are violent, and we are going to target them and use our enforcement practices like we do with any gang in the city.”
For Venezuelan migrants seeking asylum here, the gang’s prominence in the nation’s divisive discourse has affected their daily lives, creating painful stigma and discrimination.
“Any of us who have tattoos, they think we are from the Aragua Train,” said Evelyn Velasquez, 33, a Venezuelan mother of three who lives in a shelter in the city. “I go to apply for a job and when they hear that we are Venezuelan, they reject us.”
Origins in a Venezuelan prison
At one of Venezuela’s largest prisons, police made some surprising discoveries during a raid last year. In addition to finding machine guns and ammunition, they discovered several restaurants, a discotheque, a swimming pool, a baseball field and a zoo.
The prison known as Tocorón, in Aragua, a state southwest of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, 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 began to call themselves ‘Aragua Train’.
The gang was formed to impose order through intimidation: leaders recorded the executions and torture of offenders, circulating the videos to scare other inmates.
The gang’s influence soon spread outside the prison to become the most powerful criminal enterprise in Venezuela.
As the country spiraled into economic and political crisis, the gang began profiting from the millions of Venezuelans fleeing, exploiting, extorting and silencing vulnerable migrants.
“They identified that there is money to be made in migration and they have taken advantage of that business,” said Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan investigative journalist who published a book about the ‘Aragua Train.’
The gang quickly expanded into neighboring Latin American countries. In 2022, authorities in Bogotá, Colombia, accused the “Tren de Aragua” of at least 23 murders after police began finding bags of body parts. Members of the gang have also been captured in Chile, and in Brazil, the gang aligned itself with one of the country’s largest organized crime syndicates, the Primeiro Comando da Capital.
In the United States, gang members have been charged with everything from shootings to human trafficking, targeting primarily the Venezuelan community.
In November, Yurwin Salazar, a Venezuelan migrant who Miami police say is part of the ‘Aragua Train,’ was charged with kidnapping and murdering a retired Venezuelan police officer in South Florida.
Amid reports of the gang’s growing presence, the Biden administration designated the gang a “transnational criminal organization” in July, announcing up to $12 million for information that could lead to the arrest of three of its leaders.
Without access to Venezuelans’ criminal records, U.S. officials said they have stepped up screening for potential members of the “Tren de Aragua” at the border, conducting “enhanced interviews” of single Venezuelan men that can include checking phones and tattoos.
The gang arrives in New York City
The first indication of the Aragua Train’s presence in New York came earlier this year, when federal officials alerted local authorities that its members had arrived on the East Coast, said Joseph Kenny, chief of detectives for the Police Department.
Since January, police have interviewed at least 30 people, including gang members incarcerated at Rikers Island and others familiar with their operations, according to an internal police document containing summaries of the interviews obtained by The New York Times.
The interviews provided insight into the gang’s characteristics and suggest that police are still learning about its most basic functions.
Castro Mata, the man accused of shooting two police officers, said the gang is reestablishing connections with new members of the ‘Tren de Aragua’ who have been placed in the city’s migrant shelters, which house 65,000 migrants.
Some said members have similar identifying marks: tattoos of clocks, anchors, crowns or verses with the word “Guerrero,” in reference to the gang’s leader in Venezuela; Michael Jordan and Chicago Bulls brand clothing; and, for unknown reasons, an Albanian flag emoji on social media.
As of September, police have entered the names of 24 members of the “Tren de Aragua” into their database of 496 identified gangs in the city. To label someone a gang member, Kenny said members often “have to self-admit, say ‘I’m in a gang.’”
“Do we think there are only 24 TDA members in New York City? That would be ridiculous,” he said, referring to the Aragua Train. “Obviously, there are more.”
Perhaps a sign of the gang’s stealth or its still-nascent operations, migrants living in shelters in the city said they have not noticed the gang’s influence there. However, they spoke in muted tones when the “Aragua Train” was mentioned.
The gang came up in casual conversations, they said, and in sensational clips on social media. But most said they couldn’t believe the gang was actually in New York, though they expressed embarrassment and dismay that all the Venezuelan migrants were being associated with the group.
“Sometimes I feel, as a Venezuelan, that I have a bad reputation because of certain groups that tarnish everyone’s name,” said Nelson, 34, who traveled to the United States with his wife and son and preferred not to give his last name. “I want to work, earn my money and get on with my life. We are not all the same.”
Many echoed a common sentiment among migrants: “For one, everyone pays.”
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