Tren de Aragua: What is the Venezuelan gang targeted by Trump?

For his part, Johan Petrica has been accused of leading a powerful illegal gold mining gang in Las Claritas, in the south of Bolívar state, known as the Las Claritas Sindicato. In 2022, as the Chilean police began to investigate him, he fled to Colombia, from where he continued leading the faction’s operations in Chile and planned the group’s expansion in Colombia. His recapture and return to Tocorón in 2013 led Guerrero to consolidate Tren de Aragua alongside other criminals, who became his most trusted lieutenants. He escaped before the operation, with Venezuelan civil society reporting that he was warned ahead of time.

• The presence of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua in the U.S. has made recent headlines and been given as a reason for deportations by the Trump administration.
• Trump’s executive order is part of his promise to carry out the largest wave of deportations in the country’s history, which has resulted in an increase in raids and the detention of immigrants.
• Ávila notes that Venezuela’s structural crisis has forced millions to migrate, many of whom are later stigmatized as criminals without evidence.
• (All have since been moved off the island.) But Jordan imagery — and basketball generally — are popular in Venezuela.

It’s often unclear how law enforcement identifies gang members, and evidence of their involvement is tenuous in some of the most violent and high-profile cases that Trump and his supporters attribute to the gang. Six states — Colorado, Florida, Illinois, New York, Texas and Virginia — have what police have identified as the most organized presence, with enterprises that mirror their Latin American operations. In the U.S., law enforcement has accused dozens of people of belonging to Tren de Aragua in at least 14 states, according to an NBC News analysis. Tren de Aragua developed this model in Colombia starting in 2018 and now practices it in several countries, including, according to federal prosecutors, the United States.

Manhunt for Venezuelan gang boss who ran luxury jail

At the time, Trump said MS-13 gang members from El Salvador were coming to the U.S. illegally and as unaccompanied minors, holding up the gang as a reason for stricter immigration policies. During her hours in captivity, she said, they showed her the footage of the armed men roaming the halls and told her the video was why they’d kidnapped her. In December, one woman, a Venezuelan immigrant, was unloading groceries outside the apartment complex when she was surrounded by armed men and dragged, along with her boyfriend, to a vacant apartment in the complex. Rodriguez noticed that the gang picked its targets based on their perceived vulnerability.

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This freedom and the gang’s criminal income allowed for the construction of a zoo, swimming pool, playground, restaurant, and nightclub within the prison. Under Niño Guerrero’s leadership, Tocorón became one of the country’s most notorious prisons, in large part due to the Venezuelan government’s unofficial policy of handing control of some prisons, including Tocorón, over to crime bosses known as pranes. From Tocorón prison in Aragua, the gang oversaw and profited from cells established in at least three other South American countries.

Tren de Aragua began emerging throughout the United States during the early 2020s, which saw a surge of migrants crossing the Mexico-U.S. Due to Tren de Aragua’s heavy presence in Lima, there were increased sentiments of xenophobia against Venezuelans. Chilean authorities accused Venezuela’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, of ordering Tren de Aragua to carry out the killing and paying the assassins. Ojeda was kidnapped on 21 February and his body was discovered 10 days later inside a bag which had been cemented over. On 11 April 2024, Chilean authorities implicated Tren de Aragua in the murder of Ronald Ojeda, a Venezuelan political dissident and opponent to Nicolás Maduro who had been living in exile in Chile.

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Days later, his lifeless body was found stuffed in a suitcase and buried in cement. But as Venezuela sank into its worst economic meltdown in history and crime became less lucrative, the Tren de Aragua branched out overseas. From behind bars, its leaders ordered robberies, kidnappings and murders. The accusations also included financing through Colombian narco-paramilitarism, human and drug trafficking, assassinations, and attacks against state institutions. However, on 7 April 2025, a declassified intelligence report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded that while some members of the Maduro regime may tolerate or work with Tren de Aragua, there’s no evidence of widespread, organized cooperation.

In September 2023, 11,000 members of the Venezuelan security forces reclaimed the Aragua Penitentiary Center, which served as the gang’s headquarters. The president claimed the victims were “narco-terrorists from Venezuela.” This was the second such operation in two weeks. On 2 September 2025, US President Donald Trump announced that the US Navy sank an alleged drug vessel, suspected of being operated by members of Tren de Aragua in the Southern Caribbean amid tension between the two countries, killing eleven people. Linette Tobin, attorney for detainee Jerce Reyes Barrios, stated that there is no evidence linking him to the criminal organization, that the only basis the DHS had for such a connection was a tattoo similar to Real Madrid symbols and a photograph in which he made a sign language gesture, and that his whereabouts have been unknown since his deportation on 15 March. Described by experts as unconstitutional, the deportations were denounced by the Nicolás Maduro regime, which characterized the transfers as a “kidnapping” and denied any links between the deportees and the gang.

In March 2025, the government of United States President Donald Trump ordered the detention and deportation of more than 200 Venezuelan citizens, accusing them of being members of the Venezuelan criminal group Tren de Aragua, despite not providing evidence of such affiliation. In March 2025, 200 detainees alleged by the Trump administration to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang were deported from the US to El Salvador despite a court order blocking the deportation. On 20 January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order initiating the process to designate various drug cartels and transnational gangs, including Tren de Aragua, as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, To combat the purported gang activity, hundreds of ICE agents participated in raids during the months of January and February 2025.

The truth about Tren de Aragua, the gang at the center of Trump’s immigration crackdown

Reports indicate criminal elements have migrated among those fleeing the ongoing humanitarian crisis, with some joining networks like Tren de Aragua in other countries. Some analysts have compared current patterns to the 1980 Mariel boatlift, when the Cuban regime allowed mass departure of citizens, including a significant number of common prisoners and others deemed undesirable. U.S. intelligence reports have indicated that the group operates independently of Venezuelan state control and lacks a coordinated structure within the country. In the vegas casino app United States, President Trump has referenced Tren de Aragua in discussions of immigration policy, comparing it to organizations such as Al-Qaeda, citing its reported presence when invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime law historically applied in contexts of armed conflict. The gang expanded throughout Latin America and the United States during the Venezuelan refugee crisis. Tren de Aragua is led by Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, alias “Niño Guerrero”; he was incarcerated in Tocorón prison (also known as Aragua Penitentiary Center), which functioned at the time as the organization’s de facto headquarters.

Tattoos

Another harmful outcome of the policies we have discussed here is that they may fuel xenophobia toward and criminalization of Venezuelan immigrants living in the U.S. This enables and encourages the social networks that fuel illegal markets and criminal activity beyond the walls of prisons. It expanded the group’s business portfolio to include human trafficking and sexual exploitation of Venezuelan female migrants in Chile, Colombia and Peru.

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Tren de Aragua engages in a variety of criminal activities including arms trafficking, bribery, drug-trafficking, illegal mining, kidnappings-for-ransom, and money laundering. Rather, Tren de Aragua is reminiscent of former criminal organizations in South America including the Medellin Cartel or Cali Cartel, which similarly did not use signifying tattoos, thus preventing easy identification. On 20 January 2025, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order initiating the process of designating various drug cartels and transnational gangs, including Tren de Aragua, as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Once finished, the Mattermost desktop app will open automatically. Mattermost desktop applications are available for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.

• In 2024, U.S. officials at the U.S.-Mexico border implemented enhanced interviews of single Venezuelan male migrants in order to screen for Tren de Aragua members.
• These offenses — homicide, assault, theft, extortion — do not require coordination across state lines, much less with a transnational criminal structure.
• The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
• The Tren de Aragua’s operational hub was based in Tocorón prison in Aragua state, where remnants of the group remain, albeit weakened.

Future waves of migrants will be easy prey for criminal organizations like Tren de Aragua, which has turned human trafficking into a lucrative business. Members of different gangs in and outside the prison also began to communicate and share information about criminal activities such as kidnapping and extortion. Trump has often said that Venezuela’s crime rate has fallen to record lows because the country “emptied out its prisons” by sending migrants to the US. Although he asserted that the criminal organization is deeply embedded in international networks protected by the opposition, on 21 March 2025, the same minister stated that none of the more than one hundred Venezuelans deported by the United States to a prison in El Salvador are members of Tren de Aragua, contradicting Washington’s official justification for the mass deportation. On 22 January 2025, during the inauguration of the military and police exercises “Bolivarian Shield 2025,” the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, described the Tren de Aragua as a “construct” aimed at destabilizing the country and facilitating interventionist scenarios.

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The family members of some of the deportees have said that there is no connection between them and the gang. The Mara Salvatrucha, commonly known as MS-13, was also included in the list of organizations deemed as terrorists. On his first day back in office, Trump signed a presidential action designating the Tren de Aragua as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization.” The deportations were done in defiance of an order issued by Chief U.S. Judge James Boasberg in Washington, D.C., who temporarily blocked the deportation of five Venezuelans who challenged Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and denied being members of Tren de Aragua.

However, in September 2023, 11,000 Venezuelan police and military personnel, backed by armored vehicles, stormed Tocorón to seemingly take control of what had been Tren de Aragua’s center of operations. Besides Venezuela, the gang has also been reported to have operations in Chile, Peru and the U.S. The migrants were sent to a high-security prison in El Salvador known as the Center for Terrorism Confinement, which has been accused of human rights violations. Following the invocation of the act, hundreds of Venezuelan migrants were deported to El Salvador and Honduras. Las week, Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as the basis for the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelan citizens under suspicion of their membership with the gang.