By Nicole C. Brambila | Denver Gazette
As millions of immigrants fleeing the economic and political chaos in Venezuela used social media to navigate the journey north, Tren de Aragua (TdA) operatives embedded in their ranks and exploited these same platforms — particularly WhatsApp — to coordinate extortion, smuggling and violence.
Venezuela’s economic and political chaos made the rise of an enterprising criminal organization like TdA almost inevitable, according to Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan journalist who’s been investigating the gang.
“The heads of the Tren de Aragua identified the massive and forced Venezuelan migration as a goldmine of business opportunities,” Rísquez wrote in her book, “El Tren de Aragua: La banda que revolucionó el crimen organizado en América Latina” (The Tren de Aragua: The gang that revolutionized organized crime in Latin America).
“Therefore, they didn’t hesitate to follow the footsteps of their compatriots who were fleeing the economic and social crisis that left them unemployed and without food,” Rísquez wrote.
According to U.S. authorities, members of the Venezuelan prison gang hid in plain sight by infiltrating and traveling with Venezuelan immigrants headed north. But the gang didn’t remain in the shadows long. Its brutal reputation — magnified by reports the gang had taken over apartment complexes in Aurora — quickly made TdA a public safety issue and political flashpoint. On the campaign trail, then-President Donald Trump cited the gang as evidence of the unhampered flow of illegal immigration and hammered the Biden administration over stricter border enforcement.
Now, 100 days into his second term, Trump has deployed an aggressive crackdown, and made going after TdA a cornerstone of his illegal immigration agenda.
“They’re a savage gang, one of the worst in the world and they’re getting bigger all the time because of our stupidity,” Trump earlier said.
Trump added: “We will send elite squads from ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to deport every single gang member.”
In Colorado, law enforcement sources said some two dozen TdA affiliates have been arrested in the Denver metro area.
‘Devastate TdA’s infrastructure’
According to the Pew Research Center, a group based in Washington D.C., an estimated 11 million immigrants were living in the U.S. without lawful authorization in 2022. That figure had been falling since peaking in 2007 at 12.2 million, but began to climb in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic.
For decades, illegal immigration has been America’s intractable challenge. Republicans and Democrats have perennially promised to solve the crisis — and perennially failed. On a few occasions, Congress came close to passing a comprehensive plan, only to fall short.
Those failures have left states and local governments scrambling to confront the crisis.
And in the past two years, it finally exploded in metro Denver.