A new report released by the Heritage Foundation offers the first comprehensive English language look at the massive Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) whose cruel exploits in the U.S. have been making national headlines.
The verdict? According to the report’s author, Joseph Humire, the threat America faces from Tren de Aragua is much worse than most people think.
Titled “Derailing the Tren de Aragua,” the report offers U.S. leaders a starting point to understand the violent criminal organization that it says was “honed and perfected inside Venezuelan prison walls then exported throughout the Western Hemisphere.”
Humire told Fox News Digital that he hopes the report will give the incoming Trump administration a starting point on how to respond to and dismantle the TdA before it can continue to grow more roots within U.S. borders.
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Migrants enter the U.S. in Lukeville, Ariz. (Fox News)
“The TdA is unique among criminal organizations because it has an ideology associated with it,” Humire said in the report. “Now that the TdA is already present in America, to fix this, a proper understanding of the TdA is necessary to detect their motives, tactics, and overall strategy of organized crime.”
What is Tren de Aragua?
Humire, who is director of the Center for a Secure and Free Society and a Heritage Foundation fellow, told Fox News Digital that the first thing to understand about Tren de Aragua is that it is much more than a gang. Rather, it is an organized international terrorist effort backed by some of America’s worst enemies to sow chaos and destabilize the U.S.
Born from a Venezuelan prison more than a decade ago, Tren de Aragua, which means “Train from Aragua,” burst into the national consciousness in 2023 after reports of members of the group holding an entire apartment building hostage in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver.
Since then, reports of violent crimes by Tren de Aragua members have spread like wildfire, including the high-profile murders of nursing student Laken Riley in Georgia and 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston.
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José Antonio Ibarra, an illegal migrant from Venezuela, was recently convicted of murdering nursing student Laken Riley in Georgia. (File)
American media coverage and politicians have cast Tren de Aragua as a group of simple thugs and criminals. However, Humire’s report emphasizes that Tren de Aragua is a state-sponsored transnational criminal organization sponsored by and embedded in the Venezuelan socialist government.
Rather than working to detect and deter criminals and terror, Humire said that key aspects of the Venezuelan government help facilitate TdA’s operations, not only within Venezuela but throughout the Western Hemisphere.
With the backing of the Venezuelan government, he said TdA has an intentional “invasion ideology” that is bent on achieving territorial control of neighborhoods and regions in a matter of weeks rather than the yearslong process taken by most gangs and transnational criminal organizations.
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Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix/File)
Why is Tren de Aragua spreading across the US?
While many comparisons have been drawn between Tren de Aragua and the El Salvadoran gang La Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13), TdA is expanding much more quickly, which Humire said is likely due to its unique origin and state sponsorship in Venezuela.
He also alleged that TdA’s rapid expansion in the United States is a “direct consequence of the Biden–Harris Administration’s failed immigration policies and lack of border enforcement.”
The Biden Cuban, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans parole program and the Venezuelan parole program before it have made it so that in many cases Venezuelan migrants are being waved into the country en masse with little to no vetting. Because of these policies, the Venezuelan population in the U.S. has grown by nearly 1 million – 520.8% – becoming the fastest-growing nationality in the U.S. since 2021.
The result has been that though TdA is new to the U.S., it now has a presence in more than 30 major U.S. cities and at least 100 federal investigations involving the group are underway, as the report puts it, “catching most of the U.S. law enforcement community by surprise.”
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday announced the state is going to target a Venezuelan gang that he said is notorious for brutal violence and murder and poses a threat to Texans’ safety. (X/@GregAbbott_TX)
How to ‘derail’ the train
In the first 100 days of his new administration, Humire said Trump should follow the example set by Texas’ efforts to root out the gang by delivering on his promise to launch an “Operation Aurora” to take a “whole-of-government approach” that uses federal resources within the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the military to complement state-led law enforcement efforts as well as partner with Latin American allies to hit TdA from every angle.
“It is believed that the main TdA leaders have not yet arrived in America, meaning time is of the essence to take preventive measures,” says the report.
Humire said the Trump Department of Homeland Security should immediately label TdA a transnational terror group and mark Venezuelan migrants as “special interest aliens.” This designation would reverse the Biden administration’s policy of waving in Venezuelan migrants and instead allow U.S. immigration officials to more properly vet Venezuelan migrants.
Though this may sound controversial, Humire said it’s something that would not only better protect American citizens in the interior but also legitimize asylum seekers fleeing Venezuela.
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A Venezuelan immigrant asks Texas National Guard troops to let his family pass through razor wire after they crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico on Sept. 27, 2023, in Eagle Pass. (John Moore/Getty Images)
“This is really meant to protect the Venezuelan migrants because just because you come from one of those countries,” he said. “Most Venezuelan migrants will actually agree with this because they don’t want to be infiltrated by Tren de Aragua, and all Venezuelan migrants know how brutal and dangerous Tren de Aragua truly is.”
What will Trump do?
Humire said there are already positive signs from the Trump transition that the president-elect is serious about his promise to dismantle TdA.
“I think that appointing the border czar so early in the transition process was a clear signal that that’s one of the top, if not the top priority of the new Trump administration,” he said. “And Tom Homan, who was appointed as the border czar, is very well aware of this gang Tren de Aragua and all of the transnational criminal organizations that are undermining American sovereignty.”
Donald Trump (Brandon Bell/Pool via AP/File)
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He also said that some of Trump’s key Cabinet appointments, such as Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state and Rep. Michael Waltz for national security adviser, is evidence of a whole-of-government approach in which people in the administration realize that TdA “could be a big problem unless we nip it at the bud immediately.”
“This is something that the Biden administration could have done. They had all the tools necessary to do that, but they missed the key ingredient, which is political will,” he said. “So, the political will in the new administration to tackle this issue is very high, going from the president down to his appointees and all throughout.”
