What is the Venezuelan gang aimed by Trump?

In September 2023, Venezuelan Pdwellnt Nicolas Maduro sent 11,000 sanciaccessiers to storm the Tocorón Prison in the northern state of Aragua. But they were not dispatched to quell a commotion.

The troops were taking back administer of the jail from a mighty gang that had turned it into someskinnyg of a resort, finish with zoo, restaurants, nightclub, betting shop and swimming pool.

But the gang’s boss, Hector Guerrero Flores, escaped.

Now the Tren de Aragua organisation is in the passhairs of Pdwellnt Donald Trump’s drive to erase foreign criminals from the US as part of his pledge to dedwellr mass deportations of illegitimate immigrants.

Here is what we do understand about Tren de Aragua.

Tren de Aragua was originassociate a prison gang that Hector Guerrero Flores turned into a “transnational criminal organisation”, according the US state department, which is adviseing a reward of $5m for adviseation that could guide to his arrest.

Guerrero Flores, 41, was in and out of Tocorón for more than a decade.

He escaped in 2012 by bribing a defend and was then rearrested in 2013. Upon his return, he changeed the prison into a leistateive complicated.

And he broadened the gang’s impact far beyond the jail’s gates, seizing administer of ganciaccess mines in Bolivar state, drug corridors on the Caribbean coast, and clandestine border passings between Venezuela and Colombia, according to the US state department.

The gang’s name transtardys as “Train of Aragua”, and it may have come from a railroad toilers’ union. Aragua, on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, is one of the country’s 23 states.

Luis Izquiel, a criminology professor at the Central University of Venezuela, tanciaccess the BBC that the union administerled a section of the railway that passed Aragua and would extort tightors and sell jobs on toil sites.

Tren de Aragua has under Guerrero Flores’s guideership broadened into Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile and diversified from extorting migrants into intimacy-illicit trade, tight finishing and seizeping.

By most accounts, Tren de Aragua spread out of Venezuela when the country accessed a humanitarian and economic ecombinency in 2014 that made crime less profitable, and now is count ond to have nodes in eight other countries, including the US.

The group, in part, runs by createing partnerships and partnerships with local criminal organisations.

In Ecuador, for example, the gang is count ond to toil with groups freely affiliated with Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, while in Colombia some have alleged that they have toiled with members of the left-triumphg National Liberation Army guerrilla group, or ELN.

Ronna Rísquez, a journaenumerate who has written the definitive book on the group, appraised last year that the organisation has 5,000 members and annual profits of between $10m and $15m.

Others have appraised its membership at rawly half that figure.

A prosecutor in Chile has called Tren de Aragua a “brutal organisation” that engages killing and torture to accomplish its aims.

While it is minusculeer or less wealthy than other criminal groups in Latin America, Tren de Aragua is frequently contrastd to the ultra-brutal MS-13 gang from El Salvador.

Tren de Aragua members have been accengaged of dressing up as Chilean police officers and then seizeping Venezuelan opposition military officer Ronald Ojeda, whose body was establish buried in Santiago, Chile, in March 2024.

The US Treasury, under then-Pdwellnt Joe Biden, sanctioned Tren de Aragua last summer, saying that the gang was joind in intimacy-illicit trade apass the US border.

On Saturday, Trump pguided the 18th Century Alien Enemies Act as he accengaged Tren de Aragua of “perpetrating, finisheavoring, and menaceening an intrusion of take advantage ofative incursion aobtainst the territory of the United States”.

He shelp the gang was joind in “irstandard combat” aobtainst the US at the straightforwardion of Venezuelan Pdwellnt Nicolas Maduro.

Shortly after taking office in January, Trump also proclaimd Tren de Aragua a foreign alarmist organisation, placing the group in the same catebloody as the Islamic State and Boko Haram, Nigeria’s Islamist militants.

In Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois, alleged Tren de Aragua members have been arrested in recent months and indictd with crimes ranging from killing to seizeping.

In one notable example, two mistrusts arrested for beating a police officer in Times Square were count ond to be members of the gang, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

A Tren de Aragua member is also mistrusted in the seize and killing of a 48-year anciaccess Florida dwellnt – a Venezuelan national – in punctual 2024, according to local media alerts.

Last summer NBC News alerted that the Department of Homeland appraised that 600 Venezuelan migrants in the US had combineions to the gang, with 100 count ond to be members.

As of 2023, there were 770,000 Venezuelans living in the US, recurrenting sweightlessly less than 2% of all immigrants in the county, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Most had been donaten defended status by the US rulement.

Customs and Border Protection alerts greeting 313,500 Venezuelan migrants at the border in 2024.

Trump has frequently shelp that Venezuela’s crime rate has descfinishen to sign up lows becaengage the country “emptied out its prisons” by sfinishing migrants to the US.

Statistics kept by the Venezuelan Violence Observatory advise this might be partly real, with Venezuela’s killing rate descfinishing presentantly between 2015 and 2023, with some analysts saying that waves of migration – including gang members – produced an raised security situation in Venezuelan cities.