Known members of Tren de Aragua (aka TdA). Photo courtesy of the City of Aurora Police, Aurora, CO.
Remember when Kamala Harris was tasked by Joe Biden with securing America’s border? It was the one substantial job Biden assigned to Harris, and she failed miserably. Now she wants to be president. In through Harris’s open-door border came the violent and rapidly growing Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. Juan Forero reports for The Wall Street Journal on Harris’s guests. Forero writes:
U.S. law-enforcement officials had watched with alarm the spread of a Venezuelan gang known for dismembering rivals from Chile to Colombia. But the gang, known as the Tren de Aragua, seemed contained in Latin America.
Then late last year, Anthony Salisbury, a top Homeland Security official, got a call. “Hey, have you heard of the Tren de Aragua?” a Texas official asked.
“Please don’t tell me you’ve seen them,” Salisbury responded.
In fact, the colleague said, Tren de Aragua members were operating in Texas. Now, Salisbury said, there are also dozens of criminal cases involving the gang in Miami, where he is based.
“They expanded fast in Latin America,” he said, “and they’re expanding fast here.”
Founded in a Venezuelan prison where it ran a zoo, swimming pool, disco, restaurant and bar, the Tren de Aragua has grown into a fearsome transnational criminal force in less than a decade—“MS-13 on steroids,” as one federal official put it, referring to the Central American gang that is entrenched in many U.S. communities. The specter of crime caused by immigrants has become a major theme in the presidential campaign, with former President Donald Trump calling out “migrant crime” repeatedly.
Federal crime data show homicides and other crimes have dropped—and that the U.S. is far safer than it used to be. The gang isn’t a household name, but its activities are a source of fascination on social media. “I think the Tren de Aragua in the U.S. could help elect Trump,” said Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington.
Just as the Italian mafia followed the 19th century wave of immigration to the U.S., Tren de Aragua has emigrated alongside nearly eight million Venezuelans fleeing the reign of strongman Nicolás Maduro. Everywhere Tren de Aragua has set up, investigators say, it has established drug-distribution networks, extortion rackets and prostitution rings, preying on Venezuelans as they make new homes elsewhere in Latin America.
American officials fear the same pattern emerging in the U.S., where more than 700,000 Venezuelans have settled in the past four years. Tren de Aragua members are suspects in the shooting of two New York police officers, the killing of a former Venezuelan police officer in South Florida, and crimes from Chicago to Texas, law-enforcement authorities said.
Read more here.
If you’re willing to fight for Main Street America, click here to sign up for my free weekly email.
