Vicious Venezuelan prison gang Train de Aragua is now expanded its territory In at least 16 U.S. states — an area that includes half the U.S. population, the Post has learned.
Homeland Security officials were warned last week about the growing presence of TDAs across the country in an Interior Department intelligence memo, most recently in: Washington, DC; Virginia; Montana and Wyoming.
According to the memo and previous reporting by The Post, the gang already has a foothold in New York, New Jersey, California, Florida, Illinois, Georgia, Louisiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin and Colorado.
The memo said the gang has further increased its “violent tendencies” as it expands.
The arrival of the Tren de Aragua in the nation’s capital and nearby Virginia coincided with an “increase in the migrant population” there, the memo said.
“As the population of Venezuelan citizens continues to grow, the potential for violent TDA migration is extremely high,” the memo warned.
In a shootout with a strangulation gang in Virginia, police in Fairfax County arrested three suspected members for shoplifting in August 2023.
One of the suspects had a fake Venezuelan ID, and all three had tattoos bearing gang signatures.
The memo said gang members are targeting the D.C. area because they can easily travel to nearby suburbs in Northern Virginia to carry out burglaries, robberies and assaults.
The memo said its members increasingly engaged in “low-level fraud and theft schemes”, sending their stolen funds “back to South America as a means of financing additional criminal enterprises”.
In one case cited in the document, a suspected Tren de Aragua member withdrew $118,000 from a Florida bank account with “fraudulent check deposits” and wired the money to bank accounts in Venezuela before any of the fraud was discovered.
The sheriff of Wyoming’s most populous county told The Post on Monday that while he would not say whether they have established a presence in the western state, they currently have a suspected TDA member in their jail.
“We have an individual in our jail who is suspected of being a TDA who is being prosecuted for possession of a car that was stolen in Colorado in December,” Laramie County Sheriff Brian Kozak said.
“This is the only arrest of a potential TDA member in Wyoming, and he was passing through when he was arrested. We have not seen an increase in Venezuelan immigrants, especially the criminal gang type, in Wyoming,” he stressed.
TDA members found themselves among the waves of millions of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border during the Biden-Harris administration. According to US Border Patrol sources, due to no information sharing between the US and Venezuela to locate the gang members, they were easily released into the US.
To further complicate the disastrous situation is a fraught relationship between the Biden-Harris administration and Venezuela’s Maduro regime, which refuses to accept deportation flights taking Venezuelans from the US back to the South American country.
President-elect Donald Trump has said that cracking down on the Tren de Aragua will be a top priority for his administration, which he will accomplish. A historical “mass deportation” An attempt to take advantage of not only ICE but also the US military.
In New York, TDA members have engaged in shootings at police, assaults, snatchings, and gun smuggling into migrant shelters. There is also said to be a gang involved. involved in sex trafficking Migrant women on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens.
Outside of Democratic sanctuary cities and states, TDA has established itself in other unlikely areas of the country. Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director David Roush told “Fox & Friends” on Friday that the gang has been running human trafficking gangs In Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga.
“They move from human trafficking to organized retail crime theft, and then they move into the drug trade, attacking cartels in very violent, bloody battles,” Rausch said.
(Tags to translate)US news(T)illegal immigrants(T)Tren de Aragua(T)US border(T)Venezuela
