Venezuelan Gang Stirs Fears in Colorado’s Third-Largest City

Fox News ran a report this week showing video of armed men in sweatshirts milling around an apartment complex in Aurora, Colo. — a Denver suburb and the state’s third largest city. Fox News explains: “The group appears to be Tren de Aragua, or TdA, a transnational gang based out of Venezuela.” That’s one way to describe a group the Treasury Department designated as a transnational criminal organization (TCO) in July. It’s not clear what’s going on in Aurora, however (there’s plenty of deflection over TdA’s presence there), but such claims underscore the risks of allowing unvetted migrants to pour into the United States.

TdA’s Origins

In its designation, the Treasury Department explains that TdA “is expanding throughout the Western Hemisphere and engaging in diverse criminal activities, such as human smuggling and trafficking, gender-based violence, money laundering, and illicit drug trafficking”.

Such coordinated activities are what differentiates TCOs from scattered gangs of street hoods, but TdA has come a long way from its humble roots.

It started over a decade ago in the Tocoron prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua — like Colorado a mountainous area, only in the north of the country and bordering the Caribbean. It’s not entirely clear why it’s called “Tren de Aragua” (“Aragua train”), but InSight Crime suggests it may be linked to a union that was once formed in connection with an incomplete railway system there.

That outlet is clear about other issues having to do with the group’s ascendency, though:

Hector Rustherford Guerrero Flores, alias “Niño Guerrero”, turned the Tren de Aragua into what it is today during his imprisonment in Tocorón.

Under Niño Guerrero’s leadership, Tocorón became one of the country’s most notorious prisons, largely due to the Venezuelan government’s unofficial policy of handing over control of some prisons, including Tocorón, to criminal bosses known as pranes. This freedom and the gang’s criminal income allowed for the construction of a zoo, a swimming pool, a playground, a restaurant, and a nightclub inside the prison.

It then expanded its control outside the prison to neighboring communities, and then further by forming alliances with smaller gangs in other states.

TdA went international by expanding its reach to the Colombian border, where it clashed with existing Colombian criminal groups like the National Liberation Army (ELN). After gaining a foothold in the Colombian border town of La Parada (a major crossing point for Venezuelan emigres), it began exploiting migrants and seizing smuggling routes.

TdA’s network then spread through South America, according to InSight Crime, with the outfit:

establishing cells in Colombia, Peru and Chile, with additional reports of its sporadic presence in Ecuador, Bolivia and Brazil.

The group expanded by following Venezuelan migration flows, initially remaining under the radar by focusing solely on Venezuelan migrants, as its presence increased at border crossings and in urban areas where they congregate.

With hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans pouring illegally over the Southwest border in the past three-plus years, it was only natural that TdA would expand its reach into the United States, as CNN reported in June.

Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens is plainly concerned, tweeting in April:

TdA is likely feasting on all the illegal migration at the Southwest border. As the Treasury Department puts it, the group “leverages its transnational networks to traffic people, especially migrant women and girls, across borders for sex trafficking and debt bondage”.

Soberly, Treasury continues: “When victims seek to escape this exploitation, Tren de Aragua members often kill them and publicize their deaths as a threat to others.”

A separate Fox News piece, also published on August 29, describes El Paso, Texas, as “on high alert” due to reports that TdA members were moving through the neighboring Mexican state of Chihuahua to cross into the United States near the largest city on the Southwest border.

Chihuahuan officials have sought the assistance of a Chilean gang expert for tips on how to combat TdA, according to the Latin Times. Why a Chilean? The outlet explains that “the number of kidnappings in Chile soared by 135 percent over the last decade, with the sharpest increase occurring between 2021 and 2022. This coincided with Tren de Aragua establishing a foothold in the country”.

That may be a taste of what communities across the United States can expect unless U.S. officials are able to nip TdA in the bud.

“Venezuelan Gang Causes Alarm in Metro Denver”

Are such concerns over TdA overblown, however?

Axios published a piece on August 29, headlined “Venezuelan Gang Causes Alarm in Metro Denver”, which appears to try to throw cold water on concerns over TdA’s activities in Aurora.

The outlet ties the reported connection between the Fox News’ videos of men toting guns through the Aurora apartment complex to an organized TdA presence in the city to two local GOP officials — Aurora City Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky and Mayor Mike Coffman.

I know that they are Republicans because Axios highlights their party affiliation it its piece, before then continuing:

Yes, but: Aurora and Denver police on Wednesday said they're aware of Tren de Aragua's presence in the Denver metro and have tied the gang to some local, unspecified crimes.

Aurora police said gang members' influence is "isolated," but didn't elaborate. Denver police said they're unaware of any apartment buildings being "taken over" by Tren de Aragua in the city.

Well, that’s a relief. Sure, a TCO birthed in a prison that engages in sex- and drug-trafficking, extortion, and debt bondage (among other unsavory activities) may be “tied to” unspecified crimes, but fortunately its influence is “isolated” and it’s only Republican elected officials who are really that concerned.

There’s an aphorism known as “MRDA”, for “Mandy Rice-Davies applies”, a reference to an alleged in-court riposte by the eponymous Welsh “former model” who was a key figure in the notorious “Profumo Affair” that rocked UK politics in the early 1960s.

Faced with a denial by Lord Astor (a conservative British politician) of her claim that the two had an affair, Rice-Davies purportedly responded: “Well he would, wouldn't he?”

Her real answer was a bit more nuanced than that, but in any event, MRDA denotes skepticism over a self-serving claim — in the Axios piece, the clear contention by local Colorado police that they have TdA under control and that local residents shouldn’t worry.

I trust that local authorities responded in a similar manner when other gangs like MS-13 and 18th Street were first getting their starts, too, and it’s now well-established that then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover downplayed the Mafia’s criminal enterprises and reach for decades as well.

Back to the Treasury Designation

Read in toto, there’s a whiff of election-year politics in the Axios piece. Which brings me back to the Treasury Department’s TdA TCO designation, which includes the following quote from Brian Nelson, undersecretary of Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence:

Today’s designation of Tren de Aragua as a significant [TCO] underscores the escalating threat it poses to American communities ... As part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to target Transnational Criminal Organizations, we will deploy all tools and authorities against organizations like Tren de Aragua that prey on vulnerable populations to generate revenue, engage in a range of criminal activities across borders, and abuse the U.S. financial system.

Notably absent from that excerpt is any reference to the massive surge in Venezuelan migrants under the “Biden-Harris administration” that has enabled TdA to “pose threats to American communities”.

In the 14 fiscal years ended FY 2020, Border Patrol agents at the Southwest border apprehended just over 3,900 illegal migrants from Venezuela, total.

Venezuelan apprehensions did rise in the closing days of the Trump administration (781 illegal migrants from that country were nabbed by Border Patrol at the Southwest border between October 2020 and January 2021), but it wasn’t until the Biden-Harris DHS gave Venezuelans here illegally “temporary protected status” (TPS) that things really went off the rails.

Nationals of TPS countries are largely protected from removal, and Venezuela was designated for that status in early March 2021. Between that month and the end of FY 2021, Venezuelan apprehensions at the Southwest border surged to more than 46,000. In FY 2022, Southwest border agents made more than 187,000 apprehensions of illegal Venezuelan migrants, and 200,000-plus more in FY 2023.

In the first 10 months of FY 2024, CBP has encountered nearly 281,000 inadmissible Venezuelans, more than 133,000 of whom were apprehended by Border Patrol at the Southwest border, almost 97,500 stopped at the Southwest border ports, and 146,840 identified at interior U.S. airports.

For what it’s worth, CBP at the northern border ports of entry encountered an additional 526 inadmissible Venezuelans in FY 2024, and Border Patrol caught an additional 249 nationals of the country coming over the border from Canada this fiscal year.

The port encounters are explained by two Biden-Harris immigration innovations: CHNV parole and the CBP One app interview scheme,  that I’ve explained at length elsewhere. But the important thing to keep in mind is that an unprecedented number of Venezuelans without visas — who thus have never been screened before showing up here — have been arriving in this country since March 2021, and keep arriving.

DHS contends that it thoroughly vets those inadmissible Venezuelans before releasing them into the country, but that’s a fib and the department knows it is.

As the House Judiciary Committee recently explained:

Immigration authorities do not vet illegal aliens against databases in the aliens’ countries of origin. As a result, if there is derogatory information about an alien in that alien’s home country, the current checks are unlikely to reveal it. As former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott testified to [Congress] in 2023, the U.S. government has “very, very minuscule data” available when an alien arrives at the southwest border because “[c]rimes committed by a foreign national outside the U.S. rarely appear in [U.S.] databases.” [Emphasis added; footnotes omitted.]

It's not like the socialist dictatorship that currently rules Venezuela would be sharing much criminal info on TdA members anyway — even the U.S. State Department admits that relations between the two countries have “been strained in recent years”, and Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro is likely pleased as punch to send the United States all the criminals — and TdA members — it wants.

Given all that, “the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to target” TdA as described by the Treasury Department TCO designation of the group is a little like loosening the steering column on a car while installing better air bags: It might cushion the blow, but it’s making the crash inevitable.

A number of questions still surround a Venezuelan criminal organization’s activities in suburban Aurora, Colo., but press reports claiming TdA is controlling apartment complexes there point to a larger issue: Venezuelan migrants are still pouring into the country, some are TCO-affiliated, and the U.S. government has no way of determining which ones pose a criminal risk.