AURORA, Colo. — At the center of an increasingly fraught political and legal battle led by President Donald Trump is a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua — to some an organized and violent menace threatening U.S. national security, and to others the administration’s pretext for its anti-migrant narrative and mass deportation efforts.
This weekend, Trump claimed the gang was invading the United States and invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used law from 1738 that allows the president to deport noncitizens during wartime. The administration sent hundreds of immigrants to a prison in El Salvador even as a federal judge temporarily barred the deportations. Flights were already in the air when the ruling came down. At a federal court hearing in the case Monday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg summarized the administration’s position on his court order Saturday as: “We don’t care, we’ll do what we want.”
Trump and his supporters have sought to portray the gang as the embodiment of the criminal immigrant they so often conjure to explain the president’s increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement, which has also included sending hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and stripping hundreds of thousands more of temporary legal status in the U.S.
The reality is more complicated.
Origins in prison
Tren de Aragua began in the 2000s in a notorious penitentiary in north-central Venezuela, where gang leaders at one point had their own zoo, nightclub and bank inside the prison. What distinguishes the gang from other, larger criminal organizations is the quickness and ease with which it has spread over a large portion of the American continent, a movement experts say is tied to the mass exodus of Venezuelans.
According to the U.N., roughly 7.7 million Venezuelans have left their homeland in the last decade, more than a quarter of the population and almost certainly an undercount. It’s the largest mass displacement in the history of the Americas and one of the largest in the modern era anywhere in the world, by some estimates outpacing even the Syrian refugee crisis. Roughly three-quarters of a million people have arrived in the U.S. from Venezuela since 2022.
The massive and yearslong flow out of Venezuela and into the surrounding region provided the gang with an easy way to grow. Its signature enterprise is a model of sex trafficking that uses migration as a coercive weapon.
The gang facilitates a woman’s travel out of Venezuela, and when she reaches her destination, it forces her into prostitution to pay down the often insurmountable debt. Tren de Aragua developed this model in Colombia starting in 2018 and now practices it in several countries, including, according to federal prosecutors, the United States.
In the U.S., law enforcement has accused dozens of people of belonging to Tren de Aragua in at least 14 states, according to an NBC News analysis. The crimes include sex trafficking in Nashville, Tennessee; ATM theft in New York; a contract killing in Miami; and low-level arms dealing in Denver. Six states — Colorado, Florida, Illinois, New York, Texas and Virginia — have what police have identified as the most organized presence, with enterprises that mirror their Latin American operations.
But Tren de Aragua is dwarfed in both size and organization by more established criminal syndicates both foreign and homegrown. It’s often unclear how law enforcement identifies gang members, and evidence of their involvement is tenuous in some of the most violent and high-profile cases that Trump and his supporters attribute to the gang. This has prompted advocates to suggest the specter of violence is being used as a pretext for violating civil rights.
Caught in the middle are law-abiding Venezuelans. They are, according to law enforcement, the most frequent targets of gang violence. They are also in the crosshairs of Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Aurora, Colorado
In recent years, Denver and surrounding cities like Aurora became a major destination for Venezuelans arriving in the U.S. The city barely had a Venezuelan diaspora before then: Jeanette Rodriguez, who moved to the area when she was 18 years old, said that for nearly three decades she could count the number of fellow Venezuelans she knew on one hand.
“That changed about 2 1/2 years ago,” she said.
Rodriguez — a pastor at her church, a community leader and a deputy with the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office — said she was glad to suddenly see so many of her people at church or selling arepas on the street.
But she was also apprehensive. Beginning in 2023, close to 50,000 Venezuelans settled in metro Denver, including Aurora, in roughly the span of 18 months.
“It’s like taking a small city and putting it inside of a big city,” Rodriguez said. “It was stressful both for the newcomers and for the city itself.”
In Aurora, criminal activity among Venezuelans centered around three apartment complexes. The buildings, all owned by New York-based CBZ Management, were neglected for years before large numbers of Venezuelans moved in, city officials said.
“Backed-up sewage, leaking pipes, mold, rats — the gamut of all the things we think about when it comes to a slum,” said Jason Batchelor, Aurora’s city manager.
(Two of the complexes have since been shut down by the city, one last year and one in February, and the third is under new management. CBZ Management did not respond to requests for comment.)
Former residents of one complex said Tren de Aragua grew emboldened last summer, when gang members realized management had effectively abandoned the buildings.
“They took the place over,” said Carlos, a former resident of a particularly notorious apartment complex on Dallas Street, who spoke to NBC News on the condition that his last name be withheld over fear of retaliation from the gang. They dealt drugs, they stole cars, and they flashed guns, he said. “They would take vacant apartments and use them for parties. They would charge $20 at the door and have drugs and women.”
“They weren’t afraid that anyone would report them. They weren’t afraid of anything,” Carlos said. “It was like living in a prison.”
On Aug. 18, a 25-year-old Venezuelan man was killed at the Dallas Street apartments in what police say was a gang-related shooting. As the shooters walked the halls searching for their target, they were captured by a doorbell camera, police said. The footage made national news and was seized on by Trump and his supporters.
Rodriguez toured the troubled complexes with law enforcement in August. City officials wanted her in uniform, but she insisted on wearing civilian clothes.
“That’s when I started hearing stories,” Rodriguez said. She pieced together that the buildings were, at a minimum, the site of a crude protection racket, which started with gang members extorting fees from residents to park their cars and, when management abandoned the properties, grew to collecting the actual rent. Rodriguez noticed that the gang picked its targets based on their perceived vulnerability.
In December, one woman, a Venezuelan immigrant, was unloading groceries outside the apartment complex when she was surrounded by armed men and dragged, along with her boyfriend, to a vacant apartment in the complex.
The men bound the couple, beat them and tortured them with a knife, said the woman, who spoke to NBC News on condition of anonymity because she fears for her life. According to police, the kidnappers were members of Tren de Aragua.
During her hours in captivity, she said, they showed her the footage of the armed men roaming the halls and told her the video was why they’d kidnapped her. They were sick of the extra attention that had come from the Trump campaign’s continued fixation on the video.
“They told me, ‘This is why we’re getting harassed,’” she said.
She had nothing to do with the original video, but she had recently recorded a different one, which showed two women fighting in the courtyard outside her apartment window surrounded by a crowd; unbeknownst to her, the group included several gang members. She said an acquaintance had taken the video from her phone and posted it online.
So they were making an example of her. “They told us we weren’t going to leave that apartment alive,” she said. “I was certain that I was going to die.”
The Trump effect
The doorbell camera footage — and the gang’s presence in Aurora — had become a major plot point in Trump’s effort to demonize migrants in the U.S. and call for mass deportations during the 2024 presidential election.
In October, Trump made a campaign stop in the city, where he promised to name his military roundup of gang members “Operation Aurora.” Tren de Aragua, Trump said, had “invaded and conquered” the city with “better guns than our military has.”
Trump has zeroed in on Latin American gangs before. During the 2016 presidential race, the target of his ire was MS-13, a gang that originated in Los Angeles but grew in Central America, and whose members had committed several violent crimes on Long Island, in New York. At the time, Trump said MS-13 gang members from El Salvador were coming to the U.S. illegally and as unaccompanied minors, holding up the gang as a reason for stricter immigration policies.
Now, that focus has shifted to Tren de Aragua. Trump has cited the death of 22-year-old Laken Riley, a Georgia nursing student who was killed in February 2024, as the most egregious example of the gang’s terror. A Venezuelan man, Jose Ibarra, was convicted in November of murder and kidnapping and is serving life in prison.
Trump and conservative media routinely refer to Ibarra as a member of the gang. But neither the police who investigated the case nor the prosecutors who tried it have ever publicly made that claim themselves.
Nationwide, federal prosecutors have identified suspected members of Tren de Aragua in six ongoing cases. Two of them, in Tennessee and Louisiana, involve sex trafficking schemes.
Suspected Tren de Aragua operatives have also been known to move between cities where the gang is active: One of the men in the viral video from Aurora, for example, was arrested in New York City in January. Law enforcement officials call this a sign that the gang organizes its operations across state lines. Officials also say they have uncovered evidence that Tren de Aragua operatives in the U.S. are coordinating and communicating with gang leaders in Latin America.
But there are flaws in some of the methods law enforcement uses to tie people to the gang. Federal and local authorities have claimed certain tattoos or types of clothing serve as markers of affiliation, including tattoos or jerseys related to Michael Jordan and the number 23. A Jordan tattoo was among the reasons one man was sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, along with 176 other Venezuelans, according to documents filed in a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups. (All have since been moved off the island.) But Jordan imagery — and basketball generally — are popular in Venezuela.
The gang is also prone to petty and reckless violence in a way more organized criminal groups are not. In Denver, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has spent months surveilling pop-up nightclubs heavily featuring sex workers and a drug called tusi, or “pink cocaine,” typically a mixture of ketamine and a stimulant such as meth or MDMA. These events often end in gunfire.
“They are not the Sinaloa Cartel,” said Jonathan Pullen, special agent in charge for the Rocky Mountain Field Division of the DEA in Denver, referring to the notorious Mexican syndicate. “They’re not that massive in scope and they don’t have that type of reach or control.”
The majority of crimes attributed to the gang in the U.S. are prosecuted at the state level. These offenses — homicide, assault, theft, extortion — do not require coordination across state lines, much less with a transnational criminal structure. They are crimes, in other words, that can be committed just as well by freelancers.
“What Tren de Aragua represents is not only an organization but also a model for criminal activity,” said Ronna Risquez, a Venezuelan investigative journalist and expert on the gang. The model is successful in large part because it is easy to replicate.
“It’s entirely possible that a lot of Venezuelans who ended up in the United States are deploying that criminal model without necessarily belonging to Tren de Aragua.”
Grappling with crime
In September, police officials in Aurora created a team focused on crimes among Venezuelan migrants, which had daily phone calls to report progress, Police Chief Todd Chamberlain said.
At first, the work was slow-going. The vast majority of Venezuelans had no interest in talking to police, he said. But a breakthrough came on Dec. 17, when they got a call from the woman who’d been kidnapped.
“They told us they would be keeping an eye on us, and that they’d kill us if we reported anything,” the woman told NBC News. She called 911 anyway. “I didn’t think twice. I told myself, ‘The United States is a country where the laws actually mean something.’”
Within hours, the police chief had mobilized officers at the apartment complex. Chamberlain called in help from Homeland Security Investigations, a unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement tasked with investigating transnational crimes. Together they detained 19 people; 11 have been charged in the kidnapping so far.
Local immigrant rights advocates say people who were not involved in the crime were caught up in the operation, which they say may have violated Colorado’s sanctuary statute limiting law enforcement’s ability to cooperate with immigration agents. Chamberlain disputes the claim, saying only people connected to the kidnapping were detained.
Chamberlain’s officers ultimately amassed evidence of a wide range of criminal activities at the complexes: vehicle and retail theft, extortion, intimidation and violence, narcotics, prostitution. In one especially dilapidated apartment, he said, gang members had set up a tent for clients’ encounters with sex workers.
The apartment complex closed in February — shut down by the city as a public nuisance. After the kidnapping, the Venezuelan woman moved away from Aurora, but she still spends most of her time indoors. “When you’re surrounded by guns, when they’re doing things to you with a knife … you don’t get over that so quickly,” she said.
She talks with reproach about the people who suffered or witnessed crimes in the apartment complex but stayed quiet. “If we had died that day, it would be partly on them,” she said. “People die because of fear.”
She is seriously considering leaving the United States. Where she settles after years of displacement, she said, is not up to her but to God — as is the fate of the people who attacked her.
“You don’t leave this world without paying what you owe,” she said.
