On February 5, 2025, several teams of heavyly armed American federal agents took place in Denver and in the neighboring cities of the American state of Colorado, in search of more than 100 alleged members of Tren of Aragua – the Venezuelan gang who had become a fixation of the American president Donald Trump, inaugurated two weeks earlier.
The agents made a descent into apartments and residences, have held people and entered evidence. And they promised to continue to return, saying that the federal authorities should act because local policies protecting unauthorized immigrants had authorized violent criminals to infiltrate the country.
“This is something that will simply continue,” said an official in the United States in terms of immigration and customs application (ICE) in a video published on the X social media platform that morning.
* This article is the seventh in a Nine game survey“Tren de Aragua: done against fiction”, ” The analysis of the truth about the gang, as well as its evolution, its current operations and how it could change in the future. Read the complete survey here.
But the results of the operation were not up to the boastful. Local media reports have suggested that many more people have been detained for civil immigration offenses than for criminal charges. Federal officials refused to provide details, but ABC News reported that a single alleged member of a gang had been arrested. Trump's “border tsar” Tom Homan later said that an internal leak had compromised the operation.
The raids of the Denver region were an early example of the intense objective that the American police have shot in Tren of Aragua while Trump intensified his rhetoric against the gang. They also illustrate the extent to which Trump has merged ostensible anti-gang efforts with his immigration application program.
At the same time, the dull results of the raids underline that Tren de Aragua continues to have a limited criminal presence in the United States. Gang members – and impostors borrowing the increasingly famous name of the gang – mainly threaten communities of vulnerable Venezuelans migrants, posing a limited security risk for the general public.
It is unlikely that the extent of this threat will increase. Tren de Aragua is unlikely to build criminal power in the United States with so much application of the law and public attention focused on it.
However, the ongoing efforts on criminals and the application of immigration to the Trump administration could reshape the nature of the gang in the United States and how the American nodes of Tren of Aragua interact with gang members abroad.
How Tren from Aragua has taken prominence
A few days before the Denver raids on January 29, Trump underlined the concern of his administration with Tren of Aragua by signing the law of Laken Riley while the first bill made the law during his second mandate in the White House. The law obliges federal authorities to have unauthorized immigrants accused of minor crimes and allows states to pursue the federal government for financial damage allegedly caused by unauthorized immigrants.
The legislation was appointed according to Laken Riley, a university student from the Southeast State of Georgia, murdered in February 2024 by an unauthorized immigrant that the federal prosecutors accused of being affiliated with Tren de Aragua.
No evidence suggested that Tren of Aragua, as a wider organization, had something to do with the murder of Riley. But the case has acquired public importance Dubious reports On the supposed activities of Tren of Aragua across the United States.
See also:: Is Aragua from Venezuela the United States?
The wave of attention surrounding the Laken Riley affair marked a turning point in the public profile of Tren of Aragua in the United States. He triggered successful calls For the designation of Tren de Aragua as a transnational criminal organization under the predecessor of Trump, Joe Biden. As polling day, Trump began to refer to Tren of Aragua by name in his speeches and campaign declarations.
“They are a wild gang, one of the worst in the world, and they are growing all the time,” he said during a gathering of October 11, 2024 in the Denver region, where he spoke out against a backdrop which said “put an end to migrant crime” and “expel the illegals now”.
The suburbs of Denver d'Aurora, where Trump delivered the speech, had become a focal point of the story of Tren of Aragua due to a viral video that triggered the affirmations that the gang had taken control of various complexes of apartments in the city.
But local police and residents denied these rumors. And while local officials argue that Tren of Aragua is present in the Denver region, they have minimized the threat.
What Tren of Aragua does now
As in Denver, the reputation of Tren of Aragua through the United States has developed more quickly than its presence and its activities. The extent of the operations and benefits of the gang remains low, and mainly confined to communities of Venezuelan migrants.
The alleged members or the gang affiliates have been linked to several isolated cases of sexual traffic as well as murders, assaults, thefts, extortion, arms trafficking and drug trafficking.
But the systematic examination of Insight Crime of reports accessible to the public on alleged activities of Tren of Aragua through the United States revealed that most were misleading or lacking in evidence or context. Some were completelyIncluding several reports published by an organization whose executive director was then operated for a position in the American Department of Defense.
Only a handful of the dozens of American cases examined by Insight Crime suggest a high degree of criminal sophistication, and no solid evidence has emerged from the coordination between the local cells of Tren of Aragua in the United States, nor the communication with the International Directorate of the Gang.
Because anyone can claim to be a member of Tren de Aragua, it is difficult to determine when the authors have real links with the gang, when they have been poorly identified or when they simply take their name.
The American government's documents show that the federal authorities relied on questionable criteria such as tattoos during the “validation” of immigrants as members of Tren of Aragua, raising questions on the solidity of such identifications.
At the same time, the Trump administration's own intelligence agencies have evaluated that the presence of the gang is mainly made up of small nodes, rather than a national network of coordination cells.
“The small size of the ADD cells, its emphasis on criminal activities with a low content, and its decentralized structure make TDA coordinating large volumes of human trafficking or smuggling of migrants”, according to an assessment known as the Memorandum of the Community which was distributed to civil servants in April 2025 and later.
The evaluation makes no mention of the conventional markers of a cohesive network, such as centralized leadership which gives orders and receives funds from local cells. He also refutes the statement of Trump and others than Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro directs the activities of gang members in the United States.
The conclusions of the memo largely correspond to those proposed by a former member of Tren of Aragua consulted by Insight Crime.
The presence of Tren from Aragua in the United States, he said, is not part of a plan coordinated by members of higher gangs or Maduro. Instead, most of the reported members were young Venezuelans who had fled poverty and now sought to take advantage of the names of Tren of Aragua, while some were affiliates seeking to use what they had learned from the gang to create new criminal companies regardless of the organization.
How Tren from Aragua could change in the United States
While the federal agents dressed in armor rose raids in Denver and around February 5, thousands of kilometers in Washington, DC, newly confirmed the American prosecutor, Pam Bondi, finalized a memo calling for “the total elimination” of Tren of Aragua and other criminal groups from Latin America.
In the memo, Bondi orders the United States Ministry to prosecute Tren from Aragua and other groups using all the tools at their disposal, including accusations of terrorism. But rather than pursuing “low level” objectives without law of lawful immigration, the Ministry of Justice would rather deport the deportation.
In the following weeks, Trump designated Tren of Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization and deleted Immigration protections for hundreds of thousands of venezuelans. He also declared Tren of Aragua an invasion force and invoked a law allowing his administration to stop and quickly deport the suspect members.
See also:: Official organization of Trump which broadcast false news on Tren of Aragua
But this strategy to adopt a strong rhetorical position against the gang and use allegations of gang links as a basis for large -scale deportations of Venezuelans nationals, could turn around in several ways.
The continuation of the expulsion rather than criminal charges against the alleged members of Tren of Aragua could deprive prosecutors of the possibility of obtaining information on the gang by the negotiation of advocacy, which implies proposing to reduce potential criminal penalties in exchange for cooperation with the application of laws.
In addition, returning an influx of people to Venezuela, long mired in economic and political crises, could offer possibilities for criminal recruitment and the training of international links between gang agents who do not already exist.
On the other hand, the intensity of the police focuses on Tren of Aragua can transform the brand of the toxic gang in the United States. Even impostors can be discouraged to use the name for fear of attracting unnecessary attention.
* Additional report by María Belén López Conte.
