What is the Venezuelan gang targeted by Trump?

In September 2023, Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro sent 11,000 soldiers to storm the Tokuron prison in the northern state of Aragua. But they were not sent to suppress riots.

The forces were regaining the prison control from a strong gang that turned them into something from a resort, with a zoo, restaurants, a nightclub, a betting store and swimming pool.

But the head of the gang, Hector Guerrero Flores, fled.

Now Tren De Aragua is at the intersection of President Donald Trump’s campaign to remove foreign criminals from the United States as part of his pledge to provide mass deportations from illegal immigrants.

Here is what we know about Tren De Aragua.

Trine de Aragua was originally a prison gang in which Hector Guerrero Floris turned into a “cross -national organization”, according to the US State Department, which provides a reward of $ 5 million for information that might lead to his arrest.

Guerrero Flores, 41, was inside and outside Tocorón for more than a decade.

He fled in 2012 by bribery of a guard and then re -arrested in 2013. Upon his return, he turned the prison into an entertainment complex.

The gang’s effect expanded beyond the prison doors, control of gold mines in Bolivar, drug corridors on the Caribbean coast, and the secret border crossings between Venezuela and Colombia, according to the US State Department.

The name of the gang is translated as the “Aragua Train”, and it may be from the Federation of Railways.

Luis Iskwell, a professor of crime science at the Central University of Venezuela, told BBC that the federation controls a section of the railway that crossed the arguments and simplifying contractors and selling jobs at work sites.

Tren De Aragua was expanded under Guerrero Flores to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile, and diversified the extortion of migrants in sex transfer, killing and kidnapping.

Through most of the novels, Tren De Aragua spread from Venezuela when it entered the country in a state of humanitarian and economic emergency in 2014 that made the crime less profitable, and now it is believed that it has a contract in eight other countries, including the United States.

Rona Risskuiz, a journalist who wrote the final book on the group last year, estimated that the organization had 5,000 members and annual profits ranging from 10 million dollars and 15 million dollars.

Others estimated his membership in almost half of this number.

The Chilean Prosecutor’s Prosecutor described as a “brutal organization” that uses killing and torture to achieve its goals.

While it is smaller or less richer than other criminal groups in Latin America, TRIN Aragoa is often compared to the extremely violent MS-13 gang of El Salvador.

Trine de Aragoa members were accused of the clothes of Chile police officers and then the kidnapping of the Venezuelan opposition officer, Ronald Ogda, whose body was found in Santiago, Chile, in March 2024.

During the time of President Joe Biden, the US Treasury was confronted Terin de Aragua last summer, saying that the gang was involved in sex trafficking across the American border.

On Saturday, Trump protested the law of foreign enemies in the eighteenth century, where he accused Trin de Aragoa of “committing, experimenting and threatening to invade predators against the territory of the United States.”

He said that the gang was working in an “irregular war” against the United States towards Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro.

Soon after assuming his post in January, Trump also announced that I would see de Aragawa a foreign terrorist organization, where the group was placed in the same category of the Islamic State and Boko Haram, Nigerian Islamic militants.

In Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois, the members of Trine de Aragoa have claimed in recent months and were accused of crimes ranging from killing to kidnapping.

Last summer, NBC News reported that the Ministry of the Interior estimates that 600 Venezuelan immigrants in the United States have a gang link, with 100 believed to be members.

As of 2023, there were 770,000 Venezuelali living in the United States, and they represent just less than 2 % of all migrants in the province, according to the Institute of Immigration Policy.

Most of them were given a protected situation by the US government.

Customs reports and borders that faced 313,500 Venezuelan immigrants on the border in 2024.