Among the myriad of detrimental impacts that come with President Joe Biden’s reprehensible open border policies is the infiltration of Venezuela’s largest criminal gang, which has battered American cities with its trademark of gruesome crimes. The syndicate is called Tren de Aragua and it is operating throughout the U.S., according to both local and federal law enforcement officials.
Last month a Georgia nursing student was brutally murdered by a member of the gang, 26-year-old Jose Antonio Ibarra, who entered the country illegally through the Mexican border in the fall of 2022 and was released into the U.S. despite appearing on a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) list as a member of the deadly gang. A few months ago, a former cop was ambushed, robbed and murdered in Miami, Florida by members of the gang who left him dead in his sports utility vehicle with his hands and feet bound with tape.
Last month several of the migrants charged in the mob attack on two New York police officers in Times Square were identified as members of Tren de Aragua, according to federal immigration officials cited in a local news story. Around the same time, the New York Police Department (NYPD) disclosed that the Venezuelan gang was responsible for dozens of brazen robberies throughout the city committed while riding mopeds. Tren de Aragua has been identified as a narco-terrorist organization by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the State Department confirms that the gang’s vast sex trafficking networks exploit women and children. Tren de Aragua is Venezuela’s largest criminal organization, and it has long operated throughout Latin America. Thanks to Biden’s porous southern border, the criminal enterprise is terrorizing Americans and spreading quickly throughout the country.
The growing threat has led a group of federal lawmakers to demand the gang be designated an official Transnational Criminal Organization (TCO). In a letter to Biden, the members of Congress from various states write that the designation is crucial to effectively mobilize national awareness as well as deploy necessary resources and sanctions that will help curb the escalating crime and violence threatening communities across the nation.
“How many more innocent victims will have to suffer before we fully recognize and address the grave threat Tren de Aragua gang members cause to the peace, stability, and the national security of our nation?” the legislators ask the commander-in-chief, revealing that the gang is an invading criminal army from a prison in Venezuela that has spread its brutality and chaos to U.S. cities and small towns. “If left unchecked, they will unleash an unprecedented reign of terror, mirroring the devastation it has already inflicted in communities throughout Central and South America, most prominently in Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru,” the letter states.
Tren de Aragua is notorious for murder, drug and human trafficking, sex crimes, extortion, and kidnapping, among other brutalities, according the to the members of Congress calling for the TCO designation. “It is clear that most state and local law enforcement agencies are not yet prepared to handle the magnitude of this grave threat,” they write. “In Ecuador and Colombia, Tren de Aragua has plunged communities into chaos.
Similarly, in Chile and Peru, they have sown fear and instability, undermining the credibility of government institutions, as well as the safety and security of innocent civilians.” Failure to designate the Venezuelan gang as a TCO will only embolden its expansion and lead to heightened violence and criminality within the U.S., according to the lawmakers. “We cannot permit our cities to become battlegrounds for such organizations, nor can we allow our citizens to suffer at their hands,” the letter says, adding that “heinous crimes committed by the Tren de Aragua, like the rapes of multiple children and the murders of retired police officer José Luis Sánchez Valera and nursing student Laken Riley, must stop.”
Under Biden the U.S. has seen a shocking 7,300% spike in illegal immigrants from Venezuela, which is disturbing for reasons other than our newly relocated Tren de Aragua residents. Venezuela is run by a dictator with close ties to terrorists. Venezuela’s government issues travel documents to individuals linked to terrorism and allows terrorists to operate with relative impunity. The country also has close ties with Iran and other notorious state sponsors of terrorism. A few years ago, the Department of Justice (DOJ) charged Maduro and more than a dozen current and former Venezuelan government officials with narco-terrorism, corruption, drug trafficking and other crimes for operating a sophisticated enterprise known as Cártel de Los Soles that has flooded the U.S. with tons of cocaine.
