The Biden administration first labeled Venezuelan gang as a multi-national criminal organization. President Trump has now put Tren de Aragua at the center of the debate over immigration and deportation. But will his methods neutralize the threat Tren de Aragua poses to the U.S.?
Guest
Rebecca Hanson, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Criminology, and Law, and at the Center of Latin American Studies at University of Florida. Author of “Policing the Revolution: The Transformation of Coercive Power and Venezuela’s Security Landscape During Chavismo.” Co-editor of “The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela: Revolution, Crime, and Policing During Chavismo.“
Transcript
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: The Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is known for its vicious crimes and rapid spread throughout Latin America.
They create chaos in Chile. They create chaos in Peru, and they want to create also chaos in countries in order to shape the content of the borders. And also to, you know, create the sensation of instability, the criminality of this behavior in Venezuela.
CHAKRABARTI: That was an unnamed former Venezuelan military officer discussing the threat of Tren de Aragua on Fox News in 2024. The gang was created inside Venezuela’s Tocorón prison in 2014. It essentially controlled the prison, ordering kidnappings, robberies, and murders outside of the prison walls. By 2017, the group’s activities spread outside Venezuela’s borders.
The country’s crumbling political institutions and economy led to some 8 million Venezuelans leaving the country, and Tren de Aragua recruited from that diaspora. And by 2023, the gang had been reported in Texas and Chicago. So in July of 2024, the Biden administration took a significant step. They designated Tren de Aragua as, quote, a transnational criminal organization.
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That declaration came from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. Then Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, appeared on Meet the Press at the time.
ALEJANDRO MAYORKAS: We are indeed doing everything we can to dismantle criminal gangs and transnational criminal organizations. And quite frankly, we’ve devoted an unprecedented level of resources and personnel and focus to this effort.
CHAKRABARTI: So that was 2024. Which of course also was an election year. The Trump campaign turned the credible threat of Tren de Aragua into an incredible political opportunity on the stump. Trump repeatedly blamed the Biden administration’s handling of the border as the reason why Tren de Aragua got a foothold in the U.S.
Trump claimed he’d do better.
DONALD TRUMP: Let me tell you, if I were president now, those guys would be out of here before you left this room. (AUDIENCE CHEERS)
CHAKRABARTI: Now President Trump has taken action. Though the legality of that action is being heavily scrutinized in court. On March 15th, the President invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. It’s a measure that authorizes a president during a declared war or in the event of a quote, an invasion by any foreign nation or government to issue rules on restraining citizens or nationals of the hostile nation or government.
Now, the rules also allowed the restraint to happen without a court hearing. The Alien Enemies Act has been invoked only four times in all of U.S. history, the Trump White House used the act to justify the mass arrest and deportation of Venezuelans on U.S. soil.
TRUMP: These are criminals. Many criminals, murderers, drug dealers at the highest level, drug lords, people from mental institutions. That’s an invasion. It invaded our country. So this isn’t, in that sense, this is war. In many respects, it’s more dangerous than war because in war they have uniforms. You know who you’re shooting at, you know who you’re going after.
CHAKRABARTI: A federal district and then appellate court blocked Trump’s actions. The issue has also gone before the Supreme Court twice. Most recently, on April 19th, the court issued an unsigned order blocking the administration from deporting Venezuelans from a Texas facility, quote, until further order of this court. End quote.
Today, we are going to take a detailed look at the history of Tren de Aragua in order to better understand the true threat, or what the truth threat is that this gang poses to Americans. And then with that basis of knowledge, we’re gonna scrutinize whether the Trump administration’s actions have done anything realistically to reduce that threat.
So joining us to help us with this is Rebecca Hanson. She’s an assistant professor in the Department of sociology, criminology and Law, and at the Center of Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. She has researched crime and policing from within Venezuela and is author of a number of books on this issue, including Policing the Revolution: The Transformation of Coercive Power, and Venezuela’s Security Landscape during Chavismo.
Professor Hanson, welcome to On Point.
REBECCA HANSON: Thank you so much for the invitation, Meghna.
CHAKRABARTI: So I would really like to start by going through in detail with you as much as possible, the story of Tren de Aragua in Venezuela. Can you tell me a little bit about Tocorón Prison where the gang was supposedly founded.
HANSON: Yeah, so I think first it’s important to recognize when we’re talking about Tren de Aragua, how little we actually know about the gang. I think one of the issues here is that a lot of information is being put forward without strong empirical basis. There has been a little bit of scholarship and research that has been done within Venezuela on Tren de Aragua, but not very much.
And even less so outside of Venezuela itself. So yeah, Tren de Aragua, as far as we know from the empirical research that we do have was formed in the Tocorón prison, which is in the state of Aragua in Venezuela. Which is why the gang is known as Tren de Aragua because of the state that the prison is located in.
So important to really understanding the formation of this gang is that there is a broader kind of transformation that’s happening among criminal organizations in Venezuela at the time. So Tren de Aragua is not the only organization that undergoes this kind of transformation. Which is, so Venezuela is not Mexico, it’s not Colombia.
The country historically has not had for decades, these really large, well-organized criminal gangs. It’s really only beginning in 2013 and 2014 that we see anything like Tren de Aragua and other criminal organizations that kind of start to organize within the country. And this happens for a couple of different reasons.
One being that the government of Nicolás Maduro starts to engage in negotiations and pacts with some of these better organized gangs. It’s important to note that these pacts are very fragile. They do not constitute any kind of collaboration really, between the government of Nicolás Maduro and these gangs.
But they do help these organizations, these criminal organizations to spread and consolidate their control, which is what happens with Tren de Aragua.
CHAKRABARTI: Can we pause for just a second? I wanna go back a little bit. Because I’ll be frank, your depth of knowledge really outstrips mine.
So I’m gonna ask some more basic questions here. The background, by the way, is important to understand and I just wanna reiterate what you said. So you were saying that before 2013, 2014, the kind of international narco criminal organizations, as you said, that we are familiar with, from Mexico and Columbia.
They weren’t established in Venezuela, or not?
HANSON: So there’s still nothing like a narco criminal organization in Venezuela like we know of in Mexico and Columbia. So this is a really important, I think conflation is taking place. Tren de Aragua is not like a Mexican cartel. It’s not like a Colombian cartel.
None of the empirical data we have substantially is that. It is a more organized criminal organization than what has been seen in Venezuelan in the past. So I’ll give you like a really quick example of this. When I was doing research for, the early years of research for the book, for my new book, I was speaking to police officers and when they would refer to large gangs in Venezuela, they were talking about gangs that had about 20 men.
And that’s a very small gang in comparison to other countries. If you think about other contexts. And it’s really only after 2013 and 2014 that we start to see larger criminal organizations, but these really only reach 200, maybe 300 men at most. There is nothing really in, so I clarified that to say that even now, we’re not looking at an organization like a Mexican cartel or a Colombian cartel.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Okay. See, this is why I wanna go more slowly. Because all these details really matter in helping us understand how this is being talked about in the United States. So I actually wanna then, before we get to 2014, in the state of Aragua. Was there anything about how Hugo Chávez was leading Venezuela that contributed to whatever the political situation, an economic situation was in 2014, that led to a group like Tren de Aragua to be formed?
HANSON: Absolutely. So this is where we can actually make some comparisons with other countries like Brazil. So the reason that Tren de Aragua and other groups like them become more organized in the country is because the government, Hugo Chávez implemented a number of contradictory policing policies.
One of those was a very progressive police reform that did not make it for very long. But it also continued with and really exacerbated and increased militarized police raids in the country. And what this led to was like a very, it was a massive rounding up of young men from poor and working-class sectors and in a very notable increase in mass incarceration in the country.
And this is the same thing that you see in Brazil with their now better organized gangs as well. When you have, in El Salvador, when you have a lot of men who are placed inside of a prison where there’s really very little kind of internal control, they’re existing in very extreme and brutal conditions.
That kind of lays the groundwork for the creation of these better organized groups.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So that then leads me back to Tocorón prison. Because, and again, correct me if anything I say is not correct, because we want to really nail down the facts here. I understand that it was built, what, sometime in the 1980s.
Originally meant to house a couple of hundred people. But ended up housing thousands of imprisoned people.
HANSON: Yes. This is very true. In many prisons in the country, and this is because this to say that Tocorón is not the only prison like this, in that you have spaces that are really overwhelmed by large numbers of men.
These spaces were not designed to control this number of imprison men that are sent there. The National Guard, which is the policing organization that is in charge of controlling internal, the internal prison system, withdraws from these spaces and allows some of these gangs to take control.
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So Tocorón is not the only prison where this happens. There is a kind of an implicit agreement that the gangs themselves will start to organize social life, economic life within the prison walls themselves, while the National Guard will patrol around the prison itself.
CHAKRABARTI: Oh, this is so interesting.
So it’s used the word implicit agreement between the National Guard and the gangs that are inside the prison.
HANSON: Yes.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: Now, Professor Hanson, just before the break, you talked about how there was this implicit agreement in prisons like Tocorón prison that were so overcrowded that the gangs would essentially manage the, I guess, some of the internal life of the prison, and the National Guard would patrol the exterior.
I’ve been reading that in Tocorón that led to things like Tren de Aragua. They even had a zoo. A swimming pool, a disco, a restaurant. Is that all true?
HANSON: Yeah, that is true. It sounds like something out of fiction, but yes, it is true. Again, this is not only true at the Tocorón prison. It’s true of a couple of other prisons in Venezuela, where these better organized criminal gangs have taken over. So yes. And I think this is really important for understanding kind of the economic portfolio of Tren de Aragua.
I think there is an incorrect perception that Tren de Aragua is, as you mentioned before, something akin to a, like a Colombian or Mexican cartel that’s doing a lot of massive drug and gun running. And really for a long period of time, its economic basis were these things like parties that were organized within Tocorón prison. That people would come into. Their economic basis was extortion within local towns close to the Tocorón prison. Their economic basis was extorting prisoners within the prison system itself.
So I think while, yeah, pointing out these discos and the parties sounds very extravagant, and it is, I think it points to something that’s really a very important point that we need to understand, that Tren de Aragua’s economic basis for a very long period of time was very locally based within Aragua. And with the surrounding Tocorón prison area.
CHAKRABARTI: But as you said —
HANSON: That’s very recent.
CHAKRABARTI: That’s very recent. Okay. And we’ll get to what sort of led to its expansion. But that economic activity, as you also just said, included ordering crimes in the local community, right? Robberies, murder, kidnapping, that kind of thing.
HANSON: Directing. Yes. That’s correct. Directing them.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Is there a particular person who is, was, the leader of Tren de Aragua that we should know better?
HANSON: Yeah, so Tren de Aragua, again, as far as we know, was organized by three men that were in Tocorón prison at the time. The main leader that people will tend to point to is known as Héctor Guerrero, or El Nino.
And so this was the main organizer of the organization in 2013, 2014. And then it began to grow and take off from there. And for a number of years, yes, it is the case that particularly Guerrero directed and organized elicit markets and activities that occurred outside of Tocorón prison as well.
And this was similar to other criminal organizations at the time, were doing the same thing. Is the basis of a criminal gang that starts within a prison system that, again, is not specific only to Tren de Aragua and then it expands its system outside of the prison into neighboring sectors, into neighboring areas, and it starts to grow from that basis.
CHAKRABARTI: And so then what happened that triggered its expansion outside of Venezuela?
HANSON: Yeah, so I think that this is, there are two issues here. One, the issue that you already pointed to, which was the mass migration of Venezuelans.
That really started in 2014, but really begins to pick up 2015, 2016, and 2017. And so Tawa takes advantage of that mass migration to begin engaging in human trafficking, in extortion outside of Tren de Aragua, as well as prostitution in neighboring countries like Colombia. The other kind of key factor, understanding Tren de Aragua’s transformation were the pacts that I mentioned beforehand.
And so there was a security policy that was implemented by the government of Nicolás Maduro, really between 2013 and 2015, and again from 2017 to about 2021 or 2023, depending on the gang that we’re talking about. And basically, what these pacts do is they, the government says, we will withdraw from the territory that your gang controls.
We will allow for certain illicit activities to take place as long as you, the gang members, will keep control of these territories, reduce certain types of illicit activities, and reduce homicide rates. And so what this does is it really allows certain gangs, again, very particular gangs to really consolidate their control and expand their economic, their illicit economic basis.
Because there’s an understanding between the government and between these gangs that we’ll take care of our neighborhoods, our territories, as long as the police and the government don’t mess with our economic activities.
And that really allows for this consolidation and expansion.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. But Professor Hanson, explain to me why the government would even enter into these agreements. With criminal gangs.
HANSON: Yes. It sounds a little, but this actually is not something that’s particular to Venezuela.
This has happened in El Salvador as well. There are a couple of different countries where governments have basically decided that we, and this is the case in Venezuela, has decided that we cannot get a handle on crime and violence in our countries alone. We can’t do, we’ve tried with prisons, we’ve tried with the police, we’ve tried with state repression.
It’s not working. And so there’s an acknowledgement that gangs themselves are doing a better job of regulating social life, of regulating local economic practices, of regulating criminal activities. And so it’s this very practical recognition that these gangs are better at doing that than.
State actors themselves are. And so there is an awareness of that and a practical decision that’s made, that in order to be able to get a handle on crime, because these pacts they take place in in parts of Venezuela, that have some of the highest homicide rates. And so it’s a very intentional decision on the part of the government to say, we have to do something about these high homicide rates.
What’s the best way to attack this issue? And they decide that kind of outsourcing policing functions to gangs within those territories is a better way to go about it than the failed policing initiatives they’ve relied on in the past.
CHAKRABARTI: But were these gangs the ones performing, doing the homicides?
HANSON: In some cases, yes. In other cases, this goes back to the very, I would say, somewhat unique history of Venezuelan gangs. Again, for a very long, up until 2013, 20 14. We’re talking about very small groups that are fighting each against each other constantly. And so part of it is that you have gangs, yes, that are engaging in intentional homicides, intentional killings.
But then you also just have small gangs that are fighting against each other consistently. And so once you allow a gang to take control of our territory and tell gangs, we’re not doing that anymore. And we’re not engaging in these … which are just like we kill one person from your gang. You kill someone from our gang and just keep going on and on in this very violent cycle. So yes, that’s to say there are a couple of different ways that gangs were able to kinda get control over homicide rates. One was by consolidating and no longer fighting amongst each other.
And yes, a conscious decision that we are going to reduce our use of violence in order to maintain these pacts with the governments that are benefiting us as well.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I draw two conclusions of many, but two conclusions from this really important moment that you’re describing.
One is that Maduro’s government is essentially admitting that the gangs are better at governing than his own government. And two, does it mean that Maduro’s government then is, we should look at him as being complicit in helping provide the structure that led to gangs like Tren de Aragua, to, as you say, consolidate and then spread its actions internationally?
HANSON: So yes, absolutely. The government of Nicolás Maduro was complicit in the consolidation of these gangs. I think it’s really important to note that complicity and kind of what I think the government saw is a short-term policy to deal with local problems, does not result in collaboration or leadership in any way.
And I think this is a really important point for understanding. One of the reasons why the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act is so incorrect in this way. Because it relies on the assumption that the government of Nicolás Maduro is directing Tren de Aragua, is directing these gangs and sending their members into the United States.
None of our evidence suggest any of that. Again, what we’re talking about are very fragile, and what tend to be somewhat conflictive pacts that exist for a short period of time, that are for maybe a couple of years at most, that are mutually beneficial to each party. So the government gets a degree of security and social control gangs are allowed to increase their economic profits and to control their territories.
But we’re not talking about any kind of integration or leadership by the Maduro government. And the Trump administration knows this. And we, they, its own security institutions have released reports saying that the government of Nicolás Maduro does not control Tren de Aragua. And in fact, for those of us who are aware of the history between Tren de Aragua and the government, Nicolás Maduro, most of it’s very conflictive, them fighting it against each other.
CHAKRABARTI: But at the same time, essentially having entered these pacts, which is acknowledging the gang’s power and influence.
HANSON: Absolutely. Yes.
CHAKRABARTI: In Venezuela.
Oh, this is so interesting. Okay. Before, this is the time to get to, okay, now let’s move our folks to the United States. But just before we do that, I do want to ask you about one more thing. Because given what you said, I wonder if one of the most notorious cases that’s associated with Tren de Aragua is related to Maduro entering in all these pacts with the gangs.
Because in 2024 there was a man named Ronald Ojeda, I believe. A former Venezuelan army officer who was murdered, because he was conspiring against Maduro. And Tren de Aragua members were, what, arrested in association with that murder.
HANSON: Yes, this is a, I think another case where it’s important to realize that it’s an ongoing investigation. And I think that’s important to, to know with any of these cases that are, supposedly related to Tren de Aragua. I think given the information we have right now, what it seems happened is that the government of Nicolás Maduro contracted, potentially, some Tren de Aragua members in Chile to, yes, kill Ojeda. Who somehow presented a threat. So he, I believe, engaged in some resistance actions when he was in Venezuela. It’s not clear that he was doing anything while in Chile to continue subverting the Venezuelan government.
But I say that to say that at best this was a short-term contract, it seems, between the Maduro government and Tren de Aragua. And it’s not the government of Nicolás Maduro sending Tren de Aragua members to Chile. As like its employees or its own kind of contract killers. Instead. It’s again, kinda just like one, kind of one time contract.
CHAKRABARTI: But forgive me for not really being able to see the difference between the two. You’re still saying the government of Nicolás Maduro was, at least, for a short period of time, working with members of Tren de Aragua in order to kill someone?
HANSON: It depends on what you mean by working with. It seems, again, and this is all based off very little evidence, which I really want to highlight.
It’s, at least, it seems to me from my interpretation of what we can say so far, is that I would say working with is a strong term. I think paying a group or these particular members within a group to murder someone, which is, of course, horrendous, heinous. But that’s very different from saying that there were these, like, meetings in which the government of Nicolás Maduro helped to plan the killing of Ojeda with Tren de Aragua members.
And they’re collaborating together on this. I think it’s important to recognize these are two very different groups that very much are oftentimes in conflict with each other, and every once in a while, again, overlap. And the government outsources certain types of functions to them in the short term.
CHAKRABARTI: It does seem though that they have a relationship of convenience, though.
HANSON: Absolutely. Yes.
CHAKRABARTI: I get your point about they’re often in conflict, but there seemed to be, we’ve just talked about three or four times where they’re convenient partners. If you just, if indeed Maduro’s government did pay Tren de Aragua. Whether or not they directed it specifically, but paid them to kill somebody, if that happened in the United States, that’s a very high criminal offense.
HANSON: Absolutely. Yes.
CHAKRABARTI: But, so let’s then turn to, so that’s the time period that allowed groups like Tren de Aragua, but we’re focusing on them right now, to really spread internationally.
Colombia, Peru, Chile, and you talked about drug smuggling, extortion rackets, prostitution rings. Right now, there are somewhat 700,000 Venezuelans in the United States, and as I mentioned earlier, in the global Venezuelan diaspora, Tren de Aragua started recruiting from there. Is there any way to know actually how many members or recruits from, to the gang are in the United States right now?
HANSON: Yeah, so I think there are two issues here. One, it’s unclear how transnational of an organization Tren de Aragua is in this moment. And I don’t wanna jump too far ahead. But by that, when we say Tren de Aragua is a transnational organization that has spread its tentacles into Chile, Colombia, Peru, these countries.
What that actually looks like on the ground is very much up for debate, right? And so I say that to say if we’re not even really clear that there’s any direct leadership at this point, from within Venezuela to Tren de Aragua franchises, for example, in Chile, Peru, and Colombia. It’s even less likely that is happening in the United States.
As of right now, I would ask what is the data and information that we’re using to make claims about Tren de Aragua’s presence in the United States. We’re utilizing, to my knowledge, police reports that are highly questionable, that we have good reason to criticize them. And police departments have a particular way of going about identifying Tren de Aragua membership.
That’s very problematic. That has come under criticism, even by judges themselves, and by some police departments. So I think before jumping into this question, like how many Tren de Aragua members do we have in the United States, or how many cells in the United States, we have to step back and ask, where are we even getting our information?
That Tren de Aragua has a coordinated presence in the United States, and that’s not to say that Tren de Aragua members have not migrated to the United States. That is probably the case, but that’s a very separate issue from saying that we have a problem in the United States.
CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I take your point about it’s very hard to really pin down certain numbers or then gauge the extent of a problem.
Because we also, in preparing for this hour, we’re reading in on the work of Venezuelan journalist Ronna Rísquez. Award-winning Venezuelan journalist, and she wrote a book on the group. And in that book estimates that there’s maybe some 5,000 members in the U.S. and that Tren de Aragua is making some $10 million to $15 million from U.S. activities.
It’s not clear though how she came by that number.
HANSON: Exactly.
This is the issue, is that the only way that I’m aware that someone would be able to make claims about the number of Tren de Aragua members in the United States would be by relying on police reporting. And again, I’d be happy to go into further detail about why that can be problematic.
CHAKRABARTI: But nevertheless, as you had mentioned this earlier, now’s the time to talk about the fact that in 2024, the Biden administration through the Treasury Department did name the group. Actually, one of three, as a transnational criminal organization. And that didn’t just come out of nowhere, right?
HANSON: It’s unclear what the different sources of data, that either the Biden administration or the Trump administration had to make this claim about Tren de Aragua being a transactional organization. I think that the year 2024 is a really important year. Because the empirical research that we have suggests it’s precisely in 2024 that Tren de Aragua starts to become a less powerful, less organized group that doesn’t really have control over how its name is even being used in Latin America.
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: I wanna just provide a little bit more administrative detail here before we get back to your analysis, because it was in July of 2024, July 11th, that the Biden administration through the Treasury Department designated Tren de Aragua as a significant transnational criminal organization. And the result of that is all property and interests.
Of the gang in the United States were effectively seized by the United States, or ostensibly, I should say, seized by the United States. Now prior to that, a couple of months before that, we see that in March of 2024, then U.S. Senator Marco Rubio. And representative María Elvira Salazar wrote a letter to the Biden administration, specifically requesting that Tren de Aragua be labeled as a transnational criminal organization.
So there had been some significant attention being paid to the activities of this gang in the United States throughout 2024. Professor?
HANSON: Yeah. Throughout 2024. It’s, I think we still need some better information about where this concern comes from. Marco Rubio himself has said that he started to turn his attention to Tren de Aragua after conversations with leaders from the political opposition in Venezuela.
Which is, one way to gain information about a criminal organization. But there are, I think, better sources of information than political leaders to identify and understand the scope of a criminal, a problem of criminal organization. But I just wanted to note that it’s interesting that it starts to happen in 2024, as you mentioned.
I think before, this is, we’re talking about an election year. And I don’t think that can be separated from this concern over Tren de Aragua. And that’s, I say that’s interesting because in September 2023, and this goes back to this highly conflictual relationship that the government of Nicolás Maduro has had with Tren de Aragua. In September 2023, the government of Maduro invaded Tocorón prison, which is the prison that we’ve talked about, that Tren de Aragua has really had its base, its home base since it was first born.
So the government invades Tocorón prison and kind of takes the space back from Tren de Aragua. And after that time period, the empirical data that we have shows that Tren de Aragua starts to become a much more disorganized and less hierarchical organization. After September 2023, and so the last few months of 2023, we actually started to see Tren de Aragua losing control and power within Venezuela and in Latin America.
That’s not to say that there are not groups that claim association with Tren de Aragua that continue to engage in illicit activities, but it’s interesting that the empirical data that we have suggests that Tren de Aragua is becoming a less important kind of criminal presence within Venezuela and probably within surrounding countries at the same time that it starts to gain attention within the United States as a big problem.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. That’s really interesting because in the United States earlier in 2024, I must note that Laken Riley was murdered in February of 2024, and of course her murder really galvanized a lot of people in the United States.
We now have the Laken Riley Act. And the person arrested for her murder was Jose Antonio Ibarra, and allegedly he was a member of Tren de Aragua. Her name shows up in this letter from Marco Rubio and I should say 20 other members of Congress. So let’s just step back for a moment here, and I take your point about 2024.
But nevertheless, if we are to just accept for a second that the presence of members of an international known to be violent gang wherever they’re from, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, China, you name it, is not necessarily something that the United States wants to turn a blind eye to.
That leads us to this question of, okay, is Tren de Aragua’s presence significant enough that the invoking the Alien Enemies Act is the way to eradicate the problem from the United States? Your thoughts?
HANSON: Yes. So a couple things there. As far as I understand it, I believe that the man who killed Laken Riley, it was held that his brother was a member of Tren de Aragua. I’m not sure that he was, but in any case, that’s an aside. I think the larger issue here is that is an absolutely horrendous case. And people should be outraged by it, and we should absolutely take steps to keep these things from happening in the future.
But the question is that a crime that represents the presence of a transnational criminal organization in the United States? And I think this is a broader question about Tren de Aragua in the U.S. If we look at the crimes that suspected, and I highly supposed Tren de Aragua members in the United States have been arrested, for the most part, we’re talking about petty crimes.
We’re talking about shoplifting for the most part. And even in the case of Laken Riley, there’s nothing about that murder that indicates a transnational organization, transnational organization involvement. We’re talking about one murder case, one person that’s being killed by a Venezuelan immigrant, but how that’s related to Tren de Aragua as a transnational criminal organization is not clear.
Instead, to me, what it suggests, as I’ve written with some of my colleagues most recently in a New York Times op-ed, that this is instead a moral panic issue. So by that I mean we’re taking these disconnected or unconnected, very salacious and horrendous crimes that are absolutely terrible.
But we’re taking them and putting them into a framework that suggests that there’s a presence of a transnational organization, that if you look through the evidence, doesn’t necessarily make sense. So again, it’s not clear to me how the killing of Laken Riley, or even some of these other crimes, that suspected thing that our members have been arrested for in the United States, suggest the invasion of, or even presence of a transnational criminal organization here.
CHAKRABARTI: So the word invasion, right? That’s very critical here, because President Trump, as we played in that tape earlier, uses the word a lot. And he’s knowingly doing so because the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 requires some kind of either formal declaration of war, which has not happened, has not come from Congress or some kind of quote-unquote invasion.
And that term is so open to interpretation that I can see why President Trump uses it repeatedly. But this gets to the issue of how the United States should police international gangs within U.S. territory. Period. Because what the Alien Enemies Act allows the administration to do, as we talked about earlier, is arrest people suspected of being associated with the gang.
Deny them due process and immediately deport them. That’s why he invoked that act. And I guess, I suppose if you want to just do a burn-the-forest-down kind of approach, that would be effective, but that would require deporting every Venezuelan immigrant that the DHS comes across. I just don’t see how that’s actually effective as tamping it down the threat of whatever that threat may be of Tren de Aragua.
HANSON: Yeah, I think it’s incredibly ineffective. I’ve written about this with one of my colleagues and some other outlets as well. There’s evidence to suggest, not in the case of Venezuela, but at least in the case, for example, with gangs in El Salvador, that it’s precisely that as you meant, kind of burn-the-forest-down to get to some of the trees approach.
That is actually what catalyzes the growth of criminal organizations. And so this is precisely where we see like the Mara Salvatrucha gang in El Salvador coming from are these policies of mass incarceration and indiscriminate policing and arrest policies that actually contribute to the consolidation of these types of organizations.
So we haven’t seen that yet with Tren de Aragua. But it’s certainly an apt comparison, I think. So I think there’s an argument to be made that these policies might actually contribute to creating the problem that the Trump administration, I think, incorrectly believes, or at least says it believes exists now.
CHAKRABARTI: I just wanna play a news clip here, that again, places us directly in the United States. This is from August of 2024, and again, last year, being the critical year of when the gang really entered the public consciousness in the United States, it followed a report out of Aurora, Colorado.
So you’re gonna hear Denver TV station KDVR here where newscasters describe security camera footage of men with guns approaching an apartment inside a larger complex.
NEWS REPORT: The video shows a group of men walking up a stairwell at the edge of Lowry apartment complex in Aurora. All of them appear to be carrying rifles and handguns in the video shot earlier this month. One of the men can be seen talking on a cell phone. They all then gather around a door and go in. Another video clip shows men forcing a door open, but what or who they were searching for, not clear.
CHAKRABARTI: So that’s August of 2024. And I wanna also note that obviously this issue is still very top of mind for people, many people, including representative
María Elvira Salazar, who I mentioned earlier, who signed that letter in 2024 with Senator Rubio requesting the Biden administration to be more aggressive in its policing of Tren de Aragua.
Just last month, she was on Fox News, repeating, again, why she believes the gang is a threat.
SALAZAR: They’re no different than ISIS. They’re no different than Hezbollah or Hamas. These are terrorists. And that’s the same way we have to treat them, kick them out of the country with no mercy.
CHAKRABARTI: Professor Hanson, I want to just note that the same sort of, perhaps not the same language, but the same depth of concern was, whether it’s political or not, was expressed by the Biden administration. Because I’m looking at the Treasury Department’s release on the day that it decided to name Tren de Aragua a national transnational criminal threat. And it says here, quote:
The gang leverages its transnational networks to traffic people, especially migrant women and girls across borders for sex trafficking and debt bondage. When victims seek to exploit this exploitation, Tren de Aragua members often kill them and publicize their deaths as threats to others.
CHAKRABARTI: That administration was taking its seriously as well.
And I just wonder, from your understanding of the issues and forces that gave rise to Tren de Aragua, both in Venezuela and then spread across places in Latin America and the U.S.
What could be done to further reduce the gangs? Let’s just, even if we just wanna stick with the exploitation of women and girls in human trafficking.
HANSON: Yeah. So I think it’s important to note here when we’re talking about Tren de Aragua engaging in human trafficking, we’re not talking about the U.S.-Mexico border. There is absolutely good evidence that they have been heavily engaged in human trafficking along the Venezuelan-Columbia border as well, trafficking Venezuelans from Venezuela to Peru and Chile.
That is absolutely the case, but there’s no evidence that they’re engaging in the U.S.-Mexico border. And I think this is going back to one of my earlier points that Tren de Aragua does not have the capacity to engage in, to compete with Mexican cartels on the U.S.-Mexico border. They don’t have the capacity, they don’t have the size, they don’t have the resources to be able to engage on that along our border.
So then the question is, I think, how do countries in Latin America that are bordering Venezuela deal with the Tren de Aragua human trafficking problem? But that’s a separate question from I think what the United States could, should be doing to deal with Tren de Aragua.
And honestly, I think given the evidence that we have so far, both from the Biden administration, from the Trump administration, and the evidence that we have from scholars, suggests that the measures that are being taken right now to fight the threat of Tren de Aragua are much more dangerous themselves than the supposed coordinated presence of Tren de Aragua in the United States.
CHAKRABARTI: This is one of those situations where I think there’s common agreement that this is not necessarily a gang that we wanna allow to flourish in the United States. Let’s just put it that way.
HANSON: Absolutely. Yeah.
CHAKRABARTI: But how to prevent that from happening.
There’s significant disagreement on, and I should have asked you this much earlier, professor, and I’m sorry that I didn’t, but one of the things that we’ve been seeing reported elsewhere in the media is that DHS is arresting people simply based on tattoos.
HANSON: Yes.
CHAKRABARTI: Can you help clarify Tren de Aragua gang members actually do have specific tattoos or if there’s any significance to them. Or what’s going on there.
HANSON: Yeah. And so this goes back to my original point about we really need to step back and ask ourselves what is the actual presence of Tren de Aragua in the United States? If our only information about that is based off of police reports, off from Homeland Security or from ICE, then we have a big problem.
Because yes, many of the arrests that have taken place in recent months and the deportations that have taken place have been based in many cases solely on tattoos that are supposedly associated with Tren de Aragua, as well as hand gestures that are supposedly associated with Tren de Aragua. The problem is, and here anyone who’s familiar with, who’s with gang practices in Venezuela will tell you, this is not, these are not practices in Venezuela that are associated with gangs.
Tattoos and hand gestures are common as forms of association in Central American gangs. This has never been the case in Venezuela. And so I think one of the things that’s very problematic to me about the situation is that it seems very clear that security institutions within the United States have not consulted with Venezuelan experts. Or even I spent a lot of time spend talking with Venezuelan police officers and Venezuelan police officers will tell you, we do not use tattoos as a way to identify gang members in Venezuela. So if Venezuelan police do not even do that within their own country, why are we using that as a form of identification of gang members outside of Venezuela, if that’s not even a practice.
This has never been a practice of any gangs in Venezuela tattooing to identify membership. And another issue with these tattoos that supposedly are linked with Tren de Aragua, is they’re tattoos of incredibly popular cultural images in Venezuela.
So it is absolutely the case that if you go walk around poor and working-class neighborhoods. You will see men with these tattoos that supposedly are associated with Tren de Aragua.
CHAKRABATI: Like a Michael Jordan tattoo.
HANSON: like the Michael Jordan tattoo, like rose tattoo, like a crown tattoo. Phrases that are associated with rappers in the country.
But these are just incredibly popular, youthful images.
The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.
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