BBC News, Washington
EPAIn September 2023, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro sent 11,000 soldiers to storm the Tocorón Prison in the northern state of Aragua. But they were not dispatched to quell a riot.
The troops were taking back control of the jail from a powerful gang that had turned it into something of a resort, complete with zoo, restaurants, nightclub, betting shop and swimming pool.
But the gang’s boss, Hector Guerrero Flores, escaped.
Now the Tren de Aragua organisation is in the crosshairs of President Donald Trump’s drive to remove foreign criminals from the US as part of his pledge to deliver mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
Here is what we do know about Tren de Aragua.
How did the gang start?
Tren de Aragua was originally a prison gang that Hector Guerrero Flores turned into a “transnational criminal organisation”, according the US state department, which is offering a reward of $5m for information that could lead to his arrest.
Guerrero Flores, 41, was in and out of Tocorón for more than a decade.
He escaped in 2012 by bribing a guard and was then rearrested in 2013. Upon his return, he transformed the prison into a leisure complex.
And he expanded the gang’s influence far beyond the jail’s gates, seizing control of gold mines in Bolivar state, drug corridors on the Caribbean coast, and clandestine border crossings between Venezuela and Colombia, according to the US state department.
The gang’s name translates as “Train of Aragua”, and it may have come from a railroad workers’ union.
Luis Izquiel, a criminology professor at the Central University of Venezuela, told the BBC that the union controlled a section of the railway that crossed Aragua and would extort contractors and sell jobs on work sites.
Tren de Aragua has under Guerrero Flores’s leadership expanded into Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile and diversified from extorting migrants into sex-trafficking, contract killing and kidnapping.
How big is the gang?
By most accounts, Tren de Aragua spread out of Venezuela when the country entered a humanitarian and economic emergency in 2014 that made crime less profitable, and now is believed to have nodes in eight other countries, including the US.
Ronna Rísquez, a journalist who has written the definitive book on the group, estimated last year that the organisation has 5,000 members and annual profits of between $10m and $15m.
Others have estimated its membership at roughly half that figure.
A prosecutor in Chile has called Tren de Aragua a “brutal organisation” that uses murder and torture to achieve its aims.
While it is smaller or less wealthy than other criminal groups in Latin America, Tren de Aragua is often compared to the ultra-violent MS-13 gang from El Salvador.
Tren de Aragua members have been accused of dressing up as Chilean police officers and then kidnapping Venezuelan opposition military officer Ronald Ojeda, whose body was found buried in Santiago, Chile, in March 2024.
The US Treasury, under then-President Joe Biden, sanctioned Tren de Aragua last summer, saying that the gang was involved in sex-trafficking across the US border.
Is there a threat to the US?
On Saturday Trump invoked the 18th Century Alien Enemies Act as he accused Tren de Aragua of “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion of predatory incursion against the territory of the United States”.
He said the gang was engaged in “irregular warfare” against the US at the direction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Shortly after taking office in January Trump also has declared Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organisation, placing the group in the same category as Islamic State and Boko Haram, Nigeria’s Islamist militants.
In Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois, alleged Tren de Aragua members have been arrested in recent months and charged with crimes ranging from murder to kidnapping.
Last summer NBC News reported that the Department of Homeland estimated that 600 Venezuelan migrants in the US had connections to the gang, with 100 believed to be members.
As of 2023, there were 770,000 Venezuelans living in the US, representing slightly less than 2% of all immigrants in the county, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
Most had been given protected status by the US government.
Customs and Border Protection reports encountering 313,500 Venezuelan migrants at the border in 2024.
