When the U.S. authorities deported 177 Venezuelans on Feb. 20, 2025, the Division of Homeland Safety alleged that 80 of the deportees have been members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
Suspected Tren de Aragua members have been arrested in Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, California, Texas and different states.
The U.S. State Division went as far as to designate Tren de Aragua a overseas terrorist group in an effort to cease “the campaigns of violence and terror committed by international cartels and transnational organizations.”
We’re sociologists who’ve spent a mixed 37 years researching gangs, crime and policing in Venezuela. Our analysis in Venezuela, and our colleagues’ analysis in different international locations, means that incarceration and mass deportations of Venezuelans residing within the U.S., whether or not they have ties to the group or not, will probably strengthen Tren de Aragua fairly than cripple it.
Certainly, we have now already seen how these methods contributed to the enlargement of avenue gangs in El Salvador and Honduras by creating new alternatives for members to community and grow to be extra organized.
What’s Tren de Aragua?
In response to investigative journalists and a handful of educational research, Tren de Aragua was initially based by Hector “El Niño” Guerrero and two different males in 2014. The three males have been imprisoned in Tocorón jail within the state of Aragua.
By 2017, Tren de Aragua started to be generally known as a “megabanda,” a class the native press in Venezuela use to consult with massive organized prison teams. The time period arose to spotlight the scale of some avenue gangs, which on the time was unprecedented in Venezuela.
Since its starting, the gang has depended closely on extortion. It additionally sells avenue medication, however that has been a a lot much less essential income for it.
Tren de Aragua’s progress surged because of mass incarceration insurance policies that started below Venezuela’s former President Hugo Chávez and expanded below present President Nicolás Maduro. Incarceration charges started to extend in 2009 and have been exacerbated by police raids deployed in 2010 in marginalized neighborhoods throughout the nation. Venezuela’s prisons turned stuffed with younger, poor males.
Crowded collectively in inhumane situations, the lads started to arrange into jail gangs with clear hierarchies. They collected huge earnings by charging prisoners charges for meals, use of area and safety from inmate violence. Additionally they opened and ran companies, together with a membership, inside Tocorón jail.
Members of various gangs in and outdoors the jail additionally started to speak and share details about prison actions similar to kidnapping and extortion. This strengthened social networks and expanded their unlawful enterprises.
Tren de Aragua ultimately took management of Tocorón jail as the federal government turned unable to handle each day life inside its partitions. It had grow to be one of many largest and greatest organized gangs in Venezuela.
A view contained in the notoriously harmful and violent Tocorón jail in 2011.
Franklin Suarez by way of Getty Photographs
Felony enterprise grows
Since 2014, an financial and humanitarian disaster has devastated Venezuela, inflicting many Venezuelans emigrate.
Venezuela had one of many highest displacement charges on this planet between 2014 and 2018, when at the least 3 million folks left the nation.
Tren de Aragua, nonetheless based mostly within the Tocorón jail at the moment, took benefit of this mass migration. It expanded the group’s enterprise portfolio to incorporate human trafficking and sexual exploitation of Venezuelan feminine migrants in Chile, Colombia and Peru.
It’s unclear how far past Venezuela Tren de Aragua has unfold. Whereas the group has definitely expanded operations into the Latin American international locations talked about above, analysis exhibits frequent criminals have posed as Tren de Aragua members in each Colombia and Chile.
Furthermore, the arrest of alleged Tren de Aragua members for committing crimes within the U.S. and different international locations doesn’t imply that the gang has arrange store in these locations. Gang members, similar as non-gang members, migrate throughout crises. They could proceed to commit crimes in new locations after they arrive. Nonetheless, it’s essential to notice that immigration within the U.S. is constantly linked with decreases – not will increase – in each violent crime and property crime.
Even some native police departments have questioned the gang’s enlargement into the U.S.
In Aurora, police refuted each the mayor’s and President Donald Trump’s claims concerning the residence complicated being taken over by the gang. And the New York Police Division just lately reported that suspected Tren de Aragua members there are largely targeted on snatching cell phones and robbing shops – hardly the crimes of a transnational prison empire or terrorist group.
Venezuelan safety forces wrested management of Tocorón jail from the Tren de Aragua gang in 2023.
Yuri Cortez/AFP by way of Getty Photographs
Making issues worse
Deportations don’t tackle the pressing scenario confronted by many migrants who depart their homelands seeking a greater, safer future.
When governments prioritize the spectacle of deportations to cope with migration, they contribute to the enlargement of much more resilient networks of prison enterprises.
Latest historical past bears this out.
In El Salvador within the Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s, incarceration, deportations and repressive policing insurance policies contributed to the evolution of youth avenue gangs such because the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, into transnational extortion rackets that unfold throughout Central America.
These similar insurance policies might additionally contribute to the expansion of Tren de Aragua inside Latin America.
Jail isolates massive teams of excluded and marginalized folks and constrains them to brutal situations. This allows and encourages the social networks that gas unlawful markets and prison exercise past the partitions of prisons.
Rising xenophobia
One other dangerous final result of the insurance policies we have now mentioned right here is that they could gas xenophobia towards and criminalization of Venezuelan immigrants residing within the U.S.
This closes off alternatives and harms folks already devastated by financial, political and humanitarian crises of their dwelling nation.
Venezuelans have responded with their characteristically incisive and biting humor.
In the meantime, latest cuts in U.S. overseas support to international locations with massive Venezuelan populations, similar to Colombia and Peru, will probably exacerbate the migration disaster by constraining alternatives for Venezuelans.
Future waves of migrants can be straightforward prey for prison organizations like Tren de Aragua, which has turned human trafficking right into a profitable enterprise. And with present insurance policies of cutbacks, incarceration and repression, Tren de Aragua will probably proceed to develop and fill its coffers.