November 18, 2024
Tren De Aragua Gang Terrorizes American Cities
By Wendi Strauch Mahoney
Joe Biden’s border policies are disastrous for communities nationwide, including cities that are nowhere near United States borders. There have been at least 10.8 million encounters with illegal aliens nationwide since the start of Fiscal Year 2021 (FY2021), according to Rep. Mark Green’s September “Startling Stats” report on the border crisis. The same report indicates that 2 million more aliens have entered as “known gotaways.” According to former chief of Border Patrol Raul Ortiz, the total number of gotaways “could be underreported by as much as 20 percent.”
The devastating numbers fail to tell the whole story, however. Embedded in those historic numbers are criminal gangs like Tren de Aragua, whose members have taken root in communities nationwide. Tren de Aragua is terrorizing communities, forcing the Biden administration’s U.S. Treasury to label the gang as a U.S.-designated transnational criminal organization (TCO).
The Treasury’s announcement states that the gang has “opportunistically infiltrated local criminal economies.”
From its origins as a prison gang in Aragua, Venezuela, Tren de Aragua has quickly expanded throughout the Western Hemisphere in recent years. With a particular focus on human smuggling and other illicit acts that target desperate migrants, the organization has developed additional revenue sources through a range of criminal activities, such as illegal mining, kidnapping, human trafficking, extortion, and the trafficking of illicit drugs such as cocaine and MDMA.
Tren de Aragua poses a deadly criminal threat across the region. For example, Tren de Aragua leverages its transnational networks to traffic people, especially migrant women and girls, across borders for sex trafficking and debt bondage. When victims seek to escape this exploitation, Tren de Aragua members often kill them and publicize their deaths as a threat to others.more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/11/tren_de_aragua_gang_terrorizes_american_cities.html
