The vicious Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua has now expanded its territory to at least 16 US states — an area that includes half of America’s population, The Post has learned.
Homeland Security officials last week were warned in an internal department intelligence memo about TdA’s growing presence across the country, most recently in: Washington, DC; Virginia; Montana and Wyoming.
The gang already has footholds in New York, New Jersey, California, Florida, Illinois, Georgia, Louisiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin and Colorado, according to the memo and previous reporting by The Post.
The gang has only increased its “violent tendencies” as it spreads, the memo added.
Tren de Aragua’s arrival in the nation’s capital and nearby Virginia coincided with “increases in migrant populations” there, the memo stated.
“As the population of Venezuelan nationals continues to increase, the potential for violent TdA migrants is highly probable,” the memo warned.
In one run-in with the cutthroat gang in Virginia, cops in Fairfax County arrested three suspected members in August 2023 for shoplifting.
One of the suspects had a fake Venezuelan ID, and all three had the gang’s signature tattoos.
The gang’s members are targeting the DC area because they can travel with ease to nearby suburbs in northern Virginia to carry out thefts, robberies and assaults, the memo said.
Its members are increasingly engaged in “lower-level fraud and theft schemes,” sending their stolen funds “back to South America as a means of financing additional criminal enterprises,” the memo said.
In one case cited in the document, a suspected Tren de Aragua member withdrew $118,000 from a Florida bank account with “fraudulent check deposits” and wired the money to bank accounts in Venezuela before any fraud was detected.
The sheriff of Wyoming’s most populous county told The Post on Monday that while he “would not say they have established a presence” in the Western state, he is currently holding a suspected TdA member in his jail.
“We have a person in our jail who is suspected of being TDA who is being held for trial in December for being in possession of a car that was stolen in Colorado,” Laramie County Sheriff Brian Kozak said.
“This is the only arrest of a possible TdA member in Wyoming, and he was just passing through when he was arrested. We have not seen an increase in Venezuelan immigrants in Wyoming, especially the criminal gang type,” he insisted.
TdA members embedded themselves in the waves of millions of migrants who crossed the US-Mexico border during the Biden-Harris administration. With no information-sharing between the US and Venezuela to detect the gang members, they were easily released into the US, according to US Border Patrol sources.
Further complicating the disastrous situation is a fraught relationship between the Biden-Harris administration and Venezuela’s Maduro regime, which refuses to accept deportation flights carrying Venezuelans from the US back to the South American country.
President-elect Donald Trump has said that cracking down on Tren de Aragua will be a top priority for his administration, which he says will carry out a historic “mass deportation” effort leveraging not only ICE but also the US military.
In New York, TdA members have engaged in shootings of cops, assaults, snatch-and-grab robberies and gun smuggling into migrant shelters. The gang is also said to be engaged in sex trafficking of migrant women on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens.
Outside of Democratic sanctuary cities and states, TdA has established itself in other unlikely areas of the country. Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director David Rausch told “Fox & Friends” on Friday that the gang has been running human trafficking rings in Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga.
“They go from human trafficking to organized retail crime theft, and then they move into the drug trade, taking on the cartels in very violent, bloody battles that they’ve had,” Rausch said.