More than 800,000 Venezuelan migrants have poured into the US in the last four years, including hundreds of members of the brutal prison gang Tren de Aragua.
But, the Biden administration gave up trying to deport the criminals and gangbangers in January after the Venezuelan government stopped accepting deportation flights from the US.
It’s a problem President-elect Donald Trump will have to solve in order to make good on his promise of mass deportations.
Tom Homan, the man Trump has tapped as his border czar to lead the lead the deportation and border security efforts said the incoming administration has a lot of leverage to force Venezuela to start acception deportations — including threatening even more sanctions and withholding aid, which totaled $209 million last year.
“He got El Salvador to take back MS-13, he got Mexico to agree to the Remain in Mexico program. So I got faith in President Trump to work with the president of Venezuela,” said Homan.
Venezuelan has been one of the biggest sources of migrants traveling to the US. Millions of Venezuelans have left their home country in recent years, fleeing the corruption and economic collapse brought on by the communist regime of President Nicolás Maduro.
The Biden admin instituted policies to give Venezuelans temporary protected status, which shields them from deportation and fast-tracks work permits — making the journey even more attractive.
Tren de Aragua saw an opportunity with the influx of Venezuelans into the US and began to pose as asylum seekers as they sneaked into the country. Many members avoided getting the gang’s signature tattoos to go undetected when crossing the border.
Former acting ICE chief Ron Vitiello, who served during Trump’s first term, said the gang only began to show up on the radar of border authorities and local cops during the Biden administration.
“There hasn’t been an arrest of a Tren de Aragua member in reported CBP data before 2021. Think of that, that’s incredible. I was in the government for 34 years. I never heard of Tren de Aragua until after I left in 2021 when it became a thing in New York,” Vitiello told The Post.
The Venezuelan prison gang has now set up shop in at least 16 states and its members have committed heinous crimes, including the murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.
The moratorium on deporting Venezuelan migrants means that Tren de Aragua bang members can’t be deported either – even when cops identify them as a threat.
Some members of the gang have been released from custody after getting busted for minor crimes — and went on to commit violence.
One alleged example is Niefred Serpa-Acosta, 20, whom ICE officers arrested earlier this year for multiple thefts, but released him on July 17. A month later, he made headlines when he was allegedly party of an armed crew who stormed an apartment complex in the suburb of Aurora, Colorado.
Serpa-Acosta had already admitted to being a TdA member and had the tattoos to prove it before ICE released him, Homeland Security sources previously told The Post.
Venezuela had been accepting US deportation flights almost weekly until January, per the Wall Street Journal. That all came to a screeching halt when the Biden-Harris admin imposed new sanctions on the authoritarian regime.
It’s now up to Trump to figure out how to start deporting Venezuelan criminals again. Here’s how he could do it.
Sanctions and pulling national aid
Wes Tabor, who was in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in Caracas in 2012, said restarting deportations could be done through a “business-like” approach to “crush” the oil rich country “economically.”
“They won’t have a choice with Trump because if he extends his hand and tries to do something with them reasonably … And if he [Maduro] puts his little finger up at Trump. Trump is going to… do everything he can to crush them economically,” said Tabor.
A spokesperson for Trump didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“Forcefully” deport TdA
While the task is “complicated,” Trump could make attempts to “forcefully” send Venezuelan gangsters back to the country without the permission of the government, said Venezuelan dissident Daniel Di Martino.
“In at least one occasion when this happened with Haiti, the US Coast Guard forcefully sent people back to the coast of Haiti without the consent of the Haitian government,” said Di Martino, who is also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
An operation like that could involve shipping deported migrants to the Caribbean or Colombia and then putting them on boats that land on the beaches of Venezuela.
Third-country deportations
Another option is to pay another country to house deported migrants.
John Fabbricatore, who previously headed ICE’s Denver office, said Trump could certainly “approach” a country like Colombia in exchange for aid and economic trade.
However, Colombia — which is struggling with an influx of some 3 million Venezuelan refugees — is likely to be reluctant to take convicted criminals from the US.