In December 2023, Tennessee authorities detained Yilibeth Rivero De Caldera. Better known as “Yibi,” Rivero is a thickset Venezuelan woman in her 50s with bleached-blond hair and a hard stare. Three months later, they arrested a man in his thirties with a mop of brown hair and patchy beard. It was Yibi’s son, Kleiver Daniel Mota Rivero.
The pair had been running a human trafficking ring in the city of Nashville, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) alleged. But the significance of their case extended far beyond their victims. Mota, the TBI press release stated, was Tennessee’s first confirmed member of Tren de Aragua, the feared gang born in the prisons of Venezuela that has since spread to half a dozen nations across the Americas.
Mota and Rivero were the vanguard for Tren de Argua’s expansion across the state, TBI Director David Rausch would tell a congressional budget hearing in November 2024.
“They are here, and they are in numbers here,” he warned.
The comments, even more than the arrests, sparked a series of local news reports on the latest Latin American gang threat to menace Tennessee. For some gang watchers, Tren de Aragua was following in the footsteps of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13), which has been active in the state for two decades.
SEE ALSO: Tren de Aragua Profile
But Rausch’s comments also sparked confusion. When reporters began asking local police around the state about Tren de Aragua, none of them had heard of the gang operating in their cities and counties.
The stakes rose yet again when US President Donald Trump declared Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization after taking office in January. The group, he claimed, was an invader taking orders from an enemy state, and it was “undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States.” That designation was then used as a pretext to deport Venezuelans under the 200-year-old Alien Enemies Act.
The result is that Tennessee residents, like many others across the country, have been left with more questions than answers over this new criminal threat. Was the state facing a swarm of terrorist gang members? Or, as many of the government’s critics claim, was Tren de Aragua a paper tiger used to provide cover for a hardline immigration and citizen security agenda in places like Tennessee?
From Venezuela to Nashville: Exploiting the Exodus
The arrival of Venezuelan criminals linked to Tren de Aragua, first to the United States and then to Tennessee, followed what is now the group’s established pattern: stalking the flows of desperation.
Tren de Aragua was born in the Venezuelan prison system in the early 2010s. It expanded transnationally in the late 2010s by trailing and exploiting the millions of Venezuelans that sought refuge from political repression, rampant crime, and economic collapse. At first, the gang appeared in neighboring countries like Colombia, Peru, and Chile. But starting in 2021, there was a surge of Venezuelans heading north, their arrival facilitated by the US government’s decision to grant Venezuelan migrants leave to remain in the United States by awarding them Temporary Protected Status (TPS). With them came criminals with ties to Tren de Aragua.
SEE ALSO: Tren de Aragua: From Prison Gang to Transnational Criminal Enterprise
Tennessee investigators first detected the Rivero human trafficking case not long after that influx began. According to the accusations laid out in a federal indictment and other documents filed in February 2025, Yibi Rivero and her son, Mota, headed the network.
Rivero, prosecutors believe, was a seasoned sex trafficker with experience in Venezuela and Peru, while Mota had spent time in prison in Venezuela.
The documents identify Mota as a “member” of Tren de Aragua and Rivero as a “suspected member of TdA who has used her son’s gang affiliation to threaten victims.” The others, a report on the detention hearing states, “are almost certainly loyal to their family and TdA for support and protection.”
The group allegedly identified young, vulnerable women, mostly Venezuelans, who had little prospect of escaping their desperate poverty. They promised them work and a place to stay in the United States and offered to organize and pay for their journey. While most were recruited in Venezuela, prosecutors believe the network also brought in Venezuelans living in Peru and even the United States.
The traffickers allegedly told the women they could pay back the costs of their travel out of their wages when they arrived. But when it got too late to turn back, the prices the women had been quoted spiraled from a few thousand dollars to $15,000, and even $30,000. And the only way to pay them back, they told the women, was through prostitution.
Once they arrived in Nashville, Tennessee’s state capital, the women were moved to hotels and forced into sex work. The traffickers allegedly photographed them, then placed ads on websites used to connect with potential clients.
The members of the network had specialized roles within this enterprise, according to prosecutors.
“Yibi and Kleiver, I would say, are equally at the top, but they have different goals,” said a former federal organized crime prosecutor that worked on the case with state law enforcement, who asked to remain anonymous. “He’s more of an enforcer, and she’s more of logistics, handling the business on a day-to-day.”
Rivero’s two other sons and their wives acted as dispatchers, fielding calls and messages from clients and negotiating sexual services and prices, according to the indictment. The final defendant was identified in the indictment as the group’s “enforcer,” who stayed in the hotel to watch over the women.
To keep their victims compliant, the traffickers allegedly threatened to damage their reputation and their immigration status. They told them they would separate them from their children and, if need be, resort to violence against them and their families back in Venezuela.
That is where the Tren de Aragua connection came in. The indictment states that Rivero and Mota “used their ties” to Tren de Aragua — referred to in the documents as TdA — to “cause the victims to continue engaging in commercial sex acts out of fear of the serious harm they or their families would suffer if they attempted to leave.”
However, the group rarely resorted to actual violence, the former prosecutor said. The leverage they held was enough to keep their victims in line.
“They were just able to hold their immigration status and fear for their families back home over their head,” the ex-prosecutor said.
Tren Spotting in Tennessee
There are only an estimated 9,000 Venezuelans in Tennessee, according to population monitoring carried out by the Migration Policy Institute. But the Rivero case formed the basis of what would become a moral panic about Tren de Aragua’s activities in the state.
During his congressional testimony in November 2024, TBI’s Rausch used the case to warn about what he called the gang’s “pathway to violence:” first comes human trafficking, then organized shoplifting rings using undocumented migrants, then they make their move on the transnational drug trade.
“They will and they have taken on the cartels head on, and they will and they have been very violent.”
“They are in all our major cities,” he added.
Less than two weeks after Rausch’s testimony, on November 25, 2024, the TBI announced four arrests in an operation to disrupt sex trafficking in the city of Chattanooga in East Tennessee. Among them, the statement said, was a “known member” of Tren de Aragua, Adelvis Rodriguez Carmona.
The authorities provided no further information on Rodriguez’s alleged ties to Tren de Aragua, only noting he was suspected of violent crimes in New York and Chicago and had previously been detained then released on minor charges.
Although local news ran headlines about the arrest of Tren de Aragua sex traffickers, Rodriguez was not charged with human trafficking but with patronizing prostitution – in other words, paying for sexual services. He was also charged with possession of illegal drugs with intent to supply and illegal possession of a firearm. The three women arrested with him faced charges of prostitution.
The charges against Rodriguez were later dropped, and he accepted a plea deal on a federal charge of being an “alien” in possession of a firearm.
Days after Rodriguez’s arrest, Interpol Washington announced that while the TBI had been raiding the brothel in Chattanooga, they had arrested a senior Tren de Aragua leader in the city of Memphis in western Tennessee.
Luis Alejandro Ruiz Godoy, the statement said, was “a high-ranking Tren de Aragua fugitive from Venezuela with a history of violent crimes, including human trafficking, robbery, terrorism, weapons offenses, and escape.”
Ruiz, though, had been in the United States just over a week. Two weeks before his arrest, Interpol in Caracas had put out an alert stating that he was traveling through Mexico towards the US border. Although the notice arrived too late to prevent his entry, US police tracked him and arrested him before he made it past Tennessee.
In January, local media reported another arrest of a suspected Tren de Aragua gang member. The 28-year-old undocumented Venezuelan was arrested when he fled a raid on a Nashville brothel, throwing away a Glock pistol as he ran.
The raid was again reported as a sex trafficking operation, but the suspect, Elmer Aparcio Castillo, was charged with promoting prostitution. Unlike human trafficking charges, this involves consensual, albeit illegal arrangements, with sex workers. Again, all charges were dropped except for a federal charge of being an “alien” in possession of a firearm.
However, while media reported it as a Tren de Aragua case, neither the press releases put out by authorities nor court filings mention the gang.
Since then, authorities have reported one final alleged sighting of Tren de Aragua in Tennessee. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained nearly 200 people in a week-long immigration enforcement operation in May, they claimed that among them was a 37-year-old Venezuelan Tren de Aragua “affiliate gang member.” However, ICE did not name the man and has so far refused to release any further details to media or local government officials.
With Tren de Aragua still an ephemeral presence in Tennessee, the TBI’s initial warnings over the group’s advances have come under scrutiny. Democratic lawmakers publicly questioned Rausch’s testimony, and Democratic State Representative John Ray Clemmons sent Rausch a request for more information on the threat.
In his response, Rausch reaffirmed several of his more dubious claims while contradicting some parts of his own testimony. Specifically, he repeated his claims that Tren de Aragua is present in the state’s four main cities, Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga, all places where he said there had been arrests. InSight Crime, however, could find no record of any Tren de Aragua arrests in Knoxville. And police in Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga previously issued statements saying they had no information about the gang’s presence in their cities. For its part, Memphis police flagged the November arrest of Godoy and another incident involving Tren de Aragua graffiti as the only signs of the gang’s presence.
InSight Crime contacted the four police departments to ask whether there had been any sign of the gang’s operations since they put out those statements, but only the Knoxville police responded, saying they had no further information.
Even more telling, Rausch told Congressman Clemmons in his response that Tren de Aragua was not established in the state, contradicting his November 2024 testimony that the gang was in Tennessee “in numbers.” Rausch added they had yet to move into the other activities in the unusual criminal “pathway” he had laid out in his previous comments: from sex trafficking to shoplifting to transnational drug trafficking.
“My warnings about other crimes were to make everyone aware of what happens when they get a foothold. They do not currently have a foothold,” he wrote to Rep. Clemmons.
For Tennessee prosecutors tracking the gang, the original Nashville sex trafficking case has so far provided the most substantive evidence of Tren de Aragua’s presence in Tennessee. But that indictment does not go into details over what led investigators to their conclusions of ties between the network and Tren de Aragua, and there was little to suggest they ever carried through on their threats to turn the gang on their victims or their families in Venezuela and elsewhere.
Still, it remains the government’s strongest case. And according to the former prosecutor, there was compelling evidence they had powerful criminal ties beyond the immediate network.
“I believe that the mother and the son had what I would call true connections,” the former prosecutor said. “Whether or not they were actually considered affiliated or a member [of Tren de Aragua], they had real connections and financial backing from much larger sources.”
Other cases, the former prosecutor noted, have been even harder to assess, especially as suspects who flaunt their supposed Tren de Aragua connections often seem the least credible.
“I’ve seen someone who we feel really strongly is associated with TdA who will deny it to death. And then I see the opposite: Where they like to throw it around and say that they are, and it’s like, ‘Are you then even part of TdA or are you part of this offshoot that’s calling yourself TdA?’” the former prosecutor explained. “It’s just a little more complicated than other gang association analyses.”
Investigations have been further complicated by evidence of what prosecutors believe is the recruitment of Venezuelans by a much bigger criminal power that has been making a move on the sex trade in the United States – Mexican drug trafficking networks.
“Venezuelans with varying levels of TdA affiliation were working with the Mexicans in a collection of brothels that was part of a nationwide system,” the former prosecutor said. “Venezuelans were doing the enforcement and the dirty work, whereas the owners of it were cartels.”
Authorities, however, have made no public statements regarding the presence of Mexican criminal groups in Tennessee.
Dangerous Reality or Dangerous Rhetoric?
What investigators have uncovered so far has left them questioning whether the lack of evidence of connections between what they have seen in Tennessee and a national Tren de Aragua structure in the United States is because that broader network does not exist or because their investigations have yet to reach that far.
For Thomas Jaworski, who oversaw the sex trafficking case as acting United States Attorney for Middle Tennessee, he is convinced that the network goes beyond Tennessee.
“I’ve got to believe they weren’t operating on an island,” he said of the alleged traffickers.
They may not have been, but the evidence remains scarce. Even the Trump administration’s own intelligence on Tren de Aragua’s US activities casts doubt on such claims. A National Intelligence Council assessment from April 2025 describes small nodes like the one run by Rivero and Mota, rather than a nationwide network coordinated by a central leadership.
“The small size of TDA’s cells, its focus on low-skill criminal activities, and its decentralized structure make it highly unlikely that TDA coordinates large volumes of human trafficking or migrant smuggling,” it states.
As in Tennessee, the report also describes how evaluating Tren de Aragua’s presence in the United States is complicated by petty criminals claiming membership.
SEE ALSO: Tren de Aragua: Fact vs. Fiction
“Some self-described TDA criminal entities or individuals lack direct ties to TDA leadership but still use the TDA moniker for reputational benefits, complicating the NIC [Intelligence Council]’s ability to identify and track authentic group members and networks,” the assessment said.
The assessment concluded that there was no evidence the Venezuelan government was directing Tren de Aragua, or that the gang or the government was attempting to destabilize the United States by flooding it with criminal migrants, as Trump officials have alleged.
“The NIC attributes migration flows, including the spike in US arrivals from 2021 to 2024, of Venezuelan nationals – which could include some TdA members – to a variety of push and pull factors including socioeconomic conditions, familial ties to the United States, and migrants’ perceptions of US and regional enforcement,” its authors wrote.
None of these contradictions seemed to bother Rausch who, in his letter to Rep. Clemmons, boasted about the impact his November 2024 testimony had in the news.
“Some of the media coverage of this topic has helped in getting the information out about the gang and has certainly put notice to the gang that we are coming after them,” he wrote in his response to Rep. Clemmons.
For his part, Clemmons sees Rausch’s comments and the reaction to them in a different light. What Rausch had done amounted to scaremongering that stigmatizes the local Venezuelan population, he told InSight Crime.
“You can’t just throw things out like that to scare the hell out of people and put a bull’s-eye on an entire population’s back,” he said. “You’ve got to provide some more context here. You got to talk about where this took place and what the level of threat really is.”
His concern, he added, was that the comments were also a sign of the politicization of law enforcement for other agendas.
“There was clear coordination between the TBI director [Rausch] and his state budget statement and the governor’s office to try to build on the fact that immigration is a top polling issue and immigration enforcement is a top agenda item of the [Trump] administration, and that they need to figure out a way to tap into that,” he said.
The Tren Legacy: Stigma and Fear
As the rhetoric around Tren de Aragua has ramped up, that feeling of stigma has been keenly felt by Venezuelans living in Tennessee.
The authorities “should be creating a more efficient operation in order to identify who they are, not taking advantage of all this to demonize and criminalize the rest of the Venezuelan people,” said one Venezuelan who fled for Tennessee after his complaints about rampant corruption in his home country led to death threats, and who asked not to be identified because of the security risk he faces as a result.
In recent months, those feelings have turned to fear and paranoia as Venezuelans have come into the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.
First came the government’s designation of Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization, which the Trump administration claimed allowed them to detain and remove alleged gang members without due process. Soon after, over 250 Venezuelans were deported to El Salvador, where they were held in the country’s most notorious prison, the Terrorist Confinement Center, known as CECOT.
SEE ALSO: Could US Deportations Compromise Trump Administration’s MS13 Crackdown?
In many of the cases documented by media, legal organizations, and advocacy groups, those detained had no criminal record, and the evidence offered to support claims they were members of Tren de Aragua was flimsy, bordering on implausible. According to accounts collected by human rights organizations, once in El Salvador, they were abused and even tortured. Among them was at least one person from Tennessee, according to an investigation to track those taken carried out by the National Immigration Law Center.
After the deportations came ICE’s special enforcement operation in Nashville. In addition to the alleged “affiliate member” authorities claimed to have arrested, multiple other Venezuelans were also detained. Those working to provide support to the families of some of those picked up by ICE, including the Venezuelan who had fled because of corruption, said those detained in the recent sweep have nothing to do with Tren de Aragua.
“They are good people that just came here to escape, to look for a better life in the United States, not to rob or kill people. And they took them all prisoner,” he said.
The result of the government’s actions, he added, has been a vicious circle of fear. Fear among Tennessee’s US-born population of a new, violent criminal threat, and fear among its Venezuelan population that they could be arbitrarily detained and deported as a result.
“Everyone from Latin American countries that came here to look for a better life is living with anxiety, fear that because they entered the country illegally or have a delicate migration status their families could be separated,” he said. “But for Venezuelans it goes even further, all because of a criminal gang.”