On February 5, 2025, multiple teams of heavily armed US federal agents fanned out across Denver and nearby cities in the US state of Colorado, supposedly looking for over 100 alleged members of Tren de Aragua – the Venezuelan gang that had become a fixation of US President Donald Trump, inaugurated two weeks earlier.
The agents raided apartment complexes and residences, detained people, and seized evidence. And they promised to keep coming back, claiming federal authorities had to act because local policies protecting unauthorized immigrants had allowed violent criminals to infiltrate the country.
“This is something that is just going to continue,” a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official said in a video posted to the social media platform X that morning.
*This article is the seventh in a nine-part investigation, “Tren de Aragua: Fact vs. Fiction,” analyzing the truth about the gang, as well as its evolution, current operations and how it may change in the future. Read the full investigation here.
But the results of the operation did not live up to the bluster. Local media reports suggested far more people were detained for civil immigration infractions than for criminal charges. Federal officials declined to provide details, but ABC News reported that only one alleged gang member was arrested. Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan, later claimed an internal leaker had compromised the operation.
The Denver-area raids were an early example of the intense focus that US law enforcement has turned on Tren de Aragua as Trump has ramped up his rhetoric against the gang. They also illustrate the extent to which Trump has fused ostensible anti-gang efforts with his sweeping immigration enforcement agenda.
At the same time, the raids’ lackluster results underscore that Tren de Aragua continues to have a limited criminal presence in the United States. Members of the gang – and imposters borrowing the gang’s increasingly infamous name – primarily threaten vulnerable Venezuelan migrant communities, posing a limited security risk to the general public.
The scale of that threat is unlikely to grow. Tren de Aragua has little chance of building criminal power in the United States with so much law enforcement and public attention focused on it.
Still, the Trump administration’s ongoing criminal and immigration enforcement efforts could reshape the nature of the gang in the United States and how US-based nodes of Tren de Aragua interact with gang members abroad.
How Tren de Aragua Gained Prominence
Days before the Denver raids, on January 29, Trump emphasized his administration’s preoccupation with Tren de Aragua by signing the Laken Riley Act as the first bill made law during his second term in the White House. The law requires federal authorities to detain unauthorized immigrants accused of minor crimes, and allows states to sue the federal government over financial harms allegedly caused by unauthorized immigrants.
The legislation was named after Laken Riley, a university student in the southeastern state of Georgia, murdered in February 2024 by an unauthorized immigrant whom federal prosecutors accused of being affiliated with Tren de Aragua.
No evidence suggested that Tren de Aragua, as a broader organization, had anything to do with Riley’s murder. But the case gained public prominence amid a rash of dubious reports about supposed Tren de Aragua activities across the United States.
The flurry of attention surrounding the Laken Riley case marked a turning point in Tren de Aragua’s public profile in the United States. It sparked successful calls for the designation of Tren de Aragua as a transnational criminal organization under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden. As election day approached, Trump began referring to Tren de Aragua by name in his campaign speeches and statements.
“They’re a savage gang, one of the worst in the world, and they’re getting bigger all the time,” he said at an October 11, 2024 rally in the Denver area, where he spoke against a backdrop that read “End Migrant Crime” and “Deport Illegals Now.”
The Denver suburb of Aurora, where Trump gave the speech, had become a focal point of the Tren de Aragua narrative due to a viral video that sparked claims the gang had taken control of various apartment complexes in the city.
But local police and residents denied those rumors. And while local officials maintain that Tren de Aragua has a presence in the Denver area, they have downplayed the threat.
What Tren de Aragua Is Doing Now
As in Denver, Tren de Aragua’s reputation across the United States has grown more quickly than its presence and activities. The scale of the gang’s operations and profits remain small, and mostly confined to Venezuelan migrant communities.
Alleged members or affiliates of the gang have been tied to several isolated sex trafficking cases as well as killings, assaults, thefts, extortion, arms trafficking, and drug dealing.
But InSight Crime’s systematic review of publicly available reports of alleged Tren de Aragua activities across the United States found most were misleading, or lacking evidence or context. Some were completely fabricated, including several reports published by an organization whose executive director was later tapped for a post at the US Department of Defense.
Only a handful of the dozens of US cases examined by InSight Crime suggest a high degree of criminal sophistication, and no solid evidence has emerged of coordination among local Tren de Aragua cells in the United States, or communication with the gang’s international leadership.
Because anyone can claim to be a member of Tren de Aragua, it is difficult to determine when perpetrators have actual ties to the gang, when they have been misidentified, or when they are simply borrowing its name.
US government documents show that federal authorities have relied on dubious criteria like tattoos when “validating” immigrants as members of Tren de Aragua, raising questions about the soundness of such identifications.
At the same time, the Trump administration’s own intelligence agencies have assessed the gang’s presence is made up mostly of small nodes, rather than a nationwide network of coordinating cells.
“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,” according to an assessment known as a sense of the community memorandum that was distributed to officials in April 2025 and later declassified.
The assessment makes no mention of the classic markers of a cohesive network, such as a centralized leadership that gives orders and receives funds from local cells. It also refutes the assertion by Trump and others that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro directs the activities of gang members in the United States.
The memo’s conclusions broadly match those offered by a former Tren de Aragua member consulted by InSight Crime.
The Tren de Aragua presence in the United States, he said, is not part of a plan coordinated by senior gang members or Maduro. Instead, most reported members were Venezuelan youths who had fled poverty and are now seeking to cash in on the Tren de Aragua name, while some were affiliates looking to use what they had learned from the gang to set up new criminal enterprises independently of the organization.
How Tren de Aragua Could Change in the US
As armor-clad federal agents mounted raids in and around Denver on February 5, thousands of kilometers away in Washington, DC, newly confirmed US Attorney General Pam Bondi was finalizing a memo calling for the “total elimination” of Tren de Aragua and other Latin American criminal groups.
In the memo, Bondi directs the US Department of Justice to go after Tren de Aragua and other groups using all the tools at their disposal, including terrorism charges. But rather than prosecuting “low-level” targets without lawful immigration status, the Justice Department would pursue deportation instead.
In the following weeks, Trump designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization and removed immigration protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans. He also declared Tren de Aragua an invading force, and invoked a law allowing his administration to rapidly arrest and deport suspected members.
SEE ALSO: Trump Official Headed Organization That Spread Fake News About Tren de Aragua
But this strategy of taking a strong rhetorical stance against the gang, and using allegations of gang ties as a basis for large-scale deportations of Venezuelan nationals, could backfire in several ways.
Pursuing deportation rather than criminal charges against suspected Tren de Aragua members could deprive prosecutors of the opportunity to obtain information about the gang through plea bargaining, which involves offering to reduce potential criminal penalties in exchange for cooperation with law enforcement.
Additionally, sending an influx of people back to Venezuela, long mired in economic and political crises, could provide opportunities for criminal recruitment and the forming of international connections among gang operatives that do not already exist.
On the other hand, the intensity of the law enforcement focus on Tren de Aragua may turn the gang’s brand toxic in the United States. Even imposters may be discouraged from using the name for fear of attracting unnecessary attention.
*Additional reporting by María Belén López Conte.