A one-time Venezuelan prison gang has erupted into a multinational migrant crime syndicate that is ravaging the US — and is the subject of more than 100 police investigations across the nation.
Tren de Aragua, a vicious South American gang that sneaked into the US among the millions of migrants who have crossed the border, is peddling drugs, guns and women across the 50 states — from urban centers like New York and Chicago to Florida beaches and once-tranquil Middle America.
In Colorado, the gang even got a “green light” to shoot at cops, according to a federal memo.
“I would say that like six months ago, their organized presence wasn’t so obvious on the border,” a Texas law enforcement source told The Post. “But now they’re getting organized and they’re staying.
“They’ve definitely gotten their operations organized to facilitate movement, to facilitate human trafficking, to get people in to cross the border, and once they get them across the border, to get them to other locations throughout the country,” the source said.
“They’re taking over hotels, they’re taking over apartment complexes. That’s their MO. They’re coming and they’re taking over.”
One federal official described the gang as “MS-13 on steroids” — a reference to the brutal Salvadoran street gang that has terrorized communities on Long Island and elsewhere in recent years, according to a new report on the marauding migrants by the Wall Street Journal.
“It’s a certainty that the Tren has expanded,” another source told the outlet. “And they have a big market for narco-trafficking in the US.”
The gang’s tentacles have cut deep into the country in a matter of months, with gangbangers recruiting members inside tax-funded migrant shelters set up to handle the overflow of asylum seekers.
Hampering law enforcement efforts to curtail the gang’s violence are the “sanctuary city” policies in left-leaning hubs like Chicago and the Big Apple — with local pols refusing to work with federal immigration.
“Sanctuary states and cities do not share any information with immigration authorities,” one source with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement told The Post on Thursday.
“Local police department arrests don’t lead to detainers from ICE, which in turn do not lead to arrests by ICE,” the source said. “They do not contact us when they find out the subject is possibly illegal.
“That is where the difficulty lies.”
Among the recent hotspots hampered by Tren violence is Chicago, where gang member Jean Franco Torres-Roman, 21, was nabbed trying to stash a gun at a shooting and was seen dumping 43 rounds of ammunition under a nearby garbage can, according to a police report.
But a Cook County judge cut him loose — allowing Roman to flee to Denver, where he went on to terrorize workers at a jewelry store, pistol-whipping several before making off with stolen gems.
In Denver, four Venezuelan migrants with ties to the gang were indicted last week in the violent armed robbery of another jewelry store — including two with busts in other states.
Three of the alleged gangbangers — Oswaldo Lozada-Solis, 23, Jesus Daniel Lara Del Toro, 20, and Torres-Roman — were charged with armed robbery and brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence, the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado announced Wednesday.
The fourth, Edwuimar Nazareth Colina-Romero, 18, was charged with transporting stolen goods and possession of stolen goods.
In late August, Colorado cops also busted four people linked to the gang at the Ivy Crossing apartments in Denver, where they seized 750 counterfeit pills, ketamine and a stolen car.
Cops in Aurora, Colorado, have arrested 10 confirmed members of Tren de Aragua in recent months.
Gang members have taken over apartment complexes in the quiet Denver suburb. Among them is Jhonardy Jose Pacheco-Chirinos, who goes by “Galleta” — Spanish for “Cookie” — and is known as Tren de Aragua’s “shot-caller” in the region.
In November 2023, Pacheco-Chirinos and other Tren hoods brutally beat a man at the since-shuttered Fitzsimons Place apartment complex.
Inexplicably released, he and his brother were busted in July for a shooting that wounded two people.
In Athens, Georgia, Tren de Aragua member Jose Ibarra, 26, was charged with killing 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley in February, smashing her head and “asphyxiating her” as she jogged in the area.
Ibarra had already been in New York after crossing the border in September 2022, where he had been arrested but released, allowing him to make his way to Georgia to join his brother — and kill Riley.
In Miami, alleged Tren killer Yurwin Salazar Maita is charged with the November slaying of a retired Venezuelan cop, Jose Luis Sanchez, who was lured to his death by prostitutes in April 2023.
Sanchez’s body was found in a car with his hands and feet bound with tape.
One unlikely Tren stronghold has been Praire du Chien, Wisconsin, where gang member Alejandro Jose Coronel Zarate was busted last week for allegedly brutalizing a woman and her daughter.
Coronel Zarate, 26, is accused of sexually and physically assaulting a woman “under particularly brutal circumstances,” holding the woman and daughter against their will and “over the course of a period of time sexually and physically assaulting them both,” Prairie du Chien Police Chief Kyle Teynor said.
Like other gangbangers, Coronel Zarate had already been in custody after getting busted in Minneapolis for possession of stolen goods and was even named on a Wisconsin warrant for false imprisonment.
Prairie du Chien police said Coronel Zarate had only entered the US a year ago.
Despite branching out, Tren de Aragua has also remained a presence near the US border.
El Paso, Texas, has served as the main waypoint for members to enter the country.
Multiple Tren de Aragua members were caught at a Motel 6 along with the jewelry store robbers. They’ve also taken over the Gateway hotel, engaging in fighting, drinking and hard-partying behavior, according to law enforcement sources.
“There should be concern due to the establishment and rise of the Venezuelan criminal organization ‘Tren de Aragua’ at the Gateway Hotel. We discovered several Venezuelans have the tattoo identifiers of Tren de Aragua,” one El Paso cop said of the conditions, according to local news outlet KVIA.
The Post also identified several migrants with potential Tren de Aragua tattoos on the streets of El Paso in March, an early warning sign of their march into the US.
The trademark tattoos, bizarrely, include images of bulls and the number “23” once worn by Chicago Bulls basketball legend Michael Jordan — perhaps in homage to the gang’s early grip on the Windy City.
The gang itself is named after the Venezuelan state of Aragua, where the gang grew from a crew of inmates who took control of a local prison and slowly expanded to neighboring Colombia and Chile starting around 2018.
Ruthless in its operations, Tren sold drugs and became involved in prostitution and human trafficking.
With the US border growing more porous in recent years, Tren de Aragua operatives flocked north with the nearly 8 million Venezuelans fleeing strongman Nicolas Maduro.
Once inside the country, the marauding migrants began recruiting from within American shelters, enlisting armies of moped-riding crooks in the Big Apple and elsewhere.
Within months, the enterprise grew, and now Tren operatives are involved in widespread drug trafficking in the US, while also selling guns and women in seedy red-light districts in major cities.
In one Denver suburb, the gang has turned a quiet bedroom community into a war zone — even taking over apartment buildings and forcing legal tenants to flee.
“We are not a border state, but we’re dealing with the fallout of a failed immigration policy and trying to do our best in trying to keep our citizens safe, and immigrants,” Aurora District Attorney John Kellner told The Post this week.
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