Tren de Aragua’s alleged assassination of Venezuelan dissident Ronald Ojeda in Chile in 2024, using tactics linked to Venezuela’s military counterintelligence, underscores the gang’s growing transnational threat and highlights its ties to Nicolas Maduro’s regime and U.S. intelligence disputes. Coordinated with the Cartel de los Soles, TdA’s narcoterrorism activities now threaten multiple nations across the Western Hemisphere.
The Treasury Department said last summer that “from its origins as a prison gang in Aragua, Venezuela, Tren de Aragua has quickly expanded throughout the Western Hemisphere in recent years.”
Trump has repeatedly argued that Maduro has purposely emptied jails in Venezuela for the purpose of sending the criminals into the United States, including in a speech last May where he said that “in Venezuela, their prisons have been emptied into the United States. Their criminals and drug dealers have been taken out of the cities and brought into the United States.”
Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector Intelligence Unit reportedly assessed that “information received indicates that the Venezuelan government released criminals from prison and teamed them up with intelligence and counterintelligence agents to be deployed to the United States to conduct operations on selected targets,” according to a Breitbart report in November.
Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security advisor, said in a Tuesday interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show that “we know that Maduro is emptying out prisons” and that Maduro “has no problem with these gangs coming into our inner cities.”
