Inside the road to victory is the Tren de Aragua, a gang that is taking over US cities

A new report released by the Heritage Foundation offers the first comprehensive English-language look at Venezuela's largest gang, the Tren de Aragua (TdA), whose brutal actions in the US have been making national headlines.

The decision? According to the author of this report, Joseph Humire, the threat America is facing in Tren de Aragua is worse than most people think.

Titled “Derailing the Tren de Aragua,” the report gives US leaders a starting point in understanding a violent criminal organization that was “honored and developed within the walls of a Venezuelan prison and then exported to countries in the Western Hemisphere.”

Humire told Fox News Digital that he hopes the report will give the Trump administration a starting point on how to respond and dismantle TdA before it continues to take root across America's borders.

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“TdA is different from criminal organizations because it has a vision that goes with it,” said Humire in the report. “Now that the TdA is already present in America, to fix this, a proper understanding of the TdA is necessary to discover its motivations, tactics, and strategies of all organized crime.”

What is Tren de Aragua?

Humire, who is the director of the Center for a Secure and Free Society and a partner of the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital that the first thing to understand about Tren de Aragua is that it is more than a gang. Rather, it is an organized international terrorist effort supported by some of America's worst enemies to sow chaos and destabilize the US.

Born in a Venezuelan prison more than a decade ago, Tren de Aragua, which means “Train from Aragua,” went viral across the country in 2023 after reports of gang members holding an entire house in an Aurora, Colorado, suburb. in Denver.

Since then, reports of violent crimes committed by Tren de Aragua members have spread like wildfire, including the high-profile murders of nursing student Laken Riley in Georgia and 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston.

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José Antonio Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, was recently convicted of murdering nursing student Laken Riley in Georgia.

American media and politicians have cast the Tren de Aragua as a group of simple criminals and criminals. However, Humire's report insists that Tren de Aragua is a state-sponsored international criminal organization funded and integrated into Venezuela's socialist government.

Rather than working to find and prevent criminals and terrorists, Humire said key elements of the Venezuelan government help facilitate TdA operations, not only in Venezuela but throughout the Northern Hemisphere.

With the support of the Venezuelan government, he said that the TdA has a deliberate “attack” vision that is determined to gain control of neighborhoods and regions in a matter of weeks rather than the multi-year process taken by most gangs and international criminal organizations.

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Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix/File)

Why is the Tren de Aragua spreading across the US?

Although many comparisons have been made between Tren de Aragua and the El Salvador gang La Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13), TdA is growing much faster, which Humire says may be due to its unique origins and state funding in Venezuela.

He also alleged that the rapid increase in TdA in the United States is “a direct result of the failed policies of the Biden-Harris Administration on immigration and border deficit.”

The Biden Cuban, Haitians, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan parole program and the Venezuelan parole program before it allowed in many cases Venezuelan immigrants to enter the country in large numbers with little vetting. Thanks to these policies, the number of Venezuelans in the US has increased by almost 1 million – 520.8% – to be the fastest growing country in the US as of 2021.

The result is that although TdA is new in the US, it is now present in more than 30 major US cities and at least 100 government investigations involving this group are ongoing, as the report puts it, “holding most of the US law. to force the public by surprise .”

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Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Monday announced that the state will target a Venezuelan gang that he says is notorious for brutal violence and murder and poses a threat to the safety of Texans. (X/@GregAbbott_TX)

How do you 'move' a train

In the first 100 days of his new administration, Humire said Trump should follow the example set by Texas' efforts to crack down on gangs by announcing his promise to launch “Operation Aurora” to take a “whole-of-government approach” using federal resources within the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the military to complement government-led law enforcement efforts and partners and allies in Latin America to attack TdA from every angle.

“It is believed that the main leaders of TdA have not yet arrived in America, which means that time is of the essence to take preventive measures,” the report said.

Humire said Trump's Department of Homeland Security should immediately write a TdA on the international terrorist group and mark Venezuelan migrants as “special aliens.” The appointment would reverse the Biden administration's policy of cracking down on Venezuelan immigrants and instead allow U.S. immigration officials to properly vet Venezuelan immigrants.

While this may sound controversial, Humire said it is something that will not only better protect US citizens internally but also legitimize asylum seekers fleeing Venezuela.

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Venezuelan immigrant Louis Sanchez asks Texas National Guard soldiers to let his family pass through the razor wire after crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico on Sept. 27, 2023, in Eagle Pass. (John Moore/Getty Images)

“This is intended to protect Venezuelan immigrants just because they come from one of these countries,” he said. “Most Venezuelan migrants will agree to this because they don't want to be subjected to the Tren de Aragua, and all Venezuelan migrants know how brutal and dangerous the Tren de Aragua is.”

What will Trump do?

Humire said there are already positive signs from Trump's transition that the president-elect is serious about his promise to dismantle the TdA.

“I think appointing a border czar early in the transition process was a clear signal that that is one of the top priorities, if not the top priority of the Trump administration,” he said. “And Tom Homan, who was appointed as the border king, knows very well the Tren de Aragua gang and all the criminal organizations that undermine American sovereignty.”

Donald Trump (Brandon Bell/Pool via AP/File)

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He also said that some of Trump's important Cabinet appointments, such as Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of state and Rep. Michael Waltz as national security adviser, is a testament to the way the entire government is when the people in charge see it as TdA. “It's going to be a big problem unless we get it over with quickly.”

“This is something the Biden administration could have done. They had all the necessary tools to do it, but they missed the key ingredient, which is political will,” he said. “Therefore, the political will in the new government to deal with this issue is very high, from the president down to the anointed and all.”