What is Tren de Aragua, and why is Trump focused on the Venezuelan gang?

The Trump administration says the group should be treated as an invading force. Critics say it’s a pretext for the administration’s anti-immigrant narrative.

AURORA, Colo. — At the center of an increasingly fraught political and legal battle led by President Donald Trump is a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua — to some an organized and violent menace threatening U.S. national security, and to others the administration’s pretext for its anti-migrant narrative and mass deportation efforts. 

This weekend, Trump claimed the gang was invading the United States and invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used law from 1798 that allows the president to deport noncitizens during wartime. The administration sent hundreds of immigrants to a prison in El Salvador even as a federal judge temporarily barred the deportations. Flights were already in the air when the ruling came down. At a federal court hearing in the case Monday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg summarized the administration’s position on his court order Saturday as: “We don’t care, we’ll do what we want.” 

Trump and his supporters have sought to portray the gang as the embodiment of the criminal immigrant they so often conjure to explain the president’s increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement, which has also included sending hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and stripping hundreds of thousands more of temporary legal status in the U.S.  

The reality is more complicated. 

Alleged members of the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua at the Terrorism Confinement upon arrival in Tecoluca, El Salvador.Salvador's Presidency Press Office via AFP - Getty ImagesOrigins in prisonTren de Aragua began in the 2000s in a notorious penitentiary in north-central Venezuela, where gang leaders at one point had their own zoo, nightclub and bank inside the prison. What distinguishes the gang from other, larger criminal organizations is the quickness and ease with which it has spread over a large portion of the American continent, a movement experts say is tied to the mass exodus of Venezuelans. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tren-de-aragua-trump-focused-gang-venezuelans-rcna191750

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