“They’re coming.”
That’s what Miguel, a Venezuelan migrant who came to America with his wife and two daughters, told me about the gang, Tren de Aragua, earlier this year. “And they’re very bad.”
The past few days have shown how far the Venezuelan gang appears willing to go. In Aurora, Colorado, Tren de Aragua has allegedly terrorized the local community. According to Mayor Mike Coffman, at least two buildings in the city “have fallen to” a group of armed men, suspected to be gang members. “This is an organized criminal effort. Whether it’s Tren de Aragua, that remains to be seen,” Coffman told Fox News. “But it really doesn’t matter. I mean, if they’re Venezuelan migrants in there conducting crime in an organized way, they’re a problem.”
Videos released on social media showed men believed to be members of the gang carrying rifles and handguns in the hallways of the buildings, knocking on doors, and using a tire iron to force their way into an apartment. The buildings, part of The Edge at Lowry complex on Dallas Street, reportedly have been under siege since at least mid-August.
Nick Shirley, a popular YouTuber, paid a visit to the complex and filmed residents describing the situation. One told him that the landlord recently stopped collecting rent, as “the gangs and the mafia are taking advantage of all this to get us out . . . as if we were dogs.” Another resident, Cindy Romero, whose security camera recorded some of the alleged gang activity, told Fox News that she has “months” of footage. On one occasion, she said, police did not show up when called. “There was an ongoing investigation that they did not want to interfere with,” Romero said.
At a different apartment complex in Aurora, CBS News reported that the owners had hired a law firm to investigate the alleged gang takeover of one of their buildings. The firm “found the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang began taking over the Whispering Pines Apartments in late 2023,” per CBS, and concluded that the gang had since “engaged in violent assaults, threats of murder, extortion, strongarm tactics, and child prostitution.”
On September 3, Fox News reported that four possible members of the Tren de Aragua gang were arrested in connection with one of the Aurora building takeovers. Colorado governor Jared Polis’s office has not addressed those arrests, but was initially dismissive when reports of gang activity emerged. “[A]ccording to police intelligence this purported invasion is largely a feature of Danielle Jurinsky’s imagination,” a Polis spokesman said.
Jurinsky, the Aurora city councilwoman-at-large, has amplified allegations of widespread gang activity at the apartment complex. After Polis’s statement, she reinforced her position on X. “[T]his is not just an Aurora problem. This is a national problem,” she posted.
Not everyone shares her assessment. Interim Aurora police chief Heather Morris reported making the rounds through the housing units and speaking with residents, many of whom are Venezuelan migrants. “I’m not saying that there’s not gang members that don’t live in this community, but what we’re learning out here is that gang members have not taken over this complex,” she said.
Miguel is skeptical of the chief’s view. “They know better than to talk, especially on film,” he said of the residents. Miguel arrived in New York in March of 2023. His journey here took months, much of it on foot, including the 60-mile Darien Gap, once thought unpassable, that lies between Colombia and Panama. More than half a million migrants crossed the gap in 2023, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Panama puts the number at 520,000—more than double from the previous year. A decade ago, only 6,175 were estimated to have “irregular[ly]” crossed the Columbian border.
“I lost my youngest daughter there,” Miguel said of the stretch of jungle. “We were lucky. We found her a few days later with a Colombian couple.” The daughter, only ten, stopped speaking during those days apart. Today, she is under round-the-clock care at a New York City hospital.
Along the migration route, gang members make their presence known, Miguel said. Extortion, threats of rape, and human trafficking occur frequently. He mentioned that the Gulf Clan, the paramilitary group of Colombia’s largest drug cartel, hides in the jungle. Disease-carrying insects and the scarcity of potable water are other issues. And so is the Tren de Aragua.
The gang was formed in the Tocorón prison, in the Venezuelan state of Aragua. The name of the group, which means “Aragua Train,” is believed to come from the failed railway project near the prison. The gang’s influence soon extended beyond the prison walls, as they made, and subsequently broke, “non-aggression pacts” with nearby gangs. After seizing a rival’s territory in the wake of a leader’s death in 2016, Tren de Aragua quickly became the country’s most notorious gang.
In the years that followed, Tren de Aragua’s operations expanded to the rest of the country. They now commit cybercrimes, illicit retail-drug sales, kidnappings, and migrant trafficking, according to Insight Crime.
The gang successfully fought for control of La Parada, a Colombian border town through which many Venezuelan migrants passed on their way to the United States. By 2023, they had established headquarters or cells in Colombia, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Brazil. Now, authorities believe they are operating in the United States.
In September 2023, the Venezuelan government regained control of the prison in Tocorón, but the gang has moved on. They have survived clashes with the security forces of Chile, Peru, and Colombia. “They will do anything—they are a soulless group,” Miguel told me.
Luckily, Miguel and his family survived the journey, but at great cost. Their oldest daughter, 14, is still angry at her parents and has difficulty sleeping through the night. “She wants to go back home,” Miguel told me. “She says we took her away from her friends, her life.” Though Miguel and his wife still live together, they were divorced along the trek. “Somewhere in Nicaragua,” he said.
When Miguel shared his experiences with me, I couldn’t help but ask: How bad was it back home that you would put yourself and your family in such danger?
“You’ll soon find out,” he told me.
Apparently, Aurora already has.
Photo by CRIS BOURONCLE/AFP via Getty Images