On the night of March 31, María, a 40-year-old Venezuelan mother of four who asked that her last name not be published for fear of government retaliation, was home alone in her two-bedroom Austin apartment. Around 9 p.m., her adult son and daughter, along with her teenage son, had left for a birthday party at a six-bedroom Airbnb half an hour down the road. Then, about 4:30 a.m., she got a shocking message from her daughter on WhatsApp: Her kids had been swept up in a multi-agency police raid. For three days, she didn’t hear from them—and the next six months of her life would be turned upside-down.
In the early hours of April 1, law enforcement agents had arrested three of her kids and more than 40 others outside the rented mansion near the well-off Hays County suburb of Dripping Springs. The participating agencies—the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), and the Hays County Sheriff’s Office—claimed they had busted a suspected gathering of Tren de Aragua, a transnational Venezuelan prison gang that the Trump administration designated a foreign terrorist organization earlier this year. In recent months, Venezuelan immigrants have been accused of gang membership on flimsy or non-existent evidence.
The day after the raid, DPS put out a press release stating that law enforcement agencies at all levels, including San Antonio police, had been investigating “Tren de Aragua (TdA)” for more than a year, and that: “In recent days, the FBI developed intelligence regarding a possible gathering of suspected TdA members or TdA associates in Hays Co.” The agencies’ operation led to both arrests and a drug seizure, DPS said, and prosecutors were evaluating potential charges.
