Justice Department leaders say the number of arrests and convictions connected to Tren de Aragua, the Venezuela-rooted gang branded a terrorist organization by Washington, has grown roughly sixfold since President Trump returned to the White House, a figure officials are holding up as proof that federal pressure on the organization is paying off, according to The National News Desk.
Tren de Aragua Arrests Up By 519 Percent
Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, appeared with FBI Director Kash Patel at a Washington, D.C. news conference on Wednesday to lay out those numbers, saying close to 350 people connected to the group, widely shortened to TdA, have faced charges or convictions in the year and a half since Trump's second term began. Patel put the specific rise in TdA-related arrests at 519 percent measured against the prior administration's record, telling reporters, per the Hanford Sentinel, "This is not street-level crime in the traditional sense."
Charges Related to Murders in Dallas and Chicago
The briefing doubled as the unveiling of new charges against eight men in two unrelated killings. A Texas grand jury handed up an indictment against four defendants, plus a fifth co-defendant tied to related offenses, over the August 2024 kidnapping of a father and his two young relatives outside Dallas, per the Washington Examiner. Investigators say the victim was stopped near a bridge and killed after failing to produce ransom money, forcing the children to witness the shooting, and that the same men were linked to a scheme that manipulates ATMs into dispensing cash illegally. One of the men charged is accused of holding a leadership post inside the gang.
In the second case, prosecutors in Chicago charged three men in the May killing of a man who was grabbed off a sidewalk near a park in daylight, held for hours with his hands bound, then driven to an empty building and shot, according to AOL's report of the DOJ briefing. His remains turned up in a bathtub, and someone later phoned his mother to tell her where the body was. Blanche used both cases to renew his criticism of the prior administration's border policies, saying the defendants had crossed into the country illegally sometime between the tail end of 2021 and the spring of 2024. "None of these men should have been in this country," he said, per Fox News.
JTFV: The Engine Behind the Dismantling of MS-13 and TdA
Officials pointed to Joint Task Force Vulcan, a unit first built to dismantle MS-13 that has since broadened its mission to include TdA, as the engine behind much of the enforcement, working alongside regional Homeland Security teams, the Hanford Sentinel reported. Federal prosecutors based in Dallas and Chicago were named as leading the current cases against the network.
Tren de Aragua's roots trace to a Venezuelan prison in the mid-2010s, per U.S. intelligence assessments compiled by the National Counterterrorism Center, and the group spread through Colombia, Peru, Chile and other countries as millions of Venezuelans left amid economic and political collapse, eventually reaching the United States. The State Department designated it a foreign terrorist organization on February 20, 2025, according to the Federal Register.
Patel also cited broader gang totals unrelated to TdA specifically: about 29,000 arrests and 2,700 dismantled gangs nationwide, with the gang-dismantlement figure representing what he called a 365 percent jump over a comparable stretch under the previous administration, per WSET.
Arrests Represent 'Just a Small Fraction of Overall Presence'
There's no official public tally of how many TdA members remain active inside the United States, and Blanche conceded the arrest figures still represent just a small fraction of the group's overall presence, according to the Washington Times. Coverage of the gang has long been contested: some news organizations have argued TdA's footprint is heavier elsewhere in Latin America than U.S. officials suggest, the Washington Times noted, while immigrant advocates in cities such as Aurora, Colorado have separately argued, in reporting by NBC News, that most Venezuelan migrants have nothing to do with the gang.
Left out of Wednesday's briefing was a bigger blow to the organization that predated it by three weeks. On June 12, President Trump announced that a joint U.S.-Venezuelan military strike had killed the gang's longtime leader, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores — better recognized by his alias, Niño Guerrero — who had steered TdA's growth from a prison gang into a hemispheric criminal network across more than ten years, according to CBS News. That strike, plus a May 15 extradition of an alleged senior TdA figure from Colombia to face terrorism charges in Houston, per The National Desk, are both part of the wider campaign against the group that Wednesday's numbers were meant to illustrate.
