CENTER OF GRAVITY: Aurora grapples with Venezuelan gang hysterics

AURORA | Aurora, a city infamous for its movie theater massacre and record of police misconduct, has a new cause for national notoriety: election-season fear mongering about its undocumented immigrants.

Assertions that a Venezuelan gang has taken over apartment complexes, scared away police officers and overrun parts of the city have gone so viral among some conservatives this election season that Donald Trump cited them in the Sept. 10 presidential debate and continues to embellish them on the campaign trail.

“In Aurora, Colorado, entire apartment complexes are being taken over by armed Venezuelan gangs with weapons the likes of which even the military doesn’t see,” Trump said at a rally in Wisconsin earlier this month. “They’re terrorizing residents and they’re just menacing the whole state. …And they’re vicious, violent people.”

Trump has since continued to issue deceits about the controversy, recently saying he would come here. As of press time, no announcement of a visit has been released.

The Sentinel has been reporting on the controversy surrounding Aurora’s Venezuelan migrant community since late July. Here’s what’s new and a review of what’s happened in the controversy since it began at the end of July.

How the controversy began

About 40,000 Venezuelans have migrated to Colorado in the last two years, most having walked or hitched rides across South America and through Central America to flee poverty, corruption and crime under the regime of President Nicolás Maduro. With help from federal grants passed through local nonprofits, many have rented low-rent apartments in metro Denver, including at three blighted complexes in northwest Aurora owned by the same out-of-state company.

U.S. Census data shows that 5% of the population in Colorado’s 6th Congressional District – which includes Aurora – immigrated withing the past year from another country.

Aurora has declared itself a “non-sanctuary city,” unwilling to spend local tax dollars on services or programs for undocumented immigrants. Police, however, have for years made clear they cannot enforce federal immigration laws or risk pushing crimes committed by and against immigrants underground. Police here and across the state have insisted that undocumented immigrants will avoid police contact to avoid citizenship issues, creating a host of public safety problems. A 2019 state law prohibits local police from complying with ICE detainer orders.

On July 28, the day of Venezuela’s presidential election, between 2,000 and 4,000 people — mostly newcomers from that country — gathered in the parking lot of Aurora’s Gardens on Havana shopping center to celebrate what was expected to be Maduro’s defeat by opposition candidate Edmundo González. (Maduro later declared himself the winner of another six-year term in what many nations believe was a fraudulent election.) Drawn by messages on WhatsApp, people crowded into a kind of warm-weather meetup known as a “parking-lot rave.”

The flash-mob left some customers and workers in the strip center struggling to leave its parking lot and others fearing for their safety. After someone in the crowd fired a few gunshots into the air, a Target store and a few other businesses closed early as a precaution.

Aurora Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky posted on Facebook the next day about the “severity” of the situation, claiming there had been reports of theft and assaults in the crowd. “Thousands of these folks took over and completely shut down a part of our city. The police were totally over run (sic), and we’re (sic) forced to get out of the area for their safety. A police car was shot up,” she wrote.

Her post and a flurry of social media chatter that followed prompted Aurora police to correct what it said was misinformation. The department debunked assertions that attendees rioted and damaged property, saying nobody was ticketed, arrested or hurt. The city has insisted there’s no evidence a police car was shot at. City spokesperson Ryan Luby said police officers were not forced out by the crowd, but were on-scene “for the entire event.” 

Even before Luby’s fact check, Jurinsky had warned on social media of a cover-up by city officials and reporters.

“The media won’t make a big deal about it and will try to downplay it. Some of my own colleagues would probably even tell you there is nothing to see here…,” she wrote in her July 29 Facebook post.

The far-right council member said her interest in the event —  and Venezuelan migrants more generally — was as much about politics as public safety.

“This is in the United States of America… this is in YOUR city. Please, please spread the word,” she wrote in that same post on Facebook. “This November’s election may, in fact, be the actual most important of your lives, your children’s lives, and your grandchildrens lives. Again, you all deserve the truth!” 

Apartment complex shuttered

A few weeks earlier in July, the Biden administration had added a new group to its list of transnational criminal organizations: a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren de Aragua, also known as TdA. The treasury and justice departments say its members have dealt drugs, laundered money, attacked women and smuggled and trafficked people, including children, in several South American countries. News reports indicate some members have been operating in Chicago, New York and South Florida. 

Law enforcement agencies say they have identified 10 people with documented TdA ties in metro Denver. Five of those men had been arrested by the time suspected TdA member Jean Torres Roman made headlines in early August when apprehended in connection with a violent robbery of a Denver jewelry store. 

Denver’s mayor and police chief told multiple metro area media on Aug. 7  that the gang is on their radar.

A day later, Aurora police told Aurora’s City Council that they, too, were tracking TdA members in the city and had assigned four detectives to a regional task force investigating the connection between organized crime and immigrant communities. The department urged the public — including Venezuelans the gang may prey on — to report gang activity.

Meanwhile, that same week in early August, word spread about Aspen Grove, a 98-unit apartment complex in northwest Aurora that city officials slated to close because of a host of city code and health violations. Those range from structural and mechanical problems to leaks, mold, uncollected trash and rat infestation. 

Court documents show the city has identified Zev Baumgarten and his company, CBZ Management as the property owners. Baumgarten and his public-relations agent told the Sentinel that Aspen Grove had fallen into disrepair because TdA members had been squatting there, threatening and extorting his tenants and scaring away property managers. He said he had been urging Aurora Police since September to boot the gangsters out of the complex.

Baumgarten lives out of state, yet would not indicate where for fear, he said, of violence against him and his family.

Police records confirm some, albeit isolated gang activity at Aspen Grove. Jhonardy Pacheco-Chirinos and Jhonnarty Dejesus Pacheco-Chirinos, two brothers believed to have ties to TdA, stand accused of involvement in a nonfatal shooting there on July 28. Jhonardy Pacheco-Chirinos had been arrested in March for allegedly assaulting someone in the complex.

Still, city officials said they were shutting Aspen Grove down not for gang-related reasons, but after more than two years of documented neglect and mismanagement that left the apartments uninhabitable.

“Let us be clear, the blame for this unfortunate circumstance rests solely with CBZ Management and its principals, the owners and managers of the property, who have repeatedly failed their tenants for years by allowing the building and property to fall into a state of complete disrepair,” the city’s Luby said in a statement.

But Jurinsky cast doubt on the city’s reasons for forcing tenants out of the complex.

“None of us buy that story that this is based on a code enforcement violation,” she said at the end of an Aug. 9 public safety committee meeting, referring to herself and fellow council members Stepahnie Hancock and Steve Sundberg. “The three of us believe there is a huge gang problem.”

Despite city evidence disputing allegations of a gang takeover at Aspen Grove, Jurinsky insisted, “our opinions are not up for debate.”

City code enforcers cleared out and shut down the complex on Aug. 13, leaving hundreds of residents without homes.

One Venezuelan tenant named Ernesto — who asked that the Sentinel not use his last name because he is undocumented and fears deportation — said he worried Aurora police would profile him, inaccurately, as a TdA member just for having lived in the complex.

“No gang. Good guy. Good,” he said through a translator, his hands up as if to show he had nothing to hide.

Two other apartment complexes at issue

After the city closed Aspen Grove, Jurinsky stepped up her claims that Aurora city staff and police brass were “downplaying” what she portrayed as a gang crisis there, in other complexes owned by Baumgarten called The Edge at Lowry and Whispering Pines, and other parts of the city. She accused Democratic Gov. Jared Polis of being “silent,” in an effort to downplay the problem. And she mocked local news outlets for reporting assertions by city government and police that incidents involving TdA have been isolated and that its members have not overrun any apartment complexes. 

“I don’t think Venezuelan gangs are a big safety concern in the city of Aurora,” Chris Juul, the acting deputy police chief told the Sentinel in early August. 

Jurinsky has appeared repeatedly recently on Fox News and other right-wing media channels to advance her narrative that “This isn’t anything other than a complete gang takeover in parts of our city.” Venezuelan migrants, she said, “are a product of our current administration’s failed border policy,” echoing a popular talking point in conservative campaigns this election season.

At the end of August, Jurinsky invited a video crew from Denver Fox affiliate KDVR Channel 31 to follow her and Republican congressional candidate John Fabbricatore as they helped a tenant, Cindy Romero, move out of her apartment because of what she described as violence and intimidation by TdA. Romero’s complex, The Edge at Lowry on Dallas Street, is also owned by CBZ and Baumgarten.

Romero’s son gave the TV station surveillance video footage of what the politicians described as gang members climbing the stairs of his mother’s building with long guns and handguns in hand. Another clip appears to show men kicking in a different apartment door, possibly in the same building. Jurinsky insisted the footage proved her and Baumgarten’s story that TdA members had overrun his complexes. Police have not released what an investigation into the apartment depicted in the video and those filmed has revealed. 

Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman — who had tried tempering alarm about the Venezuelan rave at the strip center a month earlier —then  began mirroring Jurinsky’s alarm about The Edge at Lowry once the video footage made headlines and went viral on conservative social media.

“There are several buildings, actually under the same ownership, out-of-state ownership that have fallen to these Venezuelan gangs,” Coffman told Fox News on Aug. 29, claims that police and city officials have repeatedly disputed. “They in fact have pushed out the property management through intimidation and collected the rents.”

In several segments over a few weeks, Fox News interviewers kept expressing what they called “shock” about Aurora’s gang situation.

Heather Morris, Aurora’s acting police chief at the time, pushed back against what she framed as exaggerations. From a courtyard at The Edge at Lowry, she filmed a video news release saying that, based on several days of conversations with tenants there, she and her investigators found “There’s definitely a different picture” than the one Coffman and Jurinsky were painting. 

“I’m not saying that there’s not gang members that… live in this community,” she said. “But what we’re learning out here is that gang members have not taken over this complex.”

 Coffman, however, later that afternoon, Aug. 30, posted on his Facebook page that city government was working to secure an emergency court order to clear out and shut down The Edge at Lowry just as it had shuttered Aspen Grove weeks earlier. Hundreds of residents there spent Labor Day weekend expecting they would be booted out and fearing a convoy of Hells Angels vigilantes would converge on their neighborhood, as some conservatives called for on social media. 

The bikers never came, and city management clarified after the long weekend that it was not in fact seeking an emergency order to close the complex. As it turned out, such a legal process doesn’t exist.

Coffman did not address the misinformation he posted — and has since removed — about imminent court action.

Meanwhile, information surfaced about a third blighted complex in Aurora owned by Baumgarten and CBZ — Whispering Pines on Helena Street. The Perkins Coie law firm sent an Aug. 9 letter to city administrators claiming TdA exerted a violent “stranglehold” on the complex dating back to 2023.

“The evidence we have reviewed indicates that gang members are engaging in flagrant trespass violations, assaults and battery, human trafficking and sexual abuse of minors, unlawful firearms possession, extortion, and other criminal activities, often targeting vulnerable Venezuelan and other immigrant populations,” wrote T. Markus Funk, a Perkins Cole partner and former U.S. Attorney representing the lender for the property.

Some of the incidents Funk detailed in his letter are consistent with arrests police have made of three suspected TdA members at the complex. They are:

Juan Carlos Mejia-Espana, arrested March 17 following a domestic dispute with a weapon

Larry Medina, arrested July 10 in connection with a July 2 felony menacing allegation. The victim reported Medina pointed a firearm and threatened to kill them, police said

And Yoendry Vilchez Medina-Jose, arrested on Aug. 5 on a warrant stemming from a Nov. 2023 assault

City officials have pointed out that the letters from lawyers representing interests of property owners are not vetted investigations.

“Much has been said about the report produced and sent to the city by Perkins Coie law firm,” city spokesperson Ryan Luby said in a Sept. 11 statement. “APD had been and still is investigating the concerns the report raised. Despite the property owners’ complaints about the city’s handling of the claims, they continue to be uncooperative in allowing the city and APD to actually investigate.”

City officials later said that an offer to place Aurora police officers in some or all of the subject apartment complexes for a limited time has been rejected by landlord officials.

3 identified in viral Aurora apartment video; police say gang ties unknown

The video that helped launch the Aurora Venezuelan controversy into the international media became news again last week.

Police have one man in custody, issued arrest warrants for two more suspects, and are searching for three other unidentified men in connection with last month’s viral video showing six armed men storming a northwest Aurora building and entering an apartment.

The surveillance footage was recorded by a resident the night of Aug. 18, seven minutes before police say 25-year-old Oswaldo Jose Dabion Araujo was killed by gunshot at the same complex, The Edge at Lowry, at Dallas Street and East 12th Avenue. Although the investigation is ongoing, investigators believe the armed men seen in the video are related to the shooting.

One of them, Naudi Lopez-Fernandez, 21, is in custody, and Aurora police are searching for two other suspects, Anderson Zambrano-Pacheco, 25, and Niefred Jose Serpa-Acosta, 20 — all of whom face charges of first-degree burglary and felony menacing. Police are trying to identify the three remaining armed men in the footage, who like Zambrano-Pachecoalso and Serpa-Acosta remain at large.

Officers found the scoped rifle seen in the video in an apartment unit neighboring the ones caught on camera.

In his first news conference since swearing in on Sept. 9, the Aurora Police Department’s new chief, Todd Chamberlain, said none of the suspects has been linked to a gang or organized crime group.

At least for the time being, that assertion counters claims in late August by Aurora Councilwoman Danielle Jurinsky and Mayor Mike Coffman that the men are members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua, otherwise known as TdA. Although Coffman since has backtracked on those claims, the false narrative that TdA members have overrun whole apartment complexes in Aurora has gone so viral that Donald Trump is using it as an anti-immigration talking point in his presidential campaign.

The new chief didn’t discount the possibility the suspects are TdA members, noting that soured diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Venezuela — and Venezuelan law enforcement’s refusal to share information about criminals or gang members from that country — make gang affiliation difficult for police to prove. 

“The one thing that I think is positive with most gang members is that they do like to brag, and they’re very verbose, and I think that after a while you’ll start to see individuals start to identify or self-identity as ‘Yeah, I’m a TdA gang member,’ or ‘Yeah, I’m a whatever-gang-they’re-affiliated with.’ But it is going to be a process. It’s not going to happen overnight. It’s going to take time.”

Chamberlain was careful to note that, “We don’t want to misidentify any individual as a gang member.” 

He said APD is being methodical at how it proceeds.

“You identify someone as a gang member that stays with them for the rest of their life. That is one (thing) I’m not going to do with this agency,” he said. “We are not going to do a knee-jerk reaction to this. We are going to be methodical, we are going to be precise and we are going to be evidence-based.”

Chamberlain emphasized that the police investigation focuses on the suspects’ alleged criminal behavior, not their immigration status. He made a point of noting that many Venezuelans don’t feel comfortable reporting crimes because they are undocumented.

“We want individuals that are being victimized, we want individuals that are being mistreated to step forward,” Chamberlain said.  “We want to help and we will help.”

That said, he promised to use “every tool” and every chance to unify efforts with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies “to ensure that criminals are found and brought to justice.” Still, he noted that “we are not going to over-police the population based on their race or (ethnicity).”

Chamberlain debunked much-publicized comments made by Jurinsky and Coffman this summer suggesting that TdA and Venezuelan migrants more generally have taken over apartment complexes and overrun police:

“We are not by any means overwhelmed by that issue. We are not by any means overtaken by (Venezuelan) gangs, TDA or any other gang.”

The Edge at Lowry, along with two other Aurora apartment complexes — Aspen Grove and Whispering pines — are owned and managed by the same company, CBZ Management and have been the subject of multiple complaints about structural problems, flooding, broken appliances, mold and bugs and vermin infestation. The city shut down Aspen Grove because of building and safety code violations, forcing hundreds of mostly Venezuelan residents to find new homes. 

Chamberlain signed a nuisance complaint Sept. 20 for all three properties. In the meantime, city staff said the owner and management company have not been cooperative in repairing the complexes and making them more livable.

Democrats push back

Weeks of Democratic silence about what Republicans framed as TdA’s reign of terror in Aurora ended as August turned to September.

Two of the three liberals on the city’s 11-person, majority-conservative council slammed Jurinsky and Coffman for scaring tenants and triggering a flood of social media racism against Venezualens. 

“We’re dealing with irresponsible folks who for political reasons want to make a frenzy about immigration in a city that has historically been welcoming of our immigrant population,” said Councilmember Alison Coombs, a progressive Democrat and longtime advocate for Aurora’s immigrant population. “Unfortunately we have parties who are unwilling to engage in good faith and in rational discourse.”

Councilmember Crystal Murillo echoed concerns that her colleagues were spreading untruths.

“We’re getting distracted by unconfirmed false narratives that play on people’s fears,” she said. “If people are spreading false information, there should be consequences. There are real impacts in the community when we use people’s identities as political pawns.”

Democratic Gov. Jared Polis’s office also chimed in, deriding Coffman and Jurinsky for manufacturing false news and urging them to refrain from stoking public fears.

“He really hopes that the city council members in charge stop trashing their own city when they are supposed to keep it safe,” Polis’ spokesperson Shelby Wieman said in a statement to the Sentinel.

Weiman noted that violent crime in Aurora — and all of metro Denver — went down between 2022-2023, and is expected to have made further declines by the end of 2024, saying, “the recent misinformation campaign threatens actual criminal investigations and could hurt the climate for small businesses in Aurora.”

Polis’ criticisms came the day Coffman appeared on national Fox News reiterating Jurinsky’s alarms about TdA. They prompted Coffman to tone down his message hours later on NEXT on 9News, calling descriptions of the gang problem “an incredible exaggeration.”

For his part, U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, whose congressional district includes Aurora, countered the narrative pushed by John Fabbricatore, his Republican challenger, by saying “There is no gang takeover of Aurora, Colorado” and “no evidence of gang takeovers” of apartment complexes in the city. He criticized his opponent, as well as Coffman and Jurinsky, for “demonizing immigrants and refugees in a way that…leads to racist, bigoted, hurtful rhetoric.”

“What’s relevant here is that you have folks who have lived in squalid conditions for many years, and that we have a huge affordable housing crisis in Aurora. We have immigrants and refugees who are trying to find security and peace and start a new life. And you have politicians, in this case, who are misrepresenting and distorting the facts for political purposes…,” Crow said.

By far the most impassioned response came from Venezuelan migrants themselves, who as the controversy heated up worried their kids would be scapegoated at school and their employers in house-cleaning, restaurants, landscaping and construction jobs would fire them.

About 50 residents of The Edge at Lowry and Whispering Pines held a news conference on Sept. 3 to say that, contrary to claims by Jurinsky and Coffman, none of them had been extorted by gang members. Tenants led camera crews on tours of their water-damaged apartments, some without glass on their windows, working appliances or running water. One resident held up traps with mice, both dead and alive, stuck to them as proof of his building’s squalid conditions.

The tenants said the real danger is not from gangs, but rather Baumgarten, the property owner they described as a “slumlord” who has let the complexes fall into disrepair. They said they also see danger in city politicians spreading misinformation and threatening their home.

“We’re afraid of your mayor and of the cockroaches and rats in our apartments, not of gangs,” Gladis Tovav, an Edge at Lowry resident, said through a translator.

As angry as they are about the conditions in their apartment complexes, tenants are even angrier at Jurinsky’s assertions that “They aren’t residents, they’re occupants,” and that the only people remaining in the buildings are those without property leases. Many have been eager to show journalists their lease agreements and receipts for rent payments that some say they scrape together by working 80 or more hours a week.

One of them, Francy Rodriguez, disputed Jurinsky through a translator:

“A true councilwoman would come speak with us in person, listen to us, and treat us like humans, not animals.”

Gang takeover stories take on lives of their own 

Locally, the story shifted in early September when Coffman made a public turn-about.

After meeting with residents of The Edge at Lowry and Whispering Pines complexes, he posted on Facebook Sept. 6 to say he had come to the conclusion “that a Venezuelan gang is not in control of either of these two apartment complexes.”

The false narrative, however, about gang takeovers in the city had taken such hold among conservatives in Aurora and across the nation, drawing a flood of anti-Venezuelan and anti-immigrant tirades from politicians and others.

A call-in speaker at the Sept. 9 City Council used the controversy to spew his admittedly white-supremacist hate at Venezuelans, whom he called “sh**-skinned people.”

“These people, none of these people belong in our country,” he said, blaming the city council for allowing migrants into the city, accusing its members of taking “Jewish money,” and calling Polis “that fa**** kike governor.”

“What happens when we stand up against these people? It’s not going to be pretty, I’m gonna tell you that. What are you gonna do then? You’re gonna put us in jail, huh?” he asked the council. “The founding stock of this country, the people that came and founded this country, we’re the ones that are gonna get thrown in gulags and all the sh**-skins get all, everything, right? You guys got a rude awakening coming, and it’s coming fast. As you can see, society is collapsing, and you’re all complicit. And we will remember all of your faces. You’re all f*****.” 

MiDian Holmes, an activist organizing recent demonstrations at City Hall, turned to news cameras to speak directly to Chief Todd Chamberlain, who hours earlier replaced interim Chief Heather Morris by swearing in as Aurora’s seventh police chief in five years. 

“I hope you understand and realize what you have stepped into,” Holmes said. “You are now the permanent police chief behind leaders that are inciting individuals that have given clear warning tonight of what they plan to do.”

Nationally, the story had grown a life of its own. Trump cited Aurora twice in his Sept. 9 presidential debate with Kamala Harris as a way to stir up fear of undocumented immigrants and loathing of current U.S. policy on the southern border.

“We have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums,” Trump said. “You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently. …And they’re destroying our country. They’re dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality.”

Google data showed online search interest in Aurora reached a 12-year high during the debate, Denver ABC affiliate KMGH-TV Channel 7 reported. In the course of one 90-minute debate, a city that has spent years and millions of dollars trying to define itself beyond its 2012 theater shooting and long string of much-publicized police excessive force cases became Springfield, Ohio, without the alleged pet-eating.

Aurora officials tried the next day to push back against Trump’s assertions. 

Gangs have not “taken over the city,” according to a statement released Sept. 11. “The overstated claims fueled by social media and through select news organizations are simply not true.”

The statement didn’t mention that two of the council members, Jurinsky and Coffman, whom the administrators work for, and who signed the joint statement with police and city staffers, are responsible for having seeded those claims. 

Trump, meanwhile, kept pushing the story forward, saying on Sept. 13 that, if elected, he would order mass deportations of undocumented immigrants starting in Springfield and Aurora. He also said he may make campaign stops in both cities this election season. 

Tren de Aragua gang started in Venezuela’s prisons and now spreads fear in the US

Former federal agent Was Tabor says his phone has been lighting up with calls from police departments around the U.S. for advice on how to combat the growing threat from the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

Tabor was in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas in 2012 when the gang was still new and when Tabor had barely heard of it.

Venezuela had long been a major transit zone for cocaine smuggled by Colombian guerrillas, with a leftist government that had close ties to some of America’s top adversaries, from Iran to Russia. So the homegrown street gang, although a concern to U.S. Embassy personnel in their daily movements around Venezuela’s dangerous capital, was not considered a major security risk to the United States.

Now, more than a decade later, the gang has become a menace even on American soil and has exploded into the U.S. presidential campaign amid a spree of kidnappings, extortion and other crimes throughout the western hemisphere tied to a mass exodus of Venezuelan migrants.

“What sets this group apart is the level of violence,” said Tabor, now retired from the DEA. “They’re aggressive, they’re hungry and they don’t know any boundaries because they’ve been allowed to spread their wings without any confrontation from law enforcement until now.”

That’s starting to change.

In July, the Biden administration sanctioned the gang, placing it alongside MS-13 from El Salvador and the Mafia-styled Camorra from Italy on a list of transnational criminal organizations and offering $12 million in rewards for the arrest of three leaders. Then, this month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared Tren de Aragua a Tier 1 threat, directing state police to target the gang and paving the way for stiffer penalties for members. Other states may soon follow suit.

Focus on the gang jumped after footage from a security camera surfaced on social media showing a group of heavily armed men brazenly entering an apartment in Aurora.

Aurora police last week said they’ve identified some of the men in the video, but that they have not determined whether they’re linked to any gang at all.

That prompted former President Donald Trump to vow to “ liberate Aurora “ from Venezuelans he falsely said were “taking over the whole town.”

Police have repeatedly called the reports exaggerated but nonetheless acknowledged that it is investigating 10 gang members for involvement in several crimes, including a July homicide.

Among them is a Venezuelan who was arrested in Jefferson County and accused of helping someone else steal a motorcycle and pointing an AR-15 at a tow truck driver who had asked him to move his car. Another was suspected of stealing designer Gucci sunglasses in Boulder and has a multi-state criminal record, including for carjacking and vehicular assault.

Elsewhere, from the heartland to major cities like New York and Chicago, the gang has been blamed for sex trafficking, drug smuggling and police shootings as well as the exploitation of migrants.

The size of the gang and the extent to which its actions are coordinated across state lines and with leaders believed to be outside the U.S. are unclear.

— JOSHUA GOODMAN Associated Press

The Tren originated in an infamous prison

The Tren, which means “train” in Spanish, traces its origin more than a decade ago to an infamously lawless prison with hardened criminals in the central state of Aragua. It nonetheless has expanded in recent years as more than 8 million desperate Venezuelans fled economic turmoil under President Nicolás Maduro’s rule and migrated to other parts of Latin America or the U.S.

One of the founders is Hector Guerrero, who was jailed years ago for killing a police officer, according to InSight Crime, a think tank that monitors organized crime in the Americas. Guerrero, better known by his alias El Nino, Spanish for the “boy,” later escaped and then was recaptured in 2013. He fled prison again more recently, as Venezuela’s government tried to reassert control over its prison population, and is believed to be residing in Colombia.

Authorities in countries such as Chile, Peru and Colombia — all with large populations of Venezuelan migrants — have accused the group of being behind a spree of violence in a region that has long had some of the highest murder rates in the world. Some of its more sensationalist crimes, including the beheading and burying alive of victims, have spread panic in poor neighborhoods where the gang extorts local businesses and illegally charges residents for “protection.”

Now there are concerns about its ruthless tactics reaching U.S. shores as members infiltrate the nearly 1 million Venezuelan migrants who have crossed into the U.S. in recent years.

Eleven Republicans led by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, the vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland last week calling for a coordinated strategy from the Biden administration to combat the gang.

“The administration’s weak enforcement of immigration laws allows gangs, like Tren de Aragua, to control routes and exploit migrants,” the letter said.

Meanwhile, back in Venezuela, officials have watched the attention on Tren de Aragua in the U.S. and have expressed their bafflement.

A year ago, President Nicolas Maduro’s government claimed it had dismantled the gang after retaking control of the prison where the group was born. In July, Foreign Minister Yván Gil declared that the Tren de Aragua is a “fiction created by the international media.”

More recently, Diosdado Cabello, a longtime ruling party-leader, linked the criminal group to an alleged plot backed by the U.S. and the opposition to kill Maduro and some of his allies following the July 28 presidential election.

“The United States knows how to carry out destabilization operations,” Cabello said Friday when he announced the arrest of several people, including a U.S. citizen, for their alleged roles in the foiled anti-Maduro plan. “Why don’t they stop them?”

— JOSHUA GOODMAN Associated Press

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