More than two dozen Venezuelan immigrants linked to the notorious Tren de Aragua street gang have been arrested on federal murder, racketeering, drug and sex trafficking charges, officials said Tuesday.
The takedown by the FBI and the NYPD marks the first time members of the Venezuelan gang are facing charges under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, otherwise known as the RICO Act.
President Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, joined Mayor Adams and NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch to detail the arrests at a press conference in lower Manhattan.
The charges against the 27 defendants are part of a broader push by the president to prosecute and deport alleged members of foreign criminal gangs operating in the country.
“My mission is to get rid of every one of these dangerous gangs from our city. I’m unapologetic about it,” Adams said announcing the indictment. “That mission was preelection. It’s the same postelection, and every law enforcement agency on the city, state and federal level is part of that partnership.
Homan called Tren de Aragua a “national security threat.”
“We remove public safety threats, especially national security threats, off the street in New York that are in this country illegally,” Homan said.
Tren de Aragua, the largest criminal organization in Venezuela with more than 5,000 members, has been named by the Trump administration as a foreign terrorist organization. Its members have been linked to human trafficking, extortion, drug crimes and murder in North and South America.
Members have surfaced in the U.S. over the past few years, including in Manhattan and Queens. Several have lived in Midtown hotels that the city uses to house immigrants. President Trump was elected in part for his anti-immigration stance.
Those arrested in the takedown include six Tren de Aragua members as well as 19 members of a splinter group known as Anti-Tren. The two groups often fought with each other, federal officials said. Of the 27 indicted, 21 were already in either federal, state or Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) custody.
Five defendants were rounded up Monday night in New York and other jurisdictions, federal authorities said.
The gang members are accused of sex-trafficking young women, who they called “multadas,” from Venezuela to Peru and the U.S., smuggling ketamine and other illegal narcotics and committing armed robberies.
The gang members were so interconnected that Tren de Aragua even created “lodging and interstate transportation” for members fleeing prosecution, the feds say.
They kept the women they sex-trafficked in check by killing and assaulting them, as well as threatening their families back in Venezuela, officials said.
Anti-Tren is almost entirely made up of former TdA members and operates in Queens, the Bronx and New Jersey, federal officials said.
The splinter group threatened, assaulted and killed TdA members and also sex-trafficked women to the U.S., the indictment states.
“For the first time ever, TdA is being named and charged as the criminal enterprise that it is,” Tisch said. “This isn’t just street crime — it’s organized racketeering, and this gang has shown zero regard for the safety of New Yorkers.”
The investigation received support from Joint Task Force Vulcan, a multistate federal investigation unit created in 2019 to fight MS-13 in Long Island and other parts of the tristate area. The unit is composed of members of U.S. Attorney’s offices in New York, New Jersey and other nearby states.
With Rocco Parascandola
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