The gang of violent Venezuelans known as Tren de Aragua actually is worse than that sounds, according to a new report.
Because the gang now has been linked to the Venezuelan government.
It is the Washington Stand that reported according to a Federal Bureau of Investigation study, “Venezuela’s socialist president Nicolás Maduro and his deputies are using criminals from the Tren de Aragua (TdA) transnational gang as ‘proxies’ to ‘destabilize’ foreign nations, including Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the U.S.”
The report said, “The FBI anticipates that TdA members the Venezuelan government has sent to the U.S. will, within the next six to 18 months, begin targeting and killing other Venezuelan nationals who have been opponents or critics of Maduro’s administration.”
President Donald Trump several times has charged that the Venezuelan government is weaponizing criminals in dangerous gangs and sending foreign terrorists into the U.S.
“These findings should shock Americans but not the law enforcement community,” a Trump administration official who was not identified, told Fox News.
“They reflect the sentiments of numerous other intelligence assessments across multiple agencies.”
That official explained Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro “is a Marxist dictator who hijacked a once-prosperous Venezuela and brought in nothing but total economic collapse and gang takeover. He crumbled Caracas, now overrun with drugs and violence, and wants to do the same across the United States by sending his most violent and dangerous criminals into our communities.”
The Trump administration has worked to utilize several laws to crack down on the illegal access to the United States by the gang members, and to deport those who have arrived.
The fact that the Venezuelan government is “aiding and abetting” the terror gang was confirmed, in the report, by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
An official in the ODNI assessed that the links between the terrorists and the government there mirror “the behavior of the Taliban in Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern failed states like Syria and Libya that have welcomed terrorists with open arms.”
While a National Intelligence Council report accessed by the AP claimed there’s no link, one expert suggested that was incorrect, based on “leakers.”
The “propaganda media conveniently did not include [more accurate intelligence] because it gets in the way of their biased narrative and attempt to deceive the American people,” the expert said.
DNI Tulsi Gabbard explained, “The Office of the Director of National Intelligence fully supports the assessment that the foreign terrorist organization, Tren De Aragua, is acting with the support of the Maduro Regime, and thus subject to arrest, detention and removal as alien enemies of the United States.”
The State Department earlier this year designated TdA as a foreign terror organization.
Trump has said, “TdA is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus. Venezuelan national and local authorities have ceded ever-greater control over their territories to transnational criminal organizations, including TdA. The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States.”
In just the past few days, several dozen TdA members and leaders have been charged under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Most of those defendants are in custody.