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-Lurid Crime Tales-

Dallas police confirm Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is in Texas

2024-09-05

Aurora/Denver, Chicago, and now Dallas. There are your three, Mercutio. Also Juarez in Mexico across from El Paso, and New York City migrant shelters… a good deal more than three.

[Daily Mail, where America gets its news] In a startling and surprising admission, the Dallas Police Department confirmed Tren De Aragua is in North Texas committing crimes, DailyMail.com can reveal.

The notorious South American mob best known for sex trafficking girls and women and exploiting their fellow Venezuelans, crossed the US-Mexico border in recent years- as DailyMail.com was first to report- mixed in with asylum-seeking migrants, and is behind a crime wave stretching from Miami to New York.

Last week in Aurora, Colorado, gang members were seen in a video storming an apartment complex armed to the hilt with assault rifles and banging on doors.

In North Texas, the criminal organization's presence had been rumored for at least a year, but for the first time ever, law enforcement officials have publicly confirmed their arrival.

'We have had gang activity in the north Dallas area linked to the Tren De Aragua gang from Venezuela,' Dallas Police Department spokeswoman Jennifer Pryor told DailyMail.com.

Texas cops stopped short of detailing what specific crimes TdA, as the gang is known by federal agents, has been involved in locally-- citing on-going investigations.

'Our department is collaborating with other agencies to address possible crimes linked to this and other gangs in our city,' Pryor added.

This latest development is the next logical step, after TdA established its new headquarters on the US-Mexico border, just south of El Paso, Texas.

As a DailyMail.com investigation revealed, Venezuelan migrants have infiltrated food delivery and ride-share apps, renting or buying accounts that do not belong to them and showing up at your door illegally.

The Venezuelan community in Dallas is concentrated in an enclave in the northern part of the city, named Villa Dallas by the Venezuelan migrants who first arrived there years ago. Thugs living in the area plunged Villa Dallas into mayhem, an October 2023 report by by DailyMail.com showed. The neighborhood became the scene of illegal street races, beatings, shootings and extortion attempts.

'A lot of these people are criminals from the (Nicholas) Maduro regime,' Miami immigration attorney Rolando Vazquez stated.

'Some are ex-security forces. They are professional criminals or part of criminal organizations.'

Some South American thugs are members of so called 'Collectivos' or Venezuelan state-run militia, Vazquez says. The government-backed gangs run Venezuelan towns, demanding bribes, taking personal items from homes simply because they want to, and killing or attacking citizens at the request of Maduro, who was indicted by the US government in 2020 for narco-terrorism and drug-trafficking charges.

'The same people so many migrants left Venezuela to escape from are now here,' Vazquez added.

'They're the ones who attacked people for their political beliefs, and they are now in the US. They're doing Maduro's dirty work, and it's not just Dallas. It's Miami; it's Chicago.'

Conservative estimates put the Venezuelan population in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex at at least 20,000-- many of them living in Villa Dallas.

In July 2023, the Dallas Police designated The Oaks as a habitual crime property and confirmed officers have increased their presence there.

'Our Neighborhood Police Officers are setting up a crime watch meeting to speak with tenants and address the crime in the area,' Dallas police said in a statement.

Law-abiding migrants who have the money to move out have already left, and those who don't try to keep their heads down and hope they don't get hit by a stray bullet or sucked into the violence.

Since Dallas police first moved in to crack down on crime in Villa Dallas, the apartment that was the center of the chaos is under new management, and many of the trouble markers have been forced out. However residents say the trouble makers have simply re-located, not left.

In July, the US government designated TdA as a transnational criminal organization.

'Today’s designation of Tren de Aragua as a significant Transnational Criminal Organization underscores the escalating threat it poses to American communities,' Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian Nelson said last month.

TdA's leader remains on the run with a $5 million bounty on his head.

The notorious criminal organization Tren de Aragua, or TdA as it is known by federal agents, previously operated out of an infamous South American prison. But after kingpin Hector Guerrero Flores escaped last year, the mafia moved its command center to Ciudad Juarez in Mexico on the US border - directly across from El Paso, Texas, local officials told DailyMail.com.

'Tren de Aragua is the epitome of evil,' Congressman Tony Gonzales, who represents El Paso, said.

'This gang is known to rape children, spearhead murders, and cause widespread chaos.'

Since forming behind the walls of the Tocoron Prison in the Venezuelan state of Aragua, Tren de Aragua (Spanish for Train of Aragua) is now linked to widespread human and sex trafficking on the South American continent. Law enforcement now considers the gang as dangerous as El Salvador's Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13.

TdA succeeded in transforming itself from a group of prison thugs to one of the most dangerous criminal gangs in the world partly because the Venezuelan government allowed its incarcerated leaders, known as Pranes, to run the penitentiary. From there, TdA's influence spread to neighborhoods across Venezuela through the establishment of alliances with smaller gangs, according to Insightcrime.org. In 2018, the gang went international, moving over the border to neighboring Colombia where they began to exploit their countrymen fleeing Venezuela's communist regime.

'While larger Colombian groups focused on drug trafficking, Tren de Aragua began to exploit Venezuelan migrants systematically, charging them extortion fees, smuggling them into and throughout Colombia, and taking control of various nodes of the human trafficking for sexual exploitation market,' the crime publication stated.

Now in Northern Mexico, TdA is once again taking advantage of desperate migrants. Gangsters are charging huge fees to smuggle migrants to the US border and then into Texas. However, the mobsters are also kidnapping migrants who have made it to the US-Mexico border without their help in a bid to make even more money.

'According to the security reports we have, this group of Venezuelans, Tren de Aragua, control which migrants can ride the train,' Mexico state prosecutor Carlos Manuel Salas said - referring to the many migrants who ride a top trains in Mexico to reach Juarez to avoid having to make the journey by foot.

Kidnapped migrants are often held captive in Juarez until TdA can get a ransom from the migrant's family back home, with many women forced into prostitution.

Posted by:Skidmark

#9 Not so much

Posted by: Skidmark 2024-09-05 23:42

#8 Say, isn't Martha's Vineyard a little lacking in the foreign gang diversity department?

Posted by: Anomalous Sources 2024-09-05 21:03

#7 The Chicago Way, since the days of Al Capone.

Posted by: Bobby 2024-09-05 17:16

#6 Think the Chicago model but at the national level, NoMore. Pols (and their apparatchiks) climb in bed with the gangs and get votes and muscle for giving them a free hand.

Posted by: Mercutio 2024-09-05 14:43

#5 Multi-state criminal enterprise with high levels of violence and international criminal connections to terrorist sponsoring states like Venezuela and Cuba. Where is the EFFBEYE and DHS? Isn't this EXACTLY what they are supposed to handle and prevent?

Posted by: NoMoreBS 2024-09-05 14:28

#4 Probably thought they could pay them off with taxpayer danegold until they could be permanently hired by the gangsters as the government face, not realizing that these hardened workers with generations of experience have them at the top of the menu and start replacing family members with ransom demands.

Ride that tiger, Polis! Ride it!

Posted by: swksvolFF 2024-09-05 12:34

#3 I think American "elites" make a horrible mistake thinking Latinos are like Wakandans.

Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2024-09-05 11:19

#2 ^Immediately, and none. Plus any "angelos" that aid and abet them. No need to keep score, we'll track them for you.

Posted by: Old Patriot 2024-09-05 11:03

#1 So when's the season open and what's the bag limit?

Posted by: Mercutio 2024-09-05 09:24

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