A Venezuelan Gang Reaches New York
Good morning. It’s Monday. Today we’ll get details on a Venezuelan gang that has emerged in New York City. We’ll also find out why the final screenings of the film “La Chimera” last week were packed.
The Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — a feared criminal organization that concentrates on sex trafficking, human smuggling and drug dealing — has emerged in New York City amid the surge of migrants in the last two years. I asked my colleague Luis Ferré-Sadurní, who, with Chelsia Rose Marcius, wrote about Tren de Aragua’s arrival in New York, to explain what officials are doing about the gang’s widening presence.
What do officials in New York blame Tren de Aragua for? Have the gang’s activities affected the crime statistics the police compile and release?
The Police Department has said that the gang is behind a string of thefts in retail stores, and that it has especially targeted high-end merchandise in department stores. The police have also connected Tren de Aragua to ride-by robberies that officials say gang members pull off on scooters, snatching cellphones and expensive watches from people on the street.
Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, has said there has been an increase in scooter-related robbery patterns since more migrants began arriving in the city two years ago. The police reported 415 incidents at the beginning of June. As of Sept. 10, that number has doubled, according to Joseph Kenny, the Police Department’s chief of detectives.
Not all of those incidents are related to Tren de Aragua, Chief Kenny said. The gang has also been linked to a handful of high-profile crimes. In June, a 19-year-old Venezuelan migrant who the police said admitted he was a member of Tren de Aragua was accused of shooting two police officers when they tried to pull him over while he was riding a scooter.
But it’s important to note that overall crime in New York City has gone down as the number of migrants in the city has gone up. Most major categories of crime — including murder and shootings — have decreased in the last year.
Where are the Tren de Aragua members who are in New York?
Informants the police have interviewed, including gang members jailed on Rikers Island, have told the police that its members live, or have lived, in the city’s migrant shelters. Some have probably moved out of the migrant shelters, where no one is supposed to stay more than 30 or 60 days, although extensions are often granted.
How many Tren de Aragua members are here?
The police are working on that.
So far, they’ve registered 24 members in the city’s criminal gang database, which the police say has 14,000 identified members from 496 gangs in the city.
But they believe the number of Tren de Aragua members is much higher than 24, in part because the criteria to label someone a gang member are very strict.
Let’s take a step back. When did Tren de Aragua members turn up in New York?
Chief Kenny told us that federal law enforcement officials alerted the New York police about the gang’s emerging presence in the Northeast earlier this year.
Criminal cases and arrests from across the country suggest that members began arriving over the past few years as the number of people crossing the southern border, especially Venezuelans, surged during the Biden administration.
Why are law enforcement officials — at the local level in places like New York, and at the federal level — concerned about Tren de Aragua?
It’s a new threat that did not exist in the United States until recently, and officials are hoping to prevent it from becoming entrenched.
The gang became notorious in some Latin American countries, disconcerting the region’s police forces as it expanded its illicit businesses of sex trafficking and drug dealing through extortion, kidnappings and murders. The Biden administration recently designated it a transcontinental criminal organization.
Indeed, the gang has already become a political flashpoint in the United States, a go-to target for Republicans raising fears about a so-called migrant crime wave ahead of the presidential election.
What have informants told the police in New York about how the gang operates?
The police say the gang’s members have been quick to blend in.
The gang is believed to recruit Tren de Aragua members arriving in the United States from inside the city’s migrant shelters.
According to an internal police document we obtained, informants told the police they communicated through invitation-only WhatsApp groups, and had also focused on dealing Tusi — a pink, powdery synthetic drug sometimes called “pink cocaine.” It’s often laced with ketamine, MDMA or fentanyl.
Tren de Aragua members in Latin America have not been known to have conspicuous tattoos. But informants the police have interviewed here said some members of the gang had tattoos of crowns, anchors and clocks, among other symbols.
The New York Police Department opened a post in Bogotá last month. What did that have to do with Tren de Aragua?
The New York police have conducted “fact finding” missions this year in Colombia, where Tren de Aragua has a presence, to learn about the gang from the Colombian authorities. Police officials say their new liaison post in Bogotá will be focused on drug trafficking and migration.