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.
Harrowing new footage appears to capture the moment an armed Venezuelan gang seized control of an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado
Then other members of the gang rush up the stairwell, bearing weapons. In the background, the men can be heard speaking in Spanish to one another
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.
In Texas’ sixth largest city, about a nine hour drive from Dallas, police are working on a confidential plan to address the growing threat, insiders told DailyMail.com last month.
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.
Venezuela’s most violent gang Tren de Aragua has moved its headquarters to just across the US border in the Mexican town of Ciudad Juarez
El Paso officials, who asked to remain anonymous, fear gang violence will spill over into Texas’ sixth largest city
Tren de Aragua gang tattoos (pictured above) were part of a Department of Homeland Security bulletin that was recently shared with federal agents
In many cases, the migrants working under assumed names and identities don’t have authorization to work in the US or a driver license to legally operate a vehicle.
It raises huge concerns about the safety of the home delivery apps and the consumer’s ability to trust who is actually delivering food to their home and family – with customers’ personal information potentially placed in the hands of dangerous street gangs.
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 man is brutally beaten in Villa Dallas, the Venezuelan community in North Texas.
Residents of Villa Dallas say this kind of violence is becoming routine
One disturbing clip shared by a resident shows a man with a shirt over his head wailed on by several men. The man appears to be unconscious until he moves his arm and is then kicked in the head.
Meanwhile, a car’s tires can be heard screeching in the background as shots are fired into the air.
‘Don’t kill him says a by-stander.’
The person who posted the video to Instagram identified local gangsters who he says are behind the bedlam.
‘The most popular nicknames are Aron, El Pibe and Chito– three alleged mini criminal gang leaders who face each other to keep control of the area,’ @elperijanero2020 claims.
Rolando Vazquez (right) is an immigration attorney in Miami, Florida with strong ties to the Venezuelan community
But there’s nothing ‘mini’ about these criminals, explained immigration attorney Rolando Vazquez.
‘A lot of these people are criminals from the (Nicholas) Maduro regime,’ the Miami lawyer 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.
The Oaks of North Dallas is the where the first Venezuelan refugees arrived several years ago. The migrants were from Villa Del Rosario in Venezuela and started calling their new Texas home ‘Villa Dallas.’ As more Venezuelans started to arrive in Dallas, they eventually settled in the area around the apartment complex, which has now become a Venezuelan community known as Villa Dallas
The Dallas Police Department designated the Oaks of North Dallas, the birth place of Villa Dallas, a habitual crime property in July, the department confirmed to the DailyMail.com
‘Every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the situation is out of control,’ said a renter at the Oaks at North Dallas who didn’t want to be identified.
‘These men hang around the complex drinking and doing drugs. Next thing you know, it’s bullets flying and people fighting. When I first arrived, it was calm, but things have changed in the last few months.’
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.
‘I work long hours, so I’m hardly ever here, but I’m still afraid for my son,’ another resident added. ‘They like to races here, in the parking lot of the apartment complex. You hear them going around and around and you worry someone might get run over.’
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.
Last month, the US government designated Tren de Aragua a transnational criminal organization and announced a $5 million reward for the capture of its leader, Hector ‘El Nino’ Guerrero Flores
The FBI is concerned El Tren de Aragua (pictured in a September prison raid) is linking up with other criminal networks such as the notorious MS-13
The gang boss escaped Venezuela’s Tocorón Penitentiary last year. When authorities went inside the prison, they found a professional baseball field, a zoo and a pool, among other amenities that they were able to have since gang bosses essentially ran the prison
Pictured: The on-site night club ‘Tokio’ is seen in pictures taken after the raid
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.
Dubbed the ‘epitome of evil’, 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.
The kidnapping of South American and Central American migrants in Juarez has become commonplace, as the foreigners travel through Mexico on their way to the US
Last month Mexican officials rescued 22 migrants who had been kidnapped in Juarez and were being held in a shanty home
Migrants arrive in Juarez atop of train in April
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.
