Latest news with #TrenDeAragua
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Suspected Tren de Aragua gang members terrorize apartment complex in shocking doorbell video
An armed crew of nine suspected Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members were caught on camera wreaking havoc at a Colorado apartment complex earlier this month, in an incident Aurora police are calling "very reminiscent" of the violence previously incited in the area by the Venezuelan gang. Doorbell video shows the group pointing guns and repeatedly knocking on an apartment door in a building near 6th Avenue and Potomac Street in Aurora, Colorado, on June 9, Police Chief Todd Chamberlain said during a press conference on Tuesday. "This might sound like déjà vu," Chamberlain said. "… We are addressing this actively, effectively and immediately." The people who lived in the apartment were also from Venezuela and had just moved in two days prior to the incident, Chamberlain noted, acknowledging that it's a good thing the residents did not open the door after hearing the knocking. Two Illegal Venezuelan Immigrants, Suspected Tda Gang Members Charged In Deadly Chicago Mass Shooting "I shudder to think what might have happened to them, but unfortunately that is what we have seen at that apartment complex, and it's what we've been dealing with," he said. Read On The Fox News App Emerging Venezuelan Gang 'More Violent' Than Tren De Aragua Targets Rural America, Expert Warns Following the incident, police began investigating and identifying the suspects in the video. On June 11 and 12, law enforcement arrested two suspects. Four others known to be involved in prior criminal activity were also detained, according to Aurora Police. 11 Alleged Teen Tren De Aragua Gang Members Attack Nypd Officers: Police The investigation to identify and arrest the remaining suspects in the video is ongoing. Since August of last year, the Aurora Police department has received 44 radio calls for service at the apartment complex, which they narrowed down to about 12 separate individual incidents. These calls were related to shots fired, kidnapping, assault, and more, Chamberlain said. "I want everyone to understand and to know that we are ahead of this," Chamberlain said. "This isn't something that we're reacting to. This is something that we are proactively addressing with everything that we can possibly do." The shocking footage comes as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement works to remove TdA from U.S. soil. In February, the U.S. declared TdA a global terrorist organization. Aurora is the third-largest city in Colorado with a population of more than 398,000, according to the City of Aurora website. Last summer, an Aurora apartment complex was at the center of the TdA gang takeover controversy after a viral video showed heavily armed gang members taking over an apartment by busting down the door with heavy artillery. Earlier this year, nine suspected TdA members were charged following a violent home invasion, kidnapping and robbery in Aurora. Aurora Police did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for article source: Suspected Tren de Aragua gang members terrorize apartment complex in shocking doorbell video
CBS News
2 days ago
- CBS News
Aurora police investigate suspected gang activity at Colorado apartment complex, chief says suspects "must be stopped"
The Aurora Police Department is investigating suspected gang activity at an apartment complex that is reminiscent of last year's Tren de Aragua gang activity at another apartment complex in the Colorado city. The apartment complex in Aurora is near the intersection of 6th Avenue and Potomac Street. CBS During a news conference on Tuesday afternoon, Police Chief Todd Chamberlain spoke about an incident last week involving armed suspects at 544 Potomac Street. He played a video from June 9 showing several people armed with guns positioned in hallways and stairways, many of them knocking repeatedly on a unit's door. Aurora Police "The one thing I think is the positive about this is the individuals who had just moved into that apartment complex did not open that door," said Chamberlain. "Had they opened that door, I shudder to think of what might have happened to them." Chamberlain said the people living in that unit had moved from Venezuela just two days before, and he believes they are being victimized by others who also immigrated from Venezuela. "They are picking on a community that they are versed in. They are picking on a community that is the immigrant population in the city of Aurora. They are picking on a community that are primarily Venezuelan," said the chief. The police chief explained the June 9 incident was not the first time Aurora police had responded to the apartment complex near 6th Avenue and Potomac Street. Calls for service began in August 2024, he said, for at least 12 separate incidents including shots fired, squatters, assaults and a kidnapping. Chamberlain said the video was given to police by a neighbor. That video helped officers execute a search warrant on June 11, and officers also passed out flyers -- in English and Spanish -- and spoke to people living in the building about the concerning activity. Chamberlain noted that while there are problems in the complex, it is not a problem location. During their search, Chamberlain said detectives found a firearm and a red hoodie that was used by one of the suspects seen in the surveillance video. That suspect, 23-year-old Larry Galbreath, was arrested and faces charges including felony menacing with a firearm and violation of a protection order. Aurora Police Chamberlain explained Galbreath lives in the apartment complex and told police he was tattooed, or "marked," by a Venezuelan. "They are building networks by using other people," Chamberlain said of the influx of gang activity in that area. Police believe there are at least nine people involved in this incident, two of whom are now in custody, including Galbreath. Investigators are actively working to identify the others and take them into custody. While Chamberlain could not definitively say if this latest gang activity is Tren de Aragua, he said it is "disturbing" and he will use every resource he can -- local, state, and federal -- to hold them accountable. "The reason that I am sharing this video now is because I want everyone to understand and know that we are ahead of this. This isn't something that we are reacting to, this is something that we are proactively addressing," Chamberlain said. "I look at these individuals like a cancer. They are not a benign cancer, they are a cancer that is causing victimization, they are cancer that must be addressed, they must be cut out and they must be stopped." Chamberlain said, unlike the incident at the apartment complex last summer, the property owners and management company are cooperating with this investigation.
CNN
11-06-2025
- Politics
- CNN
Analysis: Trump's top general just undercut his ‘invasion' claims
One of the problems with making a series of brazen and hyperbolic claims is that it can be hard to keep everyone on your team on the same page. And few Trump administration claims have been as brazen as the idea that the Venezuelan government has engineered an invasion of gang members into the United States. This claim forms the basis of the administration's controversial efforts to rapidly deport a bunch of people it claimed were members of the gang Tren de Aragua – without due process. But one of the central figures responsible for warding off such invasions apparently didn't get the memo. At a Senate hearing Wednesday, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman retired Lt. Gen. Dan Caine acknowledged that the United States isn't currently facing such a threat. 'I think at this point in time, I don't see any foreign state-sponsored folks invading,' Caine said in response to Democratic questioning. This might sound like common sense; of course the United States isn't currently under invasion by a foreign government. You'd probably have heard something about that on the news. But the administration has said – repeatedly and in court – that it has been. When Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to rapidly deport migrants without due process, that law required such a foreign 'invasion' or 'predatory incursion' to make his move legal. And Trump said that's what was happening. '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,' reads the proclamation from Trump. It added that Tren de Aragua's actions came 'both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.' So the White House said Tren de Aragua was acting in concert with the Maduro regime to invade; Caine now says 'state-sponsored folks' aren't invading. Some flagged Caine's comment as undermining Trump's claims of a foreign 'invasion' in Los Angeles. Trump has regularly applied that word to undocumented migrants. But the inconsistency is arguably more significant when it comes to Trump's claims about the Venezuelan migrants. Perhaps the administration would argue that Trump has halted the invasion and it is no longer happening; Caine was speaking in the present tense. Caine did go on to cite others who might have different views. 'But I'll be mindful of the fact that there has been some border issues throughout time, and defer to DHS who handles the border along the nation's contiguous outline,' he said. But if an invasion had been happening recently, it seems weird not to mention that. And if the invasion is over, that would seem to undercut the need to keep trying to use the Alien Enemies Act. The Department of Homeland Security is certainly not in the camp of no invasion. On Wednesday, DHS posted on Facebook an image with Uncle Sam that reads: 'Report all foreign invaders' with a phone number for ICE. When asked about the image and whether the use of the term 'foreign invaders' had been used previously, DHS pointed CNN to a number of posts from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller using terms like 'invade' or 'invaders' when referring to undocumented immigrants. Plenty of Trump administration figures have gone to bat for this claim. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said soon after Trump's proclamation that Tren de Aragua gang members 'have been sent here by the hostile Maduro regime in Venezuela.' Then-national security adviser Michael Waltz claimed Maduro was emptying his prisons 'in a proxy manner to influence and attack the United States.' We soon learned that the intelligence community had concluded Venezuela had not directed the gang. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio stood by Trump's claim. 'Yes, that's their assessment,' Rubio said last month about the intelligence community. 'They're wrong.' Trump administration border czar Tom Homan has said the gang was an 'arm of the Maduro regime,' and that Maduro's regime was 'involved with sending thousands of Venezuelans to this country to unsettle it.' The question of Venezuela's purported involvement actually hasn't been dealt with much by the courts. A series of judges have moved to block the administration's Alien Enemies Act gambit, but they've generally ruled that way because of the lack of an 'invasion' or 'predatory incursion' – without delving much into the more complex issue of whether such a thing might somehow have ties to Maduro's government. One of the judges to rule in that fashion was a Trump appointee, US District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. So the intelligence community and a bunch of judges – including a Trump-appointed one – have rebutted the claim the underlies this historic effort to set aside due process. And now, the man Trump installed as his top general seems to have undercut it too.
New York Times
10-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Justice Dept. Seeks to Pause Ruling Ordering Due Process for Deported Venezuelans
The Trump administration on Tuesday asked a federal appeals court to block a lower court's order directing the Trump administration to provide due process to scores of Venezuelan immigrants who were deported without hearings to El Salvador in March under a wartime law. The emergency request by the Justice Department, filed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, came one day before the administration was supposed to send the lower court judge its proposal for how to allow nearly 140 of the deported Venezuelans to challenge their expulsion. The men, accused of being members of a violent street gang called Tren de Aragua, are being held in a maximum-security Salvadoran prison. The White House deported the men on March 15 on a series of flights, using a powerful 18th-century statute known as the Alien Enemies Act. That law, which has been used on only three occasions in U.S. history, is meant to be used in times of declared war or during an invasion by a foreign nation. The fight over the Venezuelans is merely one of the many bitter battles that have pitted courts across the country against an administration that is aggressively seeking to deport as many as immigrants as possible through methods that have repeatedly strained the boundaries of the law. Time and again, judges have settled on a similar bottom line, saying that the immigrants must be afforded basic due process rights before being expelled from the country. The proceeding in front of Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge in Federal District Court in Washington, was one of the first deportation cases to reach the courts and remains one of the hardest fought. The judge tried to stop the deportation flights carrying the Venezuelans shortly after they took off, but the administration went ahead anyway, prompting him to threaten Trump officials with contempt proceedings. Ever since the men landed in El Salvador, their lawyers have been seeking another order to bring them back to the United States. And last week, Judge Boasberg gave them some of what they wanted, directing Trump officials in an outraged decision to give the men the due process they were denied, but leaving it up to the administration to offer an initial plan about how to carry out his instructions. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Venezuelan family feels full force of Trump's crackdown
Mercedes Yamarte's three sons fled Venezuela for a better life in the United States. Now one languishes in a Salvadoran jail, another "self-deported" to Mexico, and a third lives in hiding -- terrified US agents will crash the door at any moment. At her zinc-roofed home in a poor Maracaibo neighborhood, 46-year-old Mercedes blinks back tears as she thinks about her family split asunder by US President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown. "I wish I could go to sleep, wake up, and this never happened," she says, as rain drums down and lightning flashes overhead. In their homeland, her boys were held back by decades of political and economic tumult that have already prompted an estimated eight million Venezuelans to emigrate. But in leaving, all three brothers became ensnared by politics once more, and by a US president determined to bolt the door of a nation once proud of its migrant roots. For years, her eldest son, 30-year-old Mervin had lived in America, providing for his wife and six-year-old daughter, working Texas construction sites and at a tortilla factory. On March 13, he was arrested by US immigration agents and summarily deported to a Salvadoran mega jail, where he is still being held incommunicado. The Trump administration linked Mervin and 251 other men to the Tren de Aragua -- a Venezuelan gang it classifies as a terrorist group. Washington has cited tattoos as evidence of gang affiliation, something fiercely contested by experts, who say that, unlike other Latin American gangs, Tren de Aragua members do not commonly sport gang markings. Mervin has tattoos of his mother and daughter's names, the phrase "strong like mom" in Spanish and the number "99" -- a reference to his soccer jersey not any gang affiliation, according to his family. - The journey north - Mervin arrived in the United States in 2023 with his 21-year-old brother Jonferson. Both hoped to work and to send some money back home. They had slogged through the Darien Gap -- a forbidding chunk of jungle between Colombia and Panama that is one of the world's most dangerous migration routes. They had trekked north through Mexico, and were followed a year later by sister Francis, aged 19, who turned around before reaching the United States and brother Juan, aged 28, who continued on. When the brothers entered the United States, they registered with border officials and requested political asylum. They were told they could remain legally until a judge decided their fate. Then US voters voted, and with a change of administration, at dawn on March 13, US immigration agents pounded the door of an apartment in Irving, Texas where the trio were living with friends from back home. Immigration agents were serving an arrest warrant when they saw Mervin and said: "You are coming with us too for an investigation," Juan recalled. When the agents said they had an arrest warrant for Mervin too, he tried to show his asylum papers. "But they already had him handcuffed to take him away," Juan said. He was transferred to a detention center, where he managed to call Jonferson to say he was being deported somewhere. He did not know where. Three days later, Jonferson saw his brother among scores of shorn and shackled men arriving at CECOT, a prison built by El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele to house alleged gang members. Jonferson saw his handcuffed brother kneeling on the floor staring off into space. He broke down crying and called his mother. She had also seen Mervin in the images. "My son was kneeling and looked up as if to say: 'Where am I and what have I done to end up here?'" said Mercedes. "I have never seen my son look more terrified" she said. - The journey south - After his brother's arrest, Jonferson had nightmares. The fear became so great that he fled to Mexico -- what some euphemistically describe as "self-deportation". There, he waited a month to board a Venezuelan humanitarian flight to return home. "It has been a nightmare," he told AFP as he rode a bus to the airport and from there, onward home. Juan, meanwhile, has decided to remain in the United States. He lives under the radar, working construction jobs and moving frequently to dodge arrest. "I am always hiding. When I go to the grocery store I look all around, fearful, as if someone were chasing me," he told AFP asking that his face and his whereabouts remain undisclosed. As the only brother who can now send money home, he is determined not to go back to Venezuela empty-handed. He also has a wife and seven-year-old son depending on him. But he is tormented by the thought of his brother Mervin being held in El Salvador and by the toll it has taken on the family. "My mother is a wreck. There are days she cannot sleep," Juan said. "My sister-in-law cries every day. She is suffering." - The journey home - Jonferson has since returned to Maracaibo, where he was greeted by strings of blue, yellow, and red balloons and a grateful but still forlorn mother. "I would like to be happy, as I should. But my other son is in El Salvador, in what conditions I do not know," Mercedes said. But her face lights up for a second as she hugs her son, holding him tight as if never wanting to let him go. "I never thought the absence of my sons would hit me so hard," she said. "I never knew I could feel such pain." For now, the brothers are only together in a screen grab she has on her phone, taken during a video call last Christmas. mav-mbj/lbc/dw/arb/tc
