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Tren de Aragua originated as a prison gang out of Venezuela and is now considered a transnational criminal organization.
High-ranking officials with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) alerted Governor Bill Lee about an alarming amount of incidents in the state involving members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua (TDA).
David Rausch, the Director at TBI, gave the warning during Tuesday’s Budget Hearing.
“We are seeing a few things that I want to raise to your attention, and number 1 is with a Venezuelan gang that is being seen, more and more, prevalent,” Director Rausch said. “Tren de Aragua…they are ever-present in our country and in Tennessee.”
Rausch said the TBI first learned of the gang two years ago during a human trafficking investigation in Tennessee. TBI agents learned that many of the women abducted were from Venezuela and most of the TDA members fled the state.
“We did our operation, we were able to capture a number of them, but many of them fled,” Rausch explained. “They were out of Tennessee. We had no other sight or sound of them until recently. Now, what we are seeing is they are back. They are back in all of our major cities.”
TBI is seeing more cases of human trafficking, which Rausch said is how the gang typically begins to establish itself before it moves on to other crimes including organized retail theft and drug sales.
Tren de Aragua originated as a prison gang in Aragua, Venezuela, and in recent years has quickly expanded throughout the Western Hemisphere, according to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned TDA as a transnational criminal organization in July 2024.
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