As Trump wages war on Tren de Aragua, little evidence links Venezuelan gang to violence in Chicago

With tens of thousands of immigrants having sought refuge in Chicago after crossing the southern border, only a few dozen have been labeled by police as potential members of the Tren de Aragua gang that President Donald Trump calls a terrorist threat.

And there’s little evidence tying them to violence in Chicago.

Many of them are from Venezuela, where the prison gang started. Some were born in Colombia, Honduras and Ecuador — countries the gang reportedly has spread to. The police have used their tattoos, clothing and even a car decal to link them to the gang, citing law enforcement alerts detailing its iconography.

Tren de Aragua’s reputation for human-trafficking, drug sales and kidnapping has followed the gang from Venezuela along the perilous route to the United States, and Trump has made it a focus of his massive immigration crackdown.

But the three dozen-plus men flagged by the Chicago Police Department as possible Tren de Aragua members have mostly faced only drug and traffic cases, the Chicago Sun-Times found, based on arrest records and other data.

The Sun-Times also reviewed dozens of other arrest reports for Venezuelan nationals charged with violent crimes in Chicago in recent years. Those separate reports show only one man whose tattoo is considered a symbol of the gang.

Federal officials have connected two reputed Tren de Aragua members to high-profile shootings in Chicago — one in which a transgender migrant was wounded in February 2024 and one in January that left two women dead and a third wounded. But they haven’t been charged in the attacks.

Trump invoked a law dating to 1798, the Alien Enemies Act, on March 15 in his administration’s latest broadside against Tren de Aragua, which he said is working in lockstep with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s oppressive regime, “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”

Trump used the 227-year-old law to deport hundreds of Venezuelans, sending them to a notorious prison in El Salvador with no due process. His administration has been accused by civil rights advocates of disobeying a court order that sought to halt the deportation flights, stoking fears of a constitutional crisis.

In Chicago, where gangs long have had powerful footholds and been the subject of sweeping federal investigations, police sources say Tren de Aragua’s operations and reach aren’t clear.

“I think Trump is just using them as a tangible excuse to deport alleged members,” one Chicago police source says. “If they were a big problem, there would be more buzz about them.”

Not identifying more members and tying them to crimes doesn’t mean they don’t pose a major threat, says Kyle Williamson, administrator of the West Texas Anti-Gang Center and a former head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in El Paso, Texas.

“Thousands of TdA members have come in to our country, but we have only validated a few,” Williamson says.

He notes that, unlike homegrown gangs, U.S. police don’t have a history of dealing with Tren de Aragua and haven’t been able to get a lot of data about the gang because most of its members come from Venezuela, whose government is hostile to the United States.

Also, Tren de Aragua members are transient, so it’s difficult for U.S. law enforcement to keep tabs on them, according to Williamson.

“They have tactics to avoid detection by law enforcement,” he says, with many younger members not getting the gang’s tattoos in an effort to stay under the radar. “But none of this is overblown. They pose a really huge threat.”

Chicago Police Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Machine guns, Jordan logos, clocks

In Chicago, many of those linked to Tren de Aragua in police arrest reports had tattoos of roses, crowns and clocks, which officers interpreted as possible gang tattoos. Tattoos of an AK-47 and Michael Jordan’s “Jumpman” logo also drew scrutiny, along with Chicago Bulls gear.

The authors of the reports usually cited law enforcement safety alerts and bulletins.

“Above subject has a rose tattoo on his hand,” according to a report about a man stopped last year for a traffic violation. “According to the bulletin issued by the National Gang Intelligence Center, this is consistent with the gang tattoos of the Venezuela gang Tren de Aragua.”

Possibly the most serious Chicago case tied to the gang involved a man accused of stabbing a 15-year-old with a screwdriver in February 2024. Richard Ramirez Moreno, 25, had warned the boy’s mother that he was a “member of a violent street gang and threatened to get the gang to attack them,” according to court records.

There is an ongoing domestic violence case against Ramirez Moreno, a Venezuelan national who was wearing a federal GPS bracelet at the time of his arrest.

The Sun-Times reviewed about 60 police reports for Venezuelan nationals arrested in Chicago from mid-2023 through the end of 2024 on charges of committing violent crimes such as a murder, stabbings, kidnappings, sexual assaults and multiple attacks on cops.

The arrest reports — following Chicago’s “Sanctuary City” policy — don’t list the immigration status of those people. But most of the Venezuelans who now live in Chicago are among the roughly 50,000 asylum-seekers who’ve arrived after crossing the southern border in recent years, experts say.

Only three of those arrest reports said the person had a tattoo — and only one of those tattoos is considered by law enforcement authorities to be a symbol of Tren de Aragua.

Elvis Diaz Betancourt, 29, was sentenced in July 2024 to three and a half years in prison for the 2023 stabbing of a fellow resident of a shelter in downtown Chicago.

He has a tattoo of an “all-seeing eye” on his right arm, according to the arrest report, which doesn’t identify him as a Tren de Aragua member. But law enforcement sources say he was suspected of being in the gang.

Diaz Betancourt was paroled in September 2024 and is now listed on the Illinois Department of Corrections website as an “absconder.”

One of the men identified as a possible Tren de Aragua member says he isn’t affiliated with the gang and was never questioned by police about it.

He says he left Venezuela over a decade ago and doesn’t know if the gang operated in his region. He requested anonymity because he has a pending asylum case.

He says his tattoos symbolize his children and represent a guardian angel. “I’m 40 years old, I’m not part of any gang,” he told a reporter, speaking in Spanish.

He was charged with stealing from JCPenney at Ford City Mall in February 2024, court records show. He reached a deferred prosecution agreement, meaning the case will be dropped if he completes court-ordered programming.

He says he’s been under electronic surveillance by ICE for about a year and doesn’t think immigrants should be deported to unfamiliar countries like El Salvador.

“Innocent people who have nothing to do with [the gang] who came to work, for their children to have a better life, I don’t think it’s fair for them to be deported,” he says.

Shootings linked to Tren de Aragua

A week ago, the Justice Department announced that a “high-ranking member” of Tren de Aragua had been arrested in Georgia on a warrant issued by the Chicago police for kidnapping a woman earlier this year.

Ricardo Gonzalez, 32, is suspected of shooting the woman and killing two others in an alley in South Shore on Jan. 28, according to federal authorities. The survivor ran through the neighborhood, pounding on doors and screaming for help.

“This defendant’s crimes against American women are horrific, and he is exactly the type of Alien Enemy the Trump administration is fighting to remove from this country in order to make America safe again,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a written statement.

It’s unclear whether the victims were American citizens.

The Justice Department has said Gonzalez was awaiting extradition to Chicago at the Cobb County Adult Detention Center in Marietta, Georgia.

He had been arrested weeks before the shooting after being pulled over in Belmont Cragin for having a busted tail light, according to an arrest report. Police said his temporary license plates were registered to another vehicle, that he didn’t have insurance and there was an open can of beer in his vehicle’s center console.

Officers didn’t mention any connection to Tren de Aragua. He faces minor charges.

Last year, ICE announced that another member of Tren de Aragua suspected in a Chicago shooting had been arrested. Adelvis Rodriguez-Carmona, 31, from Venezuela, was accused of shooting a transgender immigrant outside a Little Village nightclub on Feb. 4, 2024, the Sun-Times reported. “Bad gay,” Rodriguez-Carmona allegedly said before shooting the woman in her legs and groin, according to police records.

He was arrested while leaving a Maywood courthouse later that month, police and court records show. He had just been ordered released in a gun case that has since been dropped.

Cook County prosecutors wouldn’t charge him in the shooting and urged the police to keep investigating. A law enforcement source said the victim stopped cooperating, in part because she feared Rodriguez-Carmona was connected to Tren de Aragua.

After being arrested again for driving violations, ICE officers detained him on March 11, 2024, and he was brought to the Dodge County Jail in Juneau, Wisconsin.

He was free by that November, when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation announced he had been busted in a sex-trafficking sting at a hotel. He was charged with patronizing a prostitute and possessing drugs and a gun.

The agency’s announcement detailing the operation called him “a known member of Tren de Aragua who is additionally suspected of committing violent crimes in Chicago and New York City.”

David Rausch, director of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, said at the time that Tren de Aragua members “remain transient until they get comfortable.”

“If they get into an area where they feel like they are able to operate [with] impunity, then they will start to dig their heels in, as we have seen in some of the other communities,” Rausch said. “What we’re trying to do — and my purpose was, in introducing this information — was to ensure that all of policing in Tennessee understands we’re not going to let them get their foothold in Tennessee.”

He is being held on $30,000 bail at the Hamilton County Jail in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The fight over flights

A court battle over Trump’s planned deportation flights has temporarily closed off the latest front in his immigration war.

U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an order March 15 barring the Trump administration from carrying out deportations for two weeks under the Alien Enemies Act, a law that gives a president broad powers to detain and deport non-citizens during wartime.

The order was handed down as detainees already were being flown to a brutal prison in El Salvador, and the planes weren’t turned around, as Boasberg ordered.

Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, said March 23 that the detainees had been “designated as terrorists,” linking 240 of them to Tren de Aragua and 21 others to MS-13, a gang started in Los Angeles by Salvadoran immigrants.

Homan said some of the alleged gang members previously were in custody, and others had been ordered deported by an immigration judge or removed under the Alien Enemies Act. He acknowledged that “many gang members don’t have a criminal history,” echoing a sworn declaration issued by an ICE supervisor in a federal court case over the deportation flights.

Robert Cerna, acting field office director of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, told Boasberg that “many” of the alleged Tren de Aragua members removed under the Alien Enemies Act “do not have criminal records in the United States.

“The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat,” Cerna said in the filing on March 17. “In fact, based upon their association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”

On Wednesday, the Trump administration lost its appeal of Boasberg’s temporary ban on deportations.

Other immigrants linked to Tren de Aragua have been sent back to Venezuela and to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, which has housed suspected terrorists for more than two decades.

On March 23, Homan said the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador were linked to Tren de Aragua “based on numerous criminal investigations, on intelligence reports and a lot of work by ICE officers.

“We have to count on social media, we have to count on surveillance techniques, we’ve gotta count on sworn statements from other gang members. We’ve gotta count on wiretaps and Title IIIs,” he said, referring to the law regulating government surveillance. “Everything involved with a criminal investigation comes into play.”

Some men swept up by immigration officials have little or no known criminal background and were wrongfully identified as members of Tren de Aragua based on tattoos, according to court filings by attorneys and a family member.

Jerce Reyes Barrio, a former professional soccer player in Venezuela, was among the group taken to the Salvadoran prison, his attorney Linette Tobin said in a filing in the case challenging the Trump administration’s deportation plans.

A tattoo referring to his favorite soccer team, Real Madrid, and a social media post showing him making hand gestures were used to link him to Tren de Aragua, Tobin said.

“In fact, the gesture is a common one that means ‘I love you’ in sign language and is commonly used as a [rock ‘n’ roll] symbol,” she said.

Tobin said Reyes Barrio fled oppression under Maduro, like other detainees.

Grace Carney, an attorney for a plaintiff in the case described only as G.F.F., said his family left Venezuela “in part due to threats the family faced from Tren de Aragua.” He was specifically targeted by the gang over his sexuality, Carney said.

He was placed on an airplane with other Venezuelans on March 15 but ultimately wasn’t deported, Carney said. An ICE agent told him and other detainees that they had “just won the lottery.”