The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) told Governor Bill Lee on Tuesday the expanding Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is now present in all of Tennessee’s “major cities,” and warned the group is engaged in human trafficking, organized retail theft, and drug trafficking nationwide.
On Wednesday, TBI communications director Josh DeVine confirmed to The Tennessee Star the bureau “has increased concerns about the potential for crime connected to Tren de Aragua (TdA), a prominent, violent Venezuelan transnational gang.”
DeVine told The Star the first crime TBI identified established is connected to Tren de Aragua was a human trafficking case in 2023, and explained is currently mostly engaged in human trafficking within Tennessee.
“At this time, intelligence suggests the gang is predominantly still involved in fostering human trafficking in Tennessee, but the known track record of the gang’s involvement in theft and drug crimes elsewhere continues to inform our concerted efforts to better understand and more consistently identify Tennessee crimes that may be connected to TdA,” he told The Star.
The remarks come after TBI Director David Rausch told Lee on Tuesday that Tren de Aragua typically establishes a presence in a specific region by trafficking abducted people from Venezuela to the United States, where the gang then presses its victims into groups that commit organized retail theft, targeting American businesses, before establishing a drug trade.
“They are present, ever present unfortunately, in our country and Tennessee,” Rausch said during the TBI budget hearing. “We first saw them a couple years ago, where we uncovered a group here in a human trafficking operation. In that operation, we recognized a number of members here trafficking females that they had abducted from Venezuela and brought them here.”
“We were able to capture a number of them, but many of them fled, and they were out of Tennessee,” said Rausch. “But now they are back. They are back in all of our major cities.”
The director explained, “they will get engaged in organized retail theft. That becomes their next phase. They’ll gather these individuals they bring here illegally, and put them into our shopping areas and steal. The next trade they move into is the drug trade. They will, and they have, taken on the cartel head on.”
Tren de Aragua is the same Venezuelan gang that allegedly took over an apartment complex in Colorado, where gang members allegedly beat a worker. The apartment owner claimed the gang first tried to extort him.
While previous reporting has suggested members of Tren de Aragua can be identified by tattoos, DeVine told The Star this may not be true and instead urged Tennesseans and the general public to be aware of warning signs for human trafficking.
The Department of Homeland Security estimated in an October report that at least 600 members of Tren de Aragua are present throughout the United States, but experts warned that number may be drastically under reported due to the lack of information available about many who crossed into the country illegally during the Biden-Harris administration.
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, and also reports for The Pennsylvania Daily Star and The Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
