Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro / Screenshot
THE GATEWAY PUNDIT | Published March 18, 2025
Venezuela’s socialist regime has compared the deportation of the country’s most violent gangsters to slavery and the Holocaust.
Hundreds of mostly Venezuelan gangsters belonging to the transnational organization Tren de Aragua were deported to El Salvador over the weekend after President Trump invoked the Foreign Enemy Act of 1798 to help speed up the deportation of illegal aliens and violent criminals.
In addition to violent gangsters, there are also millions of Venezuelans who have fled the economic and humanitarian crisis in their homeland. Many entered the U.S. illegally at the invitation of the Biden regime.
In a lengthy statement published on Sunday evening by the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry, the Maduro regime denounced the invocation as a “crime against humanity” and claimed that Venezuelan migrants were “hardworking, dignified, and honest men and women.”
The statement read:
The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela categorically and forcefully rejects the proclamation issued by the government of the United States, which infamously and unjustly criminalizes Venezuelan migration in an act that evokes the darkest episodes in human history, from slavery to the horrors of Nazi concentration camps.
The Foreign Enemy Act of 1798, upon which this presidential order is based, is an outdated law that not only violates fundamental and current laws of the United States of America but also breaches international legal frameworks regarding human rights.
Its attempted application constitutes a crime against humanity.
The Venezuelan migrant who crossed our borders in search of life alternatives did so for economic reasons, consequences of the hardships inflicted upon our people by the criminal blockade on our economy, imposed by Western governments against Venezuelan society to further their regime change agenda.
The vast majority of these migrants are hardworking, dignified, and honest men and women; they are not terrorists, criminals, nor “foreign enemies.” They are victims.
Venezuela rejects the persecution of our compatriots, including the expropriation of their personal belongings, assets, businesses, vehicles, and bank accounts.
We strongly denounce that our citizens in the United States are being subjected to harassment in their workplaces, schools, churches, hospitals, and public spaces.
With profound indignation, we condemn the threat to abduct children under 14 years of age; never before in history has an official document so brazenly attempted to label children as members of terrorist groups, deeming them criminals solely for being Venezuelan.
While the Trump administration is merely enforcing the law against people who have no right to be in the United States, perhaps the greatest irony of all is the fact that it is Venezuela that has brutally repressed its citizens over the past three decades.
Back in 2020, the left-wing former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet published a United Nations report that concluded the regime was guilty of crimes against humanity, mainly through thousands of extrajudicial killings and the systematic use of torture against political prisoners.
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SOURCE: www.thegatewaypundit.com
RELATED: Red state hunts Tren de Aragua terrorists as judges light ‘credibility on fire’ fighting deportations: senator
Tennessee officials arrested 8 TdA members last month for allegedly operating sex trafficking ring in Nashville
Map of Tren de Aragua presence in the United States as of December 2024. (Fox News Digital)
FOX NEWS | Published March 18, 2025
Tennessee officials are waging their own battle against members of a violent Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua as left-leaning officials push back on deportations of illegal immigrants, including gang members.
The Trump administration recently deported nearly 240 TdA members to El Salvador — an action that came despite U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s order to halt deportations of illegal immigrants under a wartime powers act that President Donald Trump invoked on Friday.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., says “Tren de Aragua has plagued communities across the country with violent crime—including in Tennessee, where its members established a transnational sex trafficking ring that forced women into modern-day slavery.” (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images)
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 allows the deportation of natives and citizens of an enemy nation without a hearing and has been invoked three times before, during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II.
“President Trump has the complete, constitutional authority to deport criminal illegal aliens, especially the members of Foreign Terrorist Organizations like Tren de Aragua,” Republican Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn told Fox News Digital in a statement. “With his deportation of hundreds of gang members to El Salvador, the President is fully complying with judicial orders and upholding the rule of law.”
The senator added that TdA “has plagued communities across the country with violent crime—including in Tennessee, where its members established a transnational sex trafficking ring that forced women into modern-day slavery.”
“These violent criminals have no right to be in our country, and activist judges who try to block their lawful deportation are lighting their credibility on fire.”
An ICE officer and an agent with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations prepare to transport an illegal alien from Venezuela with ties to the Tren da Aragua gang. She was arrested for her role in an illegal commercial sex and sex-trafficking enterprise out of Nashville motels from July 2022 through March 2024. (ICE)
The Department of State designated TdA as a foreign terrorist organization on Feb. 20. The gang has thousands of members, many of whom the Trump administration says have unlawfully infiltrated the United States from South and Central America and are “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States,” in multiple states, with strongholds in places like Colorado and New York.
The White House on Sunday said TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, a Venezuelan-based, narco-terrorism gang sponsored by the Nicolás Maduro regime. The gang is known for its brutal crimes, including murders, kidnappings, extortion, human and drug trafficking. TdA’s mass migration to the United States will further the Maduro regime’s objectives of harming U.S. citizens and undermining public safety, according to the White House.
TdA grew significantly while Tareck El Aissami served as governor of Aragua between 2012 and 2017, when El Aissami was appointed as vice president of Venezuela.
“What you’re really looking at is the result of a permissive environment,” former DEA agent Wesley Tabor said. “And so … when TdA first started coming into the United States, they were kind of collating into the big cities. You got Chicago, you got New York, you got El Paso, you got some other cities. But eventually what happened is: when the pressure was turned on after committing crimes or they had to flee for whatever reason, they were looking for a quieter area to go to.”
“[T]hey were looking for a quieter area to go to.”
In these “quieter” states and cities, TdA members then establish networks with family members and other connections, bringing other TdA members with them to those places.
TdA is different from other gangs like MS-13 in the sense that members do not have specific identifiers like tattoos linking them to the gang, and they commit a variety of crimes that may go undetected as being gang-related: everything from kidnapping to murder to sexual assault, Tabor explained.
Tabor added that the Maduro regime sent groups of people from Venezuelan prisons and insane asylums through Central America and into the United States with the purpose of destroying communities.
“Many of these Venezuelan criminals … were sent here for a purpose from Venezuela, sent by the Maduro regime.”
“And then, low and behold, you find out that many of them, not all of them, but many of them, are going to be Tren de Aragua members,” he said. “And then you start seeing these sporadic reportings becoming more and more frequent. And that just snowballs.”
On Feb. 14, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI) along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced the arrests of eight TdA members in Tennessee, who are accused of trafficking women and girls across the border as part of a transnational commercial sex enterprise in Nashville.
‘ESCALATING THREAT’: RISE OF VENEZUELAN STREET GANG SPARKS ALARM THROUGHOUT US
Two of eight TdA members accused of organizing a sex trafficking ring in Nashville (TBI)
The eight defendants allegedly operated an illegal commercial sex and sex trafficking enterprise out of Nashville motels between July 2022 and March 2024, ICE said in a press release, citing court documents.
“The success of this operation to stop Tren da Aragua operating in our communities is a significant step forward in our ongoing battle against human trafficking and transnational organized crime,” ICE Homeland Security Investigations Nashville Special Agent in Charge Rana Saoud said in a Feb. 14 statement. “This investigation exemplifies the importance of collaboration among local, state, and federal agencies in ending these crimes in our communities. Human exploitation leaves a trail of suffering in its wake.”
TBI Director David Rausch said the state agency would not “allow TdA – or any criminal organization – to get a stronghold in Tennessee.”
VIOLENT VENEZUELAN GANG TREN DE ARAGUA TERRORIZING AMERICANS IN AT LEAST 19 STATES
ICE officers get fingerprints on one of the known or suspected associates of the Venezuelan Tren da Aragua gang after a successful joint operation to dismantle an illegal commercial sex and sex trafficking enterprise out of Nashville motels from July 2022 through March 2024. (ICE)
“We are thankful for our local, state, and federal partners who joined us in investigating this case, and we stand prepared to continue aggressively investigating human trafficking in our state, holding traffickers and buyers accountable and helping victims take their first steps toward becoming survivors,” he said.
U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee Robert E. McGuire said officials “are coming after transnational criminal organizations like TdA, but this case shows that we will also do whatever it takes to stop those who would traffic women and girls no matter who is behind their suffering.”
Last year, Tennessee officials made two other significant TdA arrests.
WHO IS TREN DE ARAGUA? VICIOUS VENEZUELAN GANG ‘FOLLOWING IN THE PATH OF MS-13’ IN AMERICA
Four suspects, including a Tren de Aragua member, have been arrested in Hamilton County, Tennessee, in a sex-trafficking sting. (Hamilton County/Valerie Schremp Hahn/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Tribune News Service)
On Nov. 19, 2024, ICE ERO officials arrested Luis Alejandro Ruiz-Godoy, who was wanted on outstanding international warrants, a spokesperson with the Memphis Police Department said. Days later FBI officials arrested four individuals, including one Tren de Aragua member, in a Chattanooga sex trafficking sting.
Tennessee’s Human Trafficking Task Force obtained information that led them to a hotel in Hamilton County, where law enforcement encountered the four suspects and confirmed that they were part of a human sex trafficking operation.
Tabor said it is “100%” more difficult for law enforcement from smaller cities and states that do not typically deal with gangs like TdA to identify and capture its members than in larger cities like New York, Chicago and Houston.
“What you’re seeing is these gangs and associated criminals were capitalizing on the fact that many of these small-town sheriffs’ offices and metropolitan police departments had no clue who they were,” the former DEA agent explained. “They had no idea how to get help to find out who these people were because the federal government didn’t care. And all that has changed since Trump came in.”
By invoking the Foreign Enemies Act, the administration has made it easier to cut “through a lot of red tape” to detain TdA members, Tabor said.
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SOURCE: www.foxnews.com
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