Tren de Aragua has already established itself in these sixteen states, Homeland Security warns

The brutal Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua has now expanded its territory into at least 16 U.S. states — an area that includes half the U.S. population, The Post has learned.

Homeland Security officials were warned in an Internal Department intelligence memo last week about TdA’s growing presence across the country, most recently in: Washington, DC; Virginia; Montana and Wyoming.

According to the memo and previous reporting from The Post, the gang already has a foothold in New York, New Jersey, California, Florida, Illinois, Georgia, Louisiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin and Colorado.

The gang has only increased its “violent tendencies” as it spreads, the memo said.

Tren de Aragua’s arrival in the nation’s capital and nearby Virginia coincided with an “increase in migrant populations” there, the memo said.

“As the population of Venezuelan nationals continues to increase, the potential for violent TdA migrants is highly likely,” the memo warned.

In a run-in with the killer gang in Virginia, police in Fairfax County arrested three suspected members for shoplifting in August 2023.

One of the suspects had a fake Venezuelan ID and all three had the gang’s signature tattoos.

The gang’s members focus on the D.C. area because they can easily travel to nearby suburbs in northern Virginia to carry out thefts, robberies and assaults, the memo said.

Its members are increasingly involved in “lower-level fraud and theft,” sending their stolen money “back to South America as a means to finance even more criminal enterprises,” the memo said.

In one case cited in the document, a suspected Tren de Aragua member withdrew $118,000 from a Florida bank account using “fraudulent deposits by check” and transferred the money to bank accounts in Venezuela before any fraud was discovered.

The sheriff of Wyoming’s most populous county told The Post on Monday that while he “wouldn’t say they have established a presence” in the western state, he is currently holding a suspected TdA member in his jail.

“We have an individual in our jail suspected of being a TDA who is being held for trial in December for being in possession of a car that was stolen in Colorado,” Laramie County Sheriff Brian Kozak said.

“This is the only arrest of a possible TdA member in Wyoming, and he was just passing through when he was arrested. We have not seen an increase in the number of Venezuelan immigrants in Wyoming, especially of the criminal gang type,” he emphasized.

TdA members have embedded themselves in the waves of millions of migrants crossing the US-Mexico border during the Biden-Harris administration. Because there was no information sharing between the US and Venezuela to track down the gang members, they were easily released into the US, according to US Border Patrol sources.

Complicating the disastrous situation is the fraught relationship between the Biden-Harris administration and Venezuela’s Maduro regime, which refuses to accept deportation flights bringing Venezuelans from the US back to the South American country.

President-elect Donald Trump has said that the crackdown on Tren de Aragua will be a top priority for his administration, which he says will carry out a historic “mass deportation” that will involve not only ICE but also the US military.

In New York, TdA members have been involved in shooting officers, assaults, robberies and smuggling weapons into migrant shelters. The gang also allegedly engaged in the sex trafficking of migrant women on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens.

Beyond Democratic sanctuary cities and states, TdA has established itself in other unlikely parts of the country. Tennessee Bureau of Investigation Director David Rausch told Fox & Friends on Friday that the gang runs human trafficking rings in Nashville, Memphis, Knoxville and Chattanooga.

“They go from human trafficking to theft to organized retail crime, and then they get into the drug trade, taking on the cartels in very violent, bloody battles that they’ve had,” Rausch said.