Tren de Aragua Is Back In The News

In posts like this one a few weeks ago, I've tried to trace the ecosystem by which the Biden administration brought in illegal migrants, not just by letting them through the border, but by recruiting them in their home countries, flying them to the US, settling them in designated communities, giving them quasi-legal protected status, and paying for their food, shelter, transportation, and medical care.

What we still don't know much about is who designed this very complex system. We do know that a key part of it was roughly a dozen "faith based NGOs" that received billions in federal grants to implement the settlement program. Although they represented different denominations with different governing structures, they all appear to have operated in a similar way, settling migrants in specific cities and coordinating with for-profit sweatshop employers, slumlords, and car dealers.

One nationality that keeps reappearing in these accounts is Venezuela. This is partly to be expected, because Venezuelans were singled out under the so-called CHNV program:

Under that program, known as CHNV, a total of 532,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela were allowed to fly to the U.S. after securing a sponsorship from U.S.-based individuals. Upon entry, they were granted immigration parole and allowed to work in the U.S. lawfully for two years.

The "sponsors" appear to have been coordinated by, and closely aligned with, the faith-base NGOs that were implementing the strategy. But the information that keeps coming to light is how coordinated each piece of the overall strategy was, from recruitment in home counties to final placement in US communities. For instance, Venezuelans didn't just randomly turn up, one day in Idaho, the next in New Hampshire. The whole program routed them repeatedly to individual cities where the faith-based NGOs operated. We've heard, for instance, about Aurora, CO and El Paso, TX.

In addition, where groups of resettled Venezuelans turn up, the Tren de Aragua gang turns up with them. According to Newsweek,

In its operations in the U.S., it is believed its members mainly target other Venezuelan migrants, although some members have been linked to recent murders, including Jocelyn Nungaray in Texas and Laken Riley in Georgia.

The same report ran a map of states in which Tren de Aragua is thought to be operating, including Tennessee, where the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation indicates it is present in every major city. Yellow is confirmed, orange is reported, red is unknown:

It seems as if the easiest way to find where Tren de Aragua is active would be to identify the cities in which the faith-based NGOs have been settling Venezuelan migrants, but so far, it doesn't seem as if anyone has thought to do this, although the faith-based NGOs themselves must know perfectly well where they're operating. One previously unsuspected location is Mobile, AL:

Thursday, the FBI Mobile division held a press conference regarding recent arrests.

Investigators say six men named Jose Ramon Rivera-Garcia, Alejandro Jose Gomez Rivera, Jose Antonio Garcia Garcia, Jesus Alberto Queva-Vasquez, Keiber Jose Maiz-Martinez and Kendry Alexander Queva Vasquez are all suspected to be members of Tren de Aragua.

. . . Investigators with the FBI said they had multiple leads in the case, however, the main lead stemmed from an arrest made a month ago. The person arrested was a brother to one of the men and investigators said they were able to connect the dots to his siblings being in the gang.

According to investigators, the six men had tattoos that indicate they are in Tren de Aragua and all lived in Mobile, mostly in the same house.

There are other tantalizing suggestions here. What we've been seeing in all the CHNV resettlement programs, for instance, is the placement of migrants in overcrowded conditions in slum type housing. In this case, at least six gang members were in one house, but we have no idea what the total number of people living there was. But this strongly suggests that the Venezuelans' living arrangements were coodinated by the NGO operating in Mobile, and the NGO probably had a good idea of what was going on.

Another report suggests there was an intentionality at work in every aspect of the program:

According to the FBI, some Venezuelan government officials, in order to erode public safety in the United States, “likely facilitate” the migration of Tren de Aragua gang members to the United States.

Tren de Aragua has been designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration.

. . . The Venezuelan move to destabilize other countries also includes Chile, Ecuador, and Peru, Fox News Digital reported, adding, “The FBI assesses that in the next six to 18 months, Venezuelan government officials likely will attempt to leverage Tren de Aragua members in the United States as proxy actors to threaten, abduct and kill members of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States who are vocal critics of [Venezuala President Nicolás] Maduro and his regime.”

This suggests to me that, for motives that are misguided at best, actors from Venezuela through the US government to NGO workers on the ground in US cities have been making a coordinated, deliberate effort to include Tren de Aragua members among the parcels of migrants that have been flown in under the CHNV program. For instance, what are we to make of this?

The FBI has arrested former New Mexico Magistrate Judge Juan Cano and his wife Nancy Cano for allegedly harboring an illegal alien with suspected ties to Tren de Aragua, a notorious Venezuelan gang known for trafficking, extortion, and violence.

The arrest comes just weeks after Cano resigned from his judicial post following a dramatic federal raid at his Doña Ana County residence, where agents apprehended Cristhian Ortega Lopez, an illegal immigrant now charged with unlawful firearm possession and gang affiliation.

The Gateway Pundit was one of the first outlets to report that longtime Doña Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano — a Democrat and former police officer — abruptly resigned after federal agents arrested an alleged member of the violent Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang at a residence he owns.

. . . Ortega-Lopez, who had unlawfully entered the United States by scaling a barbed-wire fence in Eagle Pass, Texas, was released on so-called “humanitarian parole” due to overcrowding — a tragic consequence of Biden’s wide-open border disaster.

Once in New Mexico, prosecutors allege Ortega-Lopez became acquainted with April Cano, the judge’s stepdaughter, who reportedly owned a cache of firearms and allowed the illegal alien to shoot and pose with the weapons — images that later surfaced on Facebook.

It's hard not to think there's a great deal more to learn here. Is Las Cruces yet another city where an NGO has settled groujps of Venezuelans? Is Ortega-Lopez the only Tren de Aragua member Judge Cano has been associating with? What's going on here?