The Department of Justice has filed murder and kidnapping charges against eight alleged members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. The charges were brought in two separate cases. In one case, four men allegedly murdered a father in front of his teenage daughter outside Dallas, Texas, while in the other case, three men were accused of kidnapping a man in Chicago before beating and shooting him to death.
The eight defendants all crossed the U.S.-Mexico border between December 2021 and April 2024. According to the authorities, the father in Texas should be alive today, and his daughter and nephew should have never been kidnapped. The young victim in Chicago should also be alive.
U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould, who leads Texas' Northern District, described the events leading up to the murder of the father and his children. The four alleged TdA members kidnapped them all in the middle of the night and demanded money from the father. Once the TDA members realized the man could not pay them any money, they pulled over by a bridge in Dallas and told the man to jump off. When he refused to do so and attempted to flee, a TDA member gunned him down execution style in front of the two children.
A Texas grand jury indicted the four men involved, as well as a fifth man involved in other related crimes, for murder, kidnapping, and ATM jackpotting. One of the men indicted was a high-ranking TdA official.
In a separate case, the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago filed charges against three alleged TdA members who are accused of murdering a man in May. The three defendants forced the victim into their car while he was walking in a park, drove him to a Chicago apartment, tied his wrists, and left him for hours. After that, the men transported him to an abandoned building, where they shot him in the head and body and left him in a bathtub.
FBI Director Kash Patel praised federal law enforcement for increasing arrests of violent gang members under the previous administration. Since then, authorities have arrested 29,000 violent gang members, with a 519% increase in arrests specifically related to Tren de Aragua.
Tren de Aragua was formed around 2014 inside the Tocorón Prison in Aragua, a state in Venezuela. It has since grown into a transnational criminal organization, tied to sex trafficking, drug trafficking, kidnappings, murders, and other crimes. The gang has been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department since February 2025.
