The first RICO racketeering charges against members and associates of the migrant terrorist group Tren de Aragua were filed this week in New York.

A statement by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said that the case is part of “Operation Take Back America,” which it said is a “nationwide initiative that marshals the full resources of the Justice Department to repel the invasion of illegal immigration, achieve the total elimination of cartels and transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), and protect our communities from the perpetrators of violent crime.”

According to the statement, the charges filed against 27 alleged current and former Tren de Aragua (TdA) members include human smuggling, sex trafficking and murder.

“Today, we have filed charges against 27 alleged members, former members, and associates of Tren de Aragua, for committing murders and shootings, forcing young women trafficked from Venezuela into commercial sex work, robbing and extorting small businesses, and selling ‘tusi,’ a pink powdery drug that has become their calling card,” announced Matthew Podolsky, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. 

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Podolsky said that the indictments “make clear that this Office will work tirelessly to keep the law-abiding residents of New York City safe, and hold accountable those who bring violence to our streets.”

The charges were filed in two separate indictments, the first against six alleged current members of Tren de Aragua and the second against 21 alleged members and associates of a splinter gang known as “Anti-Tren,” which consists of former TdA members.

The Trump State Department has designated Tren de Aragua, as well as several other migrant gangs present throughout the U.S., as foreign terrorist organizations.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said that 21 of the 27 alleged gang members and associates are currently in federal custody. The statement said that 16 were already in federal criminal, immigration, or state custody and five were arrested over the last couple of days.

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DHS Secretary Kristi Noem toured the El Salvador prison holding hundreds of alleged members of Tren de Aragua who were deported from the U.S. (Credit: Pool)

Most of the alleged gang members are in their twenties, with the oldest being 44. Many are facing multiple life in prison sentences if they are found guilty.

Charges include racketeering, sex trafficking, alien importation, drug trafficking and carjacking conspiracy, robbery, illegal firearms possession and use and extortion.

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Among the most egregious of the charges included in the indictments are the smuggling of “multadas” – indentured sex workers – from Venezuela into Peru and the U.S. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office statement, both TdA and Anti-Tren operate keep the multadas trapped in a life of sex slavery by threatening to kill them and their families and by assaulting, shooting and killing them and tracking down those who attempted to flee.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi commented on the RICO charges, saying: “Today’s indictments and arrests span three states and will devastate TdA’s infrastructure as we work to completely dismantle and purge this organization from our country.” 

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Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks during a news conference at the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, Wednesday, April 16, 2025.  (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

“Tren de Aragua is not just a street gang,” said Bondi. “It is a highly structured terrorist organization that has destroyed American families with brutal violence, engaged in human trafficking, and spread deadly drugs through our communities.”

New York Police Department Commissioner Jessica Tisch also praised the operations, saying that “for the first time ever, TdA is being named and charged as the criminal enterprise that it is.”

“This gang has shown zero regard for the safety of New Yorkers,” said Tisch. “As alleged in the indictment, these defendants wreaked havoc in our communities, trafficking women for sexual exploitation, flooding our streets with drugs, and committing violent crimes with illegal guns. Thanks to the dedicated members of the NYPD and the important work of our federal partners, their time is up.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office statement also mentioned that this case received significant support from Joint Task Force Vulcan, a collection of U.S. attorneys’ offices and law enforcement agencies that was created in 2019 to eradicate the Salvadoran gang MS-13 and has now expanded to target Tren de Aragua. 

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court justices sounded ready on Tuesday to give parents a constitutional right to opt out of public school lessons for their children that offend their religious beliefs.

At issue are new “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks used for classroom reading for pre-kindergarten to 5th grade in Montgomery County, Md., a suburb of Washington where three justices reside.

In recent years, the court’s six conservatives have invoked the “free exercise of religion” to protect Catholic schools from illegal job-bias claims from teachers and to give parents an equal right to use state grants to send their children to religious schools.

During an argument on Tuesday, they strongly suggested they would extend religious liberty rights to parents with children in public schools.

“They are not asking to change what is taught in the classroom,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh told an attorney for the court.

“As a lifelong resident of the county, I’m mystified at how it came to this. They had promised parents they would be notified and allowed to opt out” if they objected to the new storybooks, he said. “But the next day, they changed the rule.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch also live in Montgomery County, and both have been reliable supporters of religious liberty claims.

Nearly every state, including Maryland and California, has a law that allows parents to opt out of sex education classes for their children.

When the new storybooks were introduced in the fall of 2022, parents were told their young children could be removed from those lessons. But when “unsustainably high numbers” of children were absent, the school board revoked the opt-out rule.

They explained this state rule applied to older students and sex education, but not to reading lessons for elementary children.

In reaction, a group of Muslim, Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox parents filed a suit in federal court, seeking an order that would allow their children to be removed from class during the reading lessons.

They said the books conflicted with the religious and moral views they taught their children.

A federal judge and the 4th Circuit Court refused to intervene. Those judges said the “free exercise” of religion protects people from being forced to change their conduct or their beliefs, neither of which were at issue in the school case.

But the Supreme Court voted to hear the parents’ appeal in the case of Mahmoud vs. Taylor.

Representing the parents, Eric Baxter, an attorney for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, stressed they “were not objecting to books being on the shelf or in the library. No student has a right to tell the school which books to choose,” he said. “Here, the school board is imposing indoctrination on these children.”

Alan Shoenfeld, an attorney for the school board, said its goal for the new storybooks was “to foster mutual respect. The lesson is that they should treat their peers with respect.”

He cautioned the court against adding a broad new right for parents and students to object to ideas or messages that offend them.

The Becket attorneys in their legal brief described seven books they found objectionable.

One of them, “Pride Puppy,” is a picture book directed at 3- and 4-year-olds. It “describes a Pride parade and what a child might find there,” they said. “The book invites students barely old enough to tie their own shoes to search for images of ‘underwear,’ ‘leather,’ ‘lip ring,’ [drag] king’ and [drag] queen.’”

Another — “Love, Violet” — is about two young girls and their same-sex playground romance.

“Born Ready” tells the story of a biological girl named Penelope who identifies as a boy.

“Intersection Allies” is a picture book also intended for early elementary school classes.

“It invites children to ponder what it means to be ‘transgender’ or ‘non-binary’ and asks ‘what pronouns fit you?’” they said. Teachers were told “to instruct students that, at birth, doctors ‘guess about our gender,’ but ‘[w]e know ourselves best.’”

They said teachers were instructed to “disrupt the either/or thinking” of elementary students about biological sex.

After the case reached the Supreme Court, two of the seven books were dropped by the school board, including “Pride Puppy.”