“We’ve acknowledged it’s likely gang members have and/or are residing at CBZ properties, but as you know from experience you could say the same about a lot of different gangs and a lot of different properties throughout the metro area,” a representative told the outlet. 

Youth gone wild

Meanwhile, Tren de Aragua’s presence has been felt in cities like New York and Chicago, where the gang is actively recruiting juveniles as young as 11 to commit brazen crimes.

Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa told Fox News Digital he’s witnessed TdA members congregate at the former Roosevelt Hotel in New York, which the city has converted into a migrant shelter. More than 210,000 migrants have arrived in the Big Apple since 2022, with the largest share from Venezuela, as the Biden administration has struggled to manage an unprecedented wave of illegal migration across the southern border.

Sliwa, who has followed gang activity in the city for more than four decades, said he observed TdA members on the north side of the hotel who were “scheming, organizing, recruiting” and “pressuring the younger people to join their gang.” 

“And if you didn’t join them, you were against them, just like in a jail situation,” he told Fox News Digital. 

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NYPD officials have blamed young Tren de Aragua members for a string of robberies in Times Square and other landmark locations in the city. 

“It’s shocking to say the least, and we’ve seen a progression with this group,” NYPD Detective Bureau Asst. Chief Jason Savino told “Fox & Friends” Tuesday morning.

The suspected gang members have been postioning pictures and videos of their guns online, according to investigators.

“We know they have access to guns, evident by the fact that they’ve done gunpoint robberies, and they’ve been brazen enough to showcase pistols in and around their social media,” Savino told the New York Post. 

The gang has targeted youth in other parts of the country as well. U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE) said this week that a confirmed TdA member was arrested in Houston for allegedly recruiting middle school students to become new gang members. 

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Sliwa said these “Pee-Wee” criminals have run roughshod over New York City residents without consequence from the law. He cited robberies in Central Park South over the summer, saying that young gangsters operating out of the Watson Hotel on 57th Street would harass locals. 

“They were coming back and forth, robbing, running back to the hotel, eventually to be caught, captured and released, and then to do it all over again,” he said. “And now they’re a force to be reckoned with in Times Square.” 

According to Sliwa, these crimes are a rite of passage before these kids can join the gang as full members. He criticized Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office for failing to keep arrested juvenile offenders detained – but in some cases it is out of the district attorney’s hands. New York raised the age to prosecute a child as an adult to 18 several years ago, which officials have said has made it difficult to keep juvenile offenders off the streets.

“We will continue to work hand in hand with our law enforcement partners to drive down crime in Manhattan, which has decreased 6% this year,” a spokesperson for Bragg’s office said.

Sliwa, who unsuccessfully ran for mayor in 2021, losing to incumbent Eric Adams, said he intends to run for mayor again and would make cracking down on organized crime a priority for city hall.

“We have to work with ICE immediately,” he said, vowing to end New York’s sanctuary city policies, which prohibit local law enforcement from turning over apprehended illegal immigrants for deportation. He credits former President Trump’s immigration and law enforcement policies with taking on MS-13 directly and said a similar approach is needed to defeat Tren de Aragua.

“They are following in the path of MS-13 every step of the way,” Sliwa said. 

Keeping America safe

Law enforcement experts warn that Tren de Aragua is more organized and vicious than even the infamous MS-13. 

John Fabbricatore, who served as an ICE field director and is currently a GOP congressional candidate in Colorado, told Fox News Digital on Wednesday that TdA is not merely a gang. 

“TdA is a true organization. They’re not a gang. They have a better structure than MS-13 ever had,” he said. 

Ken Cuccinelli, a former Virginia attorney general and acting deputy DHS secretary during the Trump administration, told Fox News Digital that TdA’s growth has been “very accelerated” in South America compared to other gangs that have come to the U.S.

“They’ve compressed into four years what MS-13 took 20 years to do in terms of reach across the country, still connected back to their home country and operating as an organized entity,” he said. “They’re outstripping all the other gangs in the radical-ness of what they’re willing to do to Americans in American communities.”

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What can be done to stop them? “What you need to do is overwhelm the force with counter force,” argues Cuccinelli. “And that means bringing in state police, typically, to reinforce your local law enforcement. To really seize all of these people, arrest them on the highest level charges you can within a state.” 

He suggested that prosecutors focus on gun and trespassing charges – which carry mandatory minimum sentences – to get potentially violent criminals off the streets before they can commit more crimes. 

At the federal level, Cuccinelli said Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) ought to make deportations of gang members their “top priority.” He also said local jurisdictions should end sanctuary policies and cooperate with immigration enforcement to deport violent criminal aliens. 

“Clearly the ICE agents have jurisdiction because of the immigration component, which is necessary for them to exercise jurisdiction within the United States. But there are 5,000 HSI agents that can be brought to bear on this problem. HSI alone could bring this gang down if they turned their attention to doing it.” 

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Tren de Aragua’s brutality and rapid growth has not gone unnoticed by the Biden administration.

Heeding the call from Rep. Gonzales and other lawmakers, the Treasury Department in July sanctioned TdA, placing it alongside MS-13 and the Mafia-styled Camorra from Italy on a list of transnational criminal organizations. Federal authorities are currently offering a $12 million reward for the arrest of its three leaders. 

Multiple federal agencies across DHS and DOJ are coordinating with state and local law enforcement to combat TdA and other organized crime. In March 2024, HSI designated TdA as an agency Top Priority Network and the agency coordinates with U.S. attorneys to establish prosecution strategies aimed at taking the gang down, according to Torres. 

But critics like Trump accuse the administration of not doing enough. The Republican candidate announced last week that he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target and dismantle “every illegal migrant criminal network operating on American soil.” 

Trump said, if elected, the federal government would “send elite squads of ICE, Border Patrol and federal law enforcement officers to hunt down, arrest and deport every last illegal alien gang member until there is not a single one left in this country.” 

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has defended the Biden-Harris administration’s law enforcement efforts in response to GOP critics, who charge the president has permitted criminal organizations to invade the U.S. across the southern border. 

“We are indeed doing everything we can to dismantle criminal gangs and transnational criminal organizations,” Mayorkas said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” “Quite frankly, we’ve devoted an unprecedented level of resources and personnel and focus to this effort. This is not a new phenomenon.”

Gonzales praised the FBI’s anti-gang task force as the ideal tool to combine federal, state and local resources to combat organized crime. 

“Just recently in El Paso, the FBI rounded up dozens via this anti-gang task force. We don’t have to recreate the wheel,” he said. “We have to utilize the tools we have to go after these people, just like we’ve done with MS-13 in some of these other areas.” 

But there is always room for improvement. The Texas congressman has proposed legislation that would require state, local and federal law enforcement agencies to share intelligence on convicted criminals, which could help identify Tren de Aragua members as targets for deportation.

“Regardless of whatever a city’s policy or politics are, keeping America safe, to me, trumps all of that. And the best way to do that is to mandate that these law enforcement agencies interact,” Gonzales said. 

Fox News Digital’s Jasmine Baehr, Christina Coulter, Michael Ruiz and the Associated Press contributed to this report.