The Trump administration has arrested 1,296 members of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan prison gang that spread across America after the Biden-era border surge, according to new federal figures.
The numbers come from the Homeland Security Task Forces that President Trump created in his first days back in office. The data, released for the first time to the Washington Examiner, covers Jan. 20, 2025, through Oct. 8, 2026. Over that same stretch, nearly 350 Tren de Aragua members and associates have been charged with federal crimes.
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis called it the largest campaign against transnational crime in U.S. history. She said it is one reason violent crime has fallen nationwide since 2025.
“The days of vicious gangs, like TdA, profiting off of the death of American citizens is over,” Bis said.
What the task forces do
A January 2025 executive order created the task forces, pairing the Department of Homeland Security with the Justice Department. Their job is to identify, locate and remove criminal rings and terrorist groups operating inside American communities. Tren de Aragua sits near the top of that list.
The gang is not a street crew. Justice Department spokeswoman Nicole Navas Oxman said its members have been charged with murder, sex trafficking, kidnapping, weapons and drug trafficking, robbery and financial crimes. An ICE spokesperson said agents have run into Tren de Aragua members in almost every state, calling it “one of the most vicious gangs on planet earth.”
Bis put the message to the gang plainly: “we will dismantle your networks, seize your profits, and put the safety of the American people first.”
How the gang got here
Tren de Aragua started about a decade ago inside a Venezuelan prison. From there it spread through Venezuela and South America, and then into the United States.
The opening came at the southern border. From January 2021 through September 2024, about 700,000 Venezuelans were encountered there, according to the Examiner. Venezuela does not share crime records with the U.S. and refused to take back its citizens. With limited detention space, most of those migrants were released into the country.
Former Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Texas Republican whose district once covered 800 miles of the border, said the group was known “to rape children, murder, and commit nearly every other crime under the sun.”
Americans have paid for that policy. In February 2024, nursing student Laken Riley was murdered while jogging in Georgia. The man identified as the suspect, Venezuelan national Jose Ibarra, is a reported Tren de Aragua member.
In June 2026, four gang members who had crossed illegally under Biden and been released at the border pleaded guilty to a 2024 double murder in the Bronx. Three of them had already been ordered deported. ICE could not pick them up because of a backlog of 1.5 million deportation cases.
From a terror label to a battlefield strike
The Biden administration labeled Tren de Aragua a transnational criminal organization in 2024, and the Treasury Department sanctioned it. The Trump administration went further. In February 2025, at the President’s direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated the gang and several Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
Then the pressure moved to the gang’s leadership. In June 2026, Tren de Aragua’s leader, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, known as “Niño Guerrero,” was killed in a joint U.S.-Venezuelan military strike.
“At my direction, the United States Southern Command delivered a swift and lethal kinetic strike,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
This month the Justice Department announced the capture of Anibal Alexander Canelon Aguirre, who had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list since March. He is alleged to have masterminded malware used to steal cash from ATMs in a $40 million scheme.
More officers on the street
The arrests track with a bigger shift at ICE. The administration’s focus on deportations has more than doubled the number of ICE deportation officers nationwide, the Examiner reported, driving up both arrests and removals.
One honest gap remains. No one can say exactly how many Tren de Aragua members are still in the country, a point Legal Insurrection’s Mary Chastain made in her write-up of the new numbers.
The bottom line
For four years, Washington let hundreds of thousands of people across the border with no way to check their records, and a violent prison gang came along with them. Families like Laken Riley’s paid the price, and so did crime victims in the Bronx whose killers had already been ordered out of the country.
This administration treated the problem as a national security threat, not a talking point. It labeled the gang a terrorist group, built task forces to hunt it down, took out its leader and has now arrested nearly 1,300 members. That is what enforcing the law looks like.
The job isn’t finished, and the next test is keeping the pressure on until the network is gone for good. But the direction is clear: the people sworn to protect Americans are finally being allowed to do it.