The brutal Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua (TdA), which has rapidly grown in recent years and is wreaking havoc in communities nationwide, is using tech savvy to best its rivals and infiltrate American communities, experts say.
“Part of their recruitment process is to get individuals with IT backgrounds so that not only are they maintaining a presence on social media to keep their ear to the ground, they’re also getting and recruiting and exploiting individuals with IT backgrounds so that they can operate digitally more easily in their marketing and advertising of individuals in the sex trade [and] sex trafficking,” said Ali Hopper, a researcher from the nonprofit GUARD Against Trafficking.
Jarrod Sadulski founded GUARD Against Trafficking, and he and Hopper travel to prisons on the southwest border, in Mexico and Central America, where they interview imprisoned former gang and cartel members for research purposes.
“They absorb people into the ranks, sometimes by force,” Sadulski said. “For example, if they come across somebody in a Venezuelan community that they’ve embedded themselves in and that person has IT skills or some specific set of unique skills, they’ll draw in that person, even if it’s unwillingly, into their enterprise, into their gang, because of that special skill set that they have. So that speaks to their sophistication.”
Hopper said that much like organized cartels, TdA uses a specific cloud communication style as a way of avoiding digital surveillance while directing gang activities, unlike typical gangs.
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Part of that style involves using unique imagery. Hopper said the gang sends images back and forth without text and communicates via symbols in the background of the images to avoid digital detection.
Other gangs will simply use email, according to Sadulski and Hopper, exposing themselves to far more risk.
TdA also has its own online language.
“They like to resort to either communicating through a photo background … an item in the background or through emojis,” Hopper said. “It’s a whole other language where emojis mean different things. And so that doesn’t really get flagged by a platform system because it’s not being written. It is a language communicated through emojis or communicated through an actual image rather than the text below or the image.”
Another part of TdA’s operational strategy that allows the organization to rapidly gain a foothold in American communities is a willingness to partner with local street gangs, a mutually beneficial arrangement that allows the local gangs to make more money on the backs of TdA.
“They’ll come into a large city, hide themselves within the Venezuelan population but then work with the local gangs in that area, whether it’s Blood group, Crips or other gangs that [are] more specific to that community and basically align themselves to make profits through human trafficking, through drug trafficking, through murder-for-hire in conjunction with these other gangs versus warring with them,” Sadulski said.
In return, TdA uses these partnerships to closely study local police and criminal justice trends.
“They align themselves with these gangs to understand the market in that area, the trade routes [and] who’s who in that community,” Hopper said. “So they align themselves with these gangs and work with them at lower levels to start to understand the lay of the land and the area in which they work.”
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“On top of that, that allows them the time to study the politics in that area,” he said. “They’re actually studying the politics of the area. They study the political climate, they study law enforcement, their routes, where they’re going, where they patrol, where they don’t patrol [and] what crimes are being prosecuted, what crimes are seen as lower level and not worth prosecuting.”
Sadulski and Hopper noted that even with their sophistication, the gang is still ultraviolent and willing to impulsively commit heinous crimes without prior planning.
One such crime recently occurred when 11 teen TdA members, including several minors, attacked New York City Police Department officers in Times Square.
“It’s horrific enough to be a victim of a crime,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams said of the attack. “But when someone openly assaults a police officer, you are attacking our symbol of safety, and it cannot be tolerated.
“People who prey on innocent people must be held accountable. They must be brought to justice.”
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