How the Trump Administration declared war on Venezuelan migrants in the U.S.September 8, 2025“It was a kidnapping,” Deicy Aldana said after her partner, Andrés Guillermo Morales Rolón, was sent to El Salvador.Photograph by Fabiola Ferrero for The New YorkerThe plane took off from Texas just before five-thirty on the evening of March 15th. By then, Yoderlyn Daviana Acosta Peña, a twenty-one-year-old from Caracas, had been wearing chains around her ankles and wrists for ten hours. Her skin was cut and irritated, and yet she felt relieved, even excited. Her boyfriend was sitting near the back of the aircraft. After six weeks in multiple immigration jails, she’d been told—along with the other passengers, including seven women and dozens of men, most of them Venezuelan—that they were finally being deported.A year and a half earlier, Acosta Peña, the eldest of seven siblings, had left Venezuela with one of her brothers to earn money to send home to their family. The trip lasted four months and spanned seven countries. In Honduras, after sudden bouts of nausea, she learned that she was pregnant. When Acosta Peña and her brother turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents in Eagle Pass, Texas, she was entering her third trimester and determined to reach Chicago, a sanctuary city where, she’d learned from TikTok, she could get medical attention and start to look for work. The governor of Texas was sending migrants there on buses. Three days later, she had a bed in one of the city’s shelters. At a nearby medical clinic, she miscarried.Maikol Gabriel López Lizano was two years older than Acosta Peña, warm and polite. Originally from La Guaira, on Venezuela’s central coast, he had left the country in 2019, with his mother and four siblings, because, he told me, “there’s no future for us there.” After living in Peru for three years, he decided to travel north. He and Acosta Peña met in another migrant shelter in Chicago. López Lizano spoke with a kind of halting formality, which charmed her. They found steady jobs—he in a mechanic’s garage, she in a factory that molded plastics—and moved in together in January of 2025, after dating for a few months.On February 1st, less than two weeks into Donald Trump’s second term, Acosta Peña and López Lizano were arrested by immigration officers at a service area outside Chicago. The couple were planning to move to Denver, where López Lizano’s mother lived, and they were running errands to prepare for the trip. “I’d been stopped before,” Acosta Peña told me. “All I had to do was show my immigration papers.” She kept them in her purse; one document authorized her to work and another listed the date of her immigration hearing, which was scheduled for October, 2027. But the officers asked a question that confused her. “I have eleven tattoos,” she told me. “They asked me if I could verify them.”Most detainees in American immigration facilities are given a uniform in a particular color. Blue jumpsuits indicate an immigration infraction or a minor criminal charge; red ones denote a more serious crime. During her first month in detention, as Acosta Peña was moved among jails in Indiana, Kentucky, and Wisconsin, she was dressed in blue. On March 9th, when she was sent to Laredo, Texas, her uniform changed to red. It was there that she learned the government was accusing her of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, an allegation she found absurd.At the Laredo detention center, the men and women were held in separate wings. Acosta Peña joined a group of seventeen Venezuelan women, some of whom had been jailed for more than six months. Within the Department of Homeland Security, Venezuelans had a reputation for being “hard to deal with,” a former official told me. “They were called los hijos de Chávez”—the children of Hugo Chávez, the country’s anti-imperialist former President—“because Chávez put this idea in their minds that the U.S. owed them something, that the U.S. was oppressing them.” In Laredo, according to the women, the guards regularly withheld food and medicine. One of the women later told a Venezuelan journalist that she was dragged into an isolation cell known as el hueco, or the hole, as punishment for asking a guard not to throw away her food. “I’m just doing my job,” the guard told her. (D.H.S. denied the existence of “subprime conditions” at Laredo and said any allegation that ICE withheld food or medicine was false.)“I’m afraid you need sunglasses.”Cartoon by Liana FinckTwo days after Acosta Peña arrived in Laredo, a prison official said that she was being sent to Venezuela. On the morning of March 15th, the women were shackled and taken from their cells by ICE officers, who seemed rushed and slightly flustered. Of the eighteen women at the detention center, only eight of them, including Acosta Peña, were led to a bus that would bring them to the airport. “Where are the others?” one of the women asked. An official replied, “There isn’t enough space on the plane for everyone.” The bus left for Harlingen, a few hours away, where, later that afternoon, the women were taken onto a plane emblazoned with the letter “X”—for GlobalX, a charter airline.Eighty-three detainees were on board, most of them Venezuelan men, including López Lizano. There were twenty-eight guards. The plane’s window shades remained closed for the entire flight, and a guard at the front of the plane shouted at anyone who spoke. Two hours after taking off, the plane landed in Honduras, where it sat on the tarmac for more than three hours. Just after midnight, it touched down for a second time. Acosta Peña, who was in a window seat, lifted the shade. “All I saw was puro monte,” she told me—the sticks. Agents dressed in black, with masks covering their faces, stood in formation on the tarmac. “This isn’t Venezuela!” she shouted.ICE officials began passing out papers with text in untranslated English, which the passengers were told to sign. One woman did so in a panic. Acosta Peña refused. Another detainee, who could read English, told the group, “Don’t sign this! It says that we’re members of Tren de Aragua.”A day earlier, Trump had signed, in secret, a proclamation that authorized the government, under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to transfer suspected Tren de Aragua members out of the country without due process. “Evidence irrefutably demonstrates that TdA has invaded the United States,” the order stated. “As President of the United States and Commander in Chief, it is my solemn duty to protect the American people from the devastating effects of this invasion.” Acosta Peña, López Lizano, and the others were passengers on one of three planes that arrived in El Salvador in the early hours of March 16th.Acosta Peña could see men in handcuffs and chains being led off another plane. She began to scream, calling out for López Lizano. An ICE officer emerged from the front of the plane, grabbed her by the hair, and punched her in the face. “Bitch,” he said. “Fuck you.” The officer was a güero, Acosta Peña told me—blond and light-skinned. The only identifying information she could glimpse, between punches, was a patch he wore that said “HOU-02,” which seemed to indicate that he worked in ICE’s Houston field office. The other passengers were yelling at him to stop. Another guard rushed over to restrain him.As the men were forced to disembark, several of the women started to sob. One man was left seated with them—a Nicaraguan whom ICE had mistakenly included on the flights. “I overheard a Salvadoran official tell an ICE officer that the Salvadoran government would not detain someone from another Central American country, because of the conflict it would cause,” the Nicaraguan said in a subsequent court declaration. “I also heard him say that they would not receive the females.”The ICE officer made a phone call. When he hung up, he said that the women and the Nicaraguan would have to be sent back to the U.S. The other passengers were being transferred to the custody of the Salvadoran government, to be held in a notoriously brutal prison called the Terrorism Confinement Center—also known by its Spanish acronym, CECOT.A decade earlier, a team of Venezuelan police officers, out on a routine patrol along a beach in the state of Aragua, spotted a luxury yacht floating placidly off the coast. When they boarded the vessel, one of the officers later told the Venezuelan journalist Ronna Rísquez, a passenger identified himself as Héctor Guerrero Flores. The officers knew him by his nom de guerre: El Niño Guerrero, the head of the prison gang Tren de Aragua. He was supposed to be in pretrial detention in Tocorón, a prison thirty miles away, for multiple alleged crimes, including attempted murder. Guerrero produced a document from the ministry of prisons that granted him permission to travel. When the officers called their bosses, the order they received was unequivocal: “Withdraw.”At the time, many of Venezuela’s prisons were governed from the inside by an inmate known as a pran—which, according to some sources, is an acronym that roughly translates to “natural-born killer.” The gang that forms around him is called a carro, or car. It operates outside the prison through affiliated groups, controlling territory and generating revenue through extortion and drug sales. According to Andrés Antillano, a professor of criminology at the Central University of Venezuela, these cars, strung together in the service of the pran, make up a tren, or train. There are several such operations across the country, each bearing the name of the state or region where it operates.Tren de Aragua, which was founded by Guerrero and four close associates, first came to the attention of Venezuelan law enforcement around 2014. Aragua, an industrial state with a large military presence, offered a number of geographic and material advantages to a burgeoning criminal enterprise. Money flowed to Tren de Aragua from gold mines that it controlled and from taxes that its members imposed on local businesses. In other states across the country, convicts were funnelled into a range of different facilities, but in Aragua the system was more centralized, and the main prison was Tocorón. As a result, the gang was able to rapidly grow its ranks: virtually everyone sentenced for criminal activity would, at some point, need to submit to the authority of its pran.“Your friends only ever want to talk about tennis balls.”Cartoon by Jason Adam KatzensteinBy 2017, a sharp drop in oil prices, coupled with catastrophic government mismanagement, had led to extreme inflation and an economic collapse in Venezuela. There were food shortages and power outages; a bottle of ketchup might cost nine dollars, while the monthly minimum wage was six dollars. More than seven million Venezuelans have fled the country in the past decade, an exodus that has reshaped life and politics across Latin America.For criminal organizations, mass migration created a new business model. Tren de Aragua, Rísquez writes, managed “to follow those who emigrated, by land, to other countries in Latin America, mixing in with them and applying their strategies to impose control in each place they reached.” Starting in 2018, authorities in Peru, Colombia, Chile, and Brazil reported incidents involving Tren de Aragua. The gang’s operations were expanding to include the trafficking of migrants and prostitution. A few years later, the body of a former Venezuelan military officer and opposition figure was found in a suitcase in Santiago. Chilean prosecutors accused Tren de Aragua of carrying out the hit.But, for the most part, the gang’s influence outside Venezuela amounted to disparate groups operating under the Tren de Aragua banner, either as minor partners in smuggling or drug-dealing rings or as something more akin to franchisees—independently run local organizations that used the name of the broader brand. One of the enduring principles of gangland public relations is that there’s no such thing as bad press; in fact, the more people talk about a criminal group, the easier it becomes to intimidate potential victims. “Tren de Aragua is phantasmagorical,” Antillano told me. “It’s everywhere. It has no face, no clear expression. It can be molded.”In 2022, when record numbers of Venezuelans began making the overland journey to Central America and the United States, Tren de Aragua was reported to be active on the outskirts of the Darién Gap, a treacherous jungle linking Colombia and Panama. That October, the Department of Homeland Security got its first tip about Tren de Aragua, from an investigation in Lima, Peru. “We were seeing criminal activity following the Venezuelan diaspora,” a former high-ranking D.H.S. official told me. It would be a year before government intelligence suggested that the gang was present in the U.S. Another former D.H.S. official told me that the department ultimately estimated that there were about a thousand potential members in the country. “Even then,” he said, “the connections to the gang were weak or spurious.”Monitoring a transnational gang like Tren de Aragua would typically fall under the purview of Homeland Security Investigations, which is a branch of ICE. But, according to one of the former officials, “Border Patrol was taking the lead.” This was both unusual and revealing. “H.S.I. was saying that Tren de Aragua wasn’t a normal gang that posed the same level of concern as a group like MS-13,” the former official said, referring to the infamous Salvadoran gang, which formed in the U.S. and at one point had as many as ten thousand members in the country. “It was loosely organized. Maybe they were connected with each other, maybe not. Border Patrol was using Tren de Aragua as a shorthand for any Venezuelan men who were doing anything criminal.”Moises, at home in Colorado.Photograph by Benjamin Rasmussen for The New YorkerBorder Patrol employed highly subjective markers to identify alleged gang membership. One of these, which experts like Antillano and Rísquez dismissed as completely unreliable, was tattoos. U.S. authorities tried to index images and phrases that they associated with members of Tren de Aragua: clocks, nautical stars, crowns, the Michael Jordan Jumpman logo, and famous phrases from reggaetón songs. The evidence linking these symbols to the gang, according to government documents, came from “open source” information available online. Border Patrol also scrutinized personal associations: Who arrived at the border with them, and what numbers were stored on their phones? At one point, a third former D.H.S. official told me, “there was an artist who performed in Tocorón. One of the questions agents would ask migrants was ‘Did you ever see him perform?’ ” (D.H.S. denied that it used concert attendance to determine Tren de Aragua membership.)It didn’t take long for vague suppositions to harden into dogma. In 2024, Roger Molina Acevedo, a twenty-nine-year-old Venezuelan f