It's always nice to see some good news come across the desk, and this is one of those times: On Thursday, in a Washington Examiner exclusive, we learned of a massive federal crackdown on the notorious Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, that netted 1,296 TdA goblins. That's a good day's work by any measure.
Task force data publicly released for the first time to the Washington Examiner showed law enforcement arrested 1,296 Tren de Aragua gang members between Jan. 20, 2025, and Oct. 8, 2026, and charged nearly 350 Tren de Aragua members and associates with federal crimes.
“President Trump’s Homeland Security Task Forces have encountered TdA gang members almost every state,” an Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson wrote in a statement. “This is one of the most vicious gangs on planet earth. They rape, maim, and murder for sport.”
They do rather more than that, and the influx of these people into the United States was turbocharged by the lax border enforcement by the hapless Biden administration.
Since Joe Biden took office in January 2021, 700,000 immigrants from Venezuela were encountered at the southern border through September 2024, making it easy for the gang’s members to hide within the migrant population.
They did so, and spread to places as far-flung as Long Island, New York, and Aurora, Colorado, where they even took over an apartment building and ruled it with a cadre of armed thugs. Sweeping up over 1,200 of these punks is great work; these are people who have no business walking around loose.
The White House also issued a press release, in the interest of counting coup.
President Donald J. Trump is systematically dismantling the bloodthirsty Tren de Aragua gang that Biden’s open borders allowed to pour into American communities. The Trump Administration has launched the largest federal campaign against transnational crime in U.S. history — identifying, arresting, and removing these vicious foreign criminals and driving violent crime down nationwide.
Once again, these people's presence here may be laid directly at the feet of the Biden administration; I blame the administration, not Joe Biden personally, only because it's a near-certainty that befuddled old Joe had very little idea what was actually going on through most of his term, if not all of it. But where TdA alone is concerned, the Biden-era non-enforcement of the border let in Bernardo Raul Castro Mata, a presumed TdA member who shot two New York police officers. Those policies allowed in the eight TdA members who were arrested earlier this year for a host of crimes including kidnapping, racketeering, murder and more. And then, of course, there was the heinous murder of Laken Riley by a suspected TdA member, Jose Ibarra.
They aren't getting away with it any longer, and the administration is treating TdA like any other terrorist group — including whacking their leaders.
Tren de Aragua’s leader, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, was killed in June during a joint U.S.-Venezuelan military strike.
“At my direction, the United States Southern Command delivered a swift and lethal kinetic strike to successfully execute Niño Guerrero, the infamous leader of Tren De Aragua, one of the most bloodthirsty Terrorist Organizations on Planet Earth,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Good.
These are not people who should be in the United States. Arresting and charging 1,200 of them is a good start, and we can hope that this will be repeated, until these goblins get the distinct idea that the United States isn't a good place for them to be anymore. And, if you want to see more of this, then I will beat this drum again and again: Vote! Vote! Vote!
Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.
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