8 TDA Members Charged With Violent Crimes, Gangs Dismantled

Eight alleged members of the Tren de Aragua (TDA) gang have been arrested, FBI Director Kash Patel announced at a July 1 news conference, adding that U.S. law enforcement has arrested around 29,000 violent gang members and disrupted and dismantled roughly 2,700 gangs nationwide since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term.

The eight illegal immigrants from Venezuela have been slapped with kidnapping and murder charges in two separate cases from Texas and Illinois, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said at the conference.

In the Texas incident, which occurred outside Dallas in 2024, four people killed a man and kidnapped his 13-year-old daughter and 12-year-old nephew. Five alleged TDA members have been charged in this incident. Three of the accused are already in U.S. custody for other crimes, while one is being held in Colombia.

In Illinois, three TDA members have been charged for the “brutal murder” of a victim in the Chicago area, Blanche said.

Detailing the Texas case, Ryan Raybould, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, said the incident took place on Aug. 24, 2024, in the middle of the night, with TDA members kidnapping the man and the two children and tying their hands.

The accused allegedly demanded that the man pay them money. When they realized the man could not pay, they pulled him over on a bridge in Dallas and asked him to jump. The man refused and tried to flee, but a TDA member gunned him down in front of the children, Raybould said.

A grand jury in Texas has charged five alleged members of the TDA for this crime, including a high-ranking member of the outfit. Charges include kidnapping, murder, jackpotting, and racketeering.

In the Illinois case, which took place in May this year, the victim was walking with two other individuals near a park in Chicago when the three alleged TDA members captured him and forced him into a car, according to Andrew S. Boutros, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.

The victim was bound and eventually taken to an abandoned building, where he was shot several times in the body and the head.

When authorities recovered the body, the victim’s wrists were bound. He was badly beaten, and there was blunt force trauma and injuries on his face, head, neck, arms, hands, and torso.

The three TDA members have been charged with kidnapping conspiracy and committing a kidnapping that resulted in death, Boutros said.

Blanche said that the eight accused had crossed the southern border illegally under the Biden administration between December 2021 and April 2024.

Under the prior administration, “open border policies left our borders wide open, and hundreds of suspected and now convicted TDA terrorists poured through those borders into our country. Now, President Trump stopped this madness on January 20th of last year,” Blanche said.

On Jan. 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” which said that many of the illegal immigrants in the United States posed “significant threats” to national security and public safety, including committing “heinous acts against innocent Americans.”

The order asked the attorney general and the homeland security secretary to set up Homeland Security Task Forces across all states, with the objective to “end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs, and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States.”

Blanche also cited another Jan. 20, 2025, executive order from Trump that declared a national emergency to deal with the threats posed by cartels and other transnational organizations such as the TDA.

The order established a process for designating such groups as foreign terrorist organizations. In February 2025, the State Department officially designated the TDA as a terrorist organization.

Crackdown on Gangs

At the conference, Blanche said that in the 18 months since Jan. 20, 2025, almost 350 members and TDA associates have been charged or convicted of various crimes, including murder, sex trafficking, drug trafficking, kidnapping, and weapons charges.

Patel said the disruption and dismantling of 2,700 gangs under the Trump administration is a 365 percent jump from the same time under the previous administration. As for TDA specifically, arrests of its members have surged by 519 percent.

One recent legal action against a TDA associate involved Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arresting a former Illinois teacher, also an illegal immigrant, according to a June 22 statement from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The individual allegedly assisted the TDA members in a mass shooting in December 2024 at a house party in Chicago, which ended up killing three people and injuring several others.

Earlier, on June 3, DHS said that four illegal immigrant members of the TDA had pleaded guilty to a double murder committed in 2024 in New York. All four entered the United States under the Biden administration.