The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is warning residents about the presence of a violent Venezuelan street gang called Tren de Aragua.
TBI Director David Rausch said intelligence the agency has gathered suggests the gang is in Tennessee after it was previously believed to be gone following past arrests.
“I don’t think we’re at the point of everyone having to watch outside their homes of this infiltration,” Rausch said in video released on the department’s YouTube page. “It is a level of concern to policing that this group is active. They are in Tennessee.”
The goal, Rausch said, is to stop the gang in its tracks so they do not spread their criminal syndicate before it escalates to a turf war against drug cartels for drug trafficking control in Tennessee.
There have been no reports of the gang’s activity in Nashville or the surrounding Middle Tennessee counties.
The Metro Nashville Police Department and Franklin Police both say they have no reported arrests of Tren de Aragua members.
“This police department is well aware of Tren de Aragua and the criminal activity associated with its members. We have a heightened awareness for any such activity seen here,” MNPD said in a statement via email.
Rausch said the gang is not unique to Tennessee. He said the gang has a national presence and is quickly becoming a national issue.
In September, rumors spread that Tren de Aragua was running an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed to NewsNation that men seen in a video were members of the Venezuelan gang.
In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, the city confirmed a “small presence of the Tren de Aragua gang in Aurora.
President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly debunked claims during an Oct. 11 rally in Aurora that the city has become a “war zone” overrun with violent Venezuelan gang members.
Tennessee is no stranger to trafficking, either.
In November 2010, 29 people were indicted in the Middle District of Tennessee after a multi-agency investigation into a Somali gang.
By 2021, Gov. Bill Lee and Tennessee lawmakers were devoting additional resources and manhours to curb trafficking, with nine total agents assigned to each of TBI’s regions.
Tennessee has seen a rise in human trafficking calls and tips, recording 245 in 2016 to a projected 1,375 in 2023.
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Most of the 2023 tips, 361, came from the state’s Middle District. There were 307 in the Upper Eastern District, 265 in the West and 183 in the Eastern District. The most popular form of trafficking in Tennessee involved minors, data shows. And there were 101 arrests made through various policing operations, the 2023 report said.
“Many of those law enforcement officials and policing officials, they haven’t seen what we know is there and that is because of the complexity of intelligence gathering,” Rausch said. “We at the TBI are the lead agency on human trafficking in the state of Tennessee so many of our operations are engaged with these types of individuals.”
Rausch also noted that the group is violent towards police.
USA TODAY contributed to this story.
Reach reporter Craig Shoup by email at cshoup@gannett.com and on X @Craig_Shoup. To support his work, sign up for a digital subscription to www.tennessean.com.
This story was updated to add a video.
