Four members of the killer Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua tried to sneak across the border by blending in with a group of asylum-seekers New Year’s Eve, but they couldn’t fool Texas cops, officials say.
The gangbangers — including a suspected high-ranking member — illegally crossed into Eagle Pass with about 22 migrants from Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela, telling state police they were bound for San Antonio, authorities said.
They were held as officials checked their backgrounds, and within days, state troopers were able to identify the four as TdA members through interviews, their gang tattoos and searches of their social media accounts, authorities said.
One of the men, Segundo Ocando-Mejia, 39, had star tattoos that indicated his possible high rank within TdA, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement Friday.
The quartet has since been charged with criminal trespassing at the state level. If convicted, they would be sentenced and then likely be held by the feds and eventually potentially released back into the US, since other countries have yet to agree to accept Venezuelans in these circumstances
Abbott has vowed to continue “to hunt down TdA and put them behind bars.”
Texas Department of Public Safety Lt. Chris Olivarez said on X that the gang “remains an existential threat to public safety,” adding that state authorities are exhausting “every resource to track down and arrest” their members.
In September, Abbott launched an initiative for state authorities to better track down and arrest TdA members in the state, designating the gang as a foreign terror group.
The governor has also instituted a 10-year mandatory minimum sentence for TdA members smuggling migrants into Texas.
“Texas is aggressively going after these foreign terrorist organizations of TdA,” the governor declared at the time.
“Our goal among law enforcement in the state of Texas is to defend our state from the growing threat of TdA. We are not going to allow them to use Texas as a base of operations to terrorize our citizens,” he fumed.
