A Venezuelan dissident who is running for office in Utah warned that local authorities “are not ready” to deal with Tren de Aragua — as the vicious prison gang has expanded its territory to at least 18 states.
Carlos Moreno, who is running for Salt Lake County Council in District 2, spoke out after Tren de Aragua gangbangers have been linked to at least two separate crimes in the Beehive State capital — including an alleged prostitution ring.
“Our law enforcement people are not ready,” Moreno told The Post.
“They are not ready yet to face these kinds of gangs in Utah because the way that they do things are totally different than the criminals here in the United States,” the city council hopeful continued.
“That’s why people right now are very afraid. And they don’t want these kinds of people in the United States.”
The violent Venezuelan gang is allegedly behind a Sept. 22 assault and shooting in Salt Lake City’s Herriman neighborhood.
Four suspected baby-faced gang members — ranging in age from 19 to 21 — allegedly assaulted three victims, injuring two of the individuals, according to local news outlet KSL.
The thugs then went on a wild car chase with acquaintances of the assault victims that ended with the two vehicles colliding and a shootout, the outlet reported.
One of the acquaintances in the targeted vehicle sustained a shrapnel wound to the shoulder.
Less than a month later, on Oct. 31, three other suspected Tren de Aragua brutes allegedly broke into a home and threatened the residents at gunpoint.
One of the victims told responding officers she was forced into prostitution by one of the suspected gangbangers when she first arrived in Utah, according to KSL.
The victim led cops to a nearby hotel, where they discovered another female who claimed the alleged gang members assaulted her.
The second female victim also told cops that she and two others were working there as “escorts.”
When cops asked the victim if she was ok, she “started to cry,” according to court documents.
Utah is now the 18th US state to report the presence of Tren de Aragua. Gov. Spencer Cox even recently recently classified the gang as “a growing threat” there.
Moreno said the immigrant community in Utah, in particular, is terrified of the gang’s presence.
“We don’t want those people here … of course we are immigrants, we have a lot of people, decent people who are immigrants, but we don’t want that kind of immigration in the United States. They are criminals,” he said.
Moreno immigrated to the US as a political asylum seeker after the Venezuelan regime charged him with treason and conspiracy due to his activism against human rights violations in the South American country, according to his campaign website. He became a US citizen in October 2022.
The ruthless foreign gang has already established a presence in the following states, according to a leaked Homeland Security memo and previous reporting by The Post:
- California
- Colorado
- Florida
- Georgia
- Illinois
- Louisiana
- Nevada
- New Jersey
- New York
- North Carolina
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Wisconsin
- Virginia
- Montana
- Wyoming
- North Dakota
Tren de Aragua members embedded themselves in the large waves of migrants who arrived at the US-Mexico border under the Biden administration.
Federal authorities released some of them because they lacked access to Venezuelan databases — but they also couldn’t return them because the Maduro regime stopped accepting deportation flights.
Roughly 2,000 migrants who arrived in Utah in recent months were shipped there by nearby Denver, which has received 40,000 migrants since 2022 and has also been hit with its own wave of gang-linked crimes.
In response, fed-up officials in the Beehive State began disseminating flyers saying there was “no space” for the migrants, suggesting they “consider another state to settle in the US.”
The gang has been tied to several prominent cases of migrant crime in the US in recent years — including the shooting of NYPD cops, the gruesome murder of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, and the brutal rape and killing of 12-year-old Houston girl Jocelyn Nungaray.
