Standing before a judge in Denver’s immigration court last week, government lawyers made a bold request typically reserved for people charged with or convicted of violent crimes: The Venezuelan immigrant should be held in detention indefinitely until he was ordered deported.
The evidence that the man was a threat to the community? His tattoos, which agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement said indicated ties to the violent gang Tren de Aragua, along with his attendance at a party in a Federal Boulevard warehouse.
The judge was skeptical.
“He was somewhere where ICE did a raid, where they thought TdA was present at a club, I guess,” said Elizabeth McGrail, an immigration judge for the U.S. Justice Department. “So he swept in with that, and all I know is respondent’s telling me that an officer told him that his tattoos seemed suspicious, but there’s nothing otherwise … that would connect him to this gang.”
Despite the government’s assertions, McGrail granted Arnaldo Velasquez Vasquez a $5,000 bond. Should he post that, he’d be free to go and continue pursuing his asylum claim to remain in the U.S.
With his decision over the weekend to invoke the 18th Century Alien Enemies Act as justification to snatch, detain and deport anyone the government declares is a member of Tren de Aragua, President Donald Trump may not appreciably increase the number of people captured by ICE in Colorado and elsewhere.
But if it survives court challenges, the order could lead to an increase in deportations by effectively shielding federal agents from all scrutiny of the claims of gang membership they have repeatedly made since Trump re-assumed office. Those come in the form of breathless social media posts and occasional court filings about young Venezuelan men who arrived in the U.S. in a wave of migration starting in late 2023.
A CPR News review of court records, social media posts and immigration court proceedings finds that the evidence behind claims of gang membership is frequently little more than circumstantial, if that. Tattoos of roses and clocks. A nod at a telephone when a confidential informant asks about gang membership. Attendance at a party where an ICE claim about the presence of one member of Tren de Aragua is then extended to everyone in the room as an associate.
When asked what process they use to determine whether someone is in a gang or if they have guardrails to make sure they’re not deporting non-gang members without court hearings, an ICE spokesman said, “As a matter of policy, ICE doesn’t comment on specific tactics, capabilities or operational details.”
Terrance Roberts of Denver, an anti-violence activist and former gang member, said tagging someone as a gang member with no proof beyond maybe a tattoo or the color of a jacket is “racist.”
“They’re just accusing anyone who is a Venezuelan of being from Tren de Aragua,” he said. “There is no way to tell that someone is from Tren, they don’t wear all reds like Bloods, they don’t wear all blue like Crips. They’re Venezuelan young men and some women, they’re wearing jeans. They’re wearing coats and jackets to stay warm.”
Roberts said he knows a number of Venezuelans fighting against Tren gang members, but the Trump administration isn’t making any distinction between them and actual criminals.
“They're using gangs as a way to justify really just a mean-spirited approach to me, attack all people of color, but that's how they're attacking the Venezuelan and Hispanic community,” he said. “The vast majority are not even a part of those gangs at all. They're just people here trying to escape a dangerous country.”
The immigration status of those targeted by Trump’s order can vary from person to person. Some may have received temporary authorization to be in the U.S. Others may have pending asylum claims. Some may have snuck across the border with no intention of trying to follow the law. Trump’s declaration treats them all the same, granting federal agents permission to broadly sweep up and deport people because of the gang affiliation alleged by the federal government without independent verification — not because of anything they particularly did.
All of that is now viewed as a valid justification for deportation, said Violeta Chapin, a professor of criminal and immigration defense law at the University of Colorado Law School.
The way the Alien Enemies Act has been employed before, Chapin said, gives the president broad authority to decide that, politically, a particular country, or an incursion of a group of people, is a threat and therefore those people are enemies of the United States.
“The US federal government would say this is a political question, this has nothing to do with the judiciary, this person is detained because they are an enemy of the United States and that is that,” she said.
When the act was invoked before, even during World War II, the nation’s immigration laws and rights and its criminal justice system were less sophisticated and more blunt. The act has only been used three times previously, all during wars, starting with the War of 1812. At that time, British nationals were required to register with the government. During World War I, thousands of German nationals were detained in camps under the authority of the act. In World War II, the act was used to intern Japanese, German and Italian nationals.
Today, Chapin said, there is a lot more data and surveillance on individuals in the United States and in the criminal justice system and it is “outdated” to broadly brand an entire population.
“It’s extremely wrong to designate people who are native of a country just because they’re native of a country with enemy behavior or hostile behavior to the United States,” Chapin said.
Still unclear is whether, under the Alien Enemies Act, the federal government could retroactively attempt to punish people who helped people from Venezuela find housing and food and clothing – particularly if those people were later accused of being part of the Tren de Aragua gang.
This briefly came up when Denver Mayor Mike Johnston testified in a Congressional hearing and defended the city’s work to help shelter and find clothing for the tens of thousands of Venezuelans who were sent to the city by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott or arrived on their own in 2023 and 2024. One Republican congresswoman said she would ask the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate mayors to see whether there was any criminal behavior.
Yoli Casas, a Peruvian immigrant who runs VIVE, an organization that was on the front lines in finding housing, food and support for the new arrivals said she wasn’t worried about criminal liability.
“We acted as a human being basically. You walk around and you see people, children without shoes, without clothing, in tents and it’s freezing outside,” she said. “How do we help our people who are here in our city? If they’re going to do this, this is after all of that and I am not sure what to say or to think.”
Casas said in order to secure housing for people, she had to make sure they had crossed the border and their case number was attached to a file that the state managed.
“They had to have been allowed in, that’s who we could help,” she said.
In late January, federal authorities launched the first public immigration operation under Trump — breaking up, they claimed, a gathering of Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members in Adams County.
“This TdA party ruined,” reads a Jan. 26 post on X from the Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA boasted that they took 49 people into custody.
The circumstances parallel with how Velasquez Vasquez told an immigration court he came to be in ICE custody. When he appeared in Denver’s immigration court last week, Judge McGrail asked him why the government was saying he was a TdA gang member. He responded that the ICE agents told him it was because he had tattoos: a rose tattoo on one arm and a crown on the other arm.
No Colorado or federal criminal record can be found for a person with that name, which was not spelled out during the immigration court proceedings. His case and others reviewed by CPR News illustrate the tenuous connections between the Venezuelan gang and Colorado. Tren de Aragua, commonly referred to as TdA, has become an obsession of immigration hardliners who say organized violent crime has followed the gang as Venezuelans have migrated in unprecedented numbers.
But while Venezuela and particularly Tren de Aragua have generated much of the attention from ICE and Trump, the CPR News review of available records found that immigrants from that nation have made up fewer than half of those publicly identified as detained on immigration violations. Unlike Colorado or federal law enforcement agencies, ICE doesn’t routinely release the names of those taken into custody on civil immigration detainers. A searchable database is available, but it only verifies whether an individual is detained if a name, date of birth and nation of origin is input.
Of 44 names identified on social media, court records, and press releases by federal agencies including ICE, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the FBI, 39 have a nationality listed. Of those, 16 are listed as Venezuelan.
Though Trump and others have said Tren de Aragua has “taken over” apartment complexes in Aurora, police there have said they identified just 10 members of the gang in the city of 395,052 people. Last August, as furor over the gang was just catching on during the presidential campaign, Aurora Police described the gang’s presence there as “isolated.”
A few days after the “TdA party” raid in Adams County, federal agents arrested six Venezuelans on federal drug and gun distribution charges. That investigation started last year, in October, thanks to a tip from a criminal informant.
At one point, according to federal court documents, an undercover officer asked if the people in the gang were TdA. One of them “nodded his head affirmatively, pointed to the cellphone that was currently still on speakerphone and stated, ‘ellos si.’ Meaning, ‘they are.’”
Agents eventually arrested the men in a daring operation in late January. In what they called a “ruse,” undercover agents hired the supposed gang members to provide protection for a drug transaction, a deal for 10 pounds of methamphetamine.
“During the ruse, the Suspects conducted an armed protection of a staged narcotics transaction. During the entire staged narcotics transaction, the Suspects were visibly armed, protecting the” undercover agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), reads an arrest warrant filed in federal court. Once the transaction was complete agents gave the signal “and an ATF arrest team took the six (6) armed suspects into custody.”
That was enough for the DEA’s X account to declare the morning of their arrest: “Successful ops taking down Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members” — with a fist bump emoji as punctuation.
Tattoos remain a key way of identification of TdA gang members, according to federal and state law enforcement. Last month, the Colorado DEA X account posted pictures of tattoos linked to TdA, with the caption “This isn’t a “pigment” of your imagination …”
Tren de Aragua indeed has a reputation for violence in Venezuela, and some of the people identified as members in Colorado are accused of serious crimes involving violence and extortion.
But in the U.S., Tren de Aragua is just one of about 33,000 gangs identified by the FBI over the years. Many of them, like the El Salvadoran gang MS-13, which is estimated to have as many as six times the membership of Tren de Aragua’s global roster of 5,000, have a much greater footprint in the U.S. But MS-13 has only occasionally been invoked by immigration authorities and never used as justification for the invocation of war powers.
In truth, gang and group affiliations have previously been rarely mentioned by federal law enforcement officials — unless they were specifically targeting crimes that sprang out of the group’s very existence, like racketeering.
Jason Dunn, who served as U.S. Attorney for Colorado during the first Trump administration, said agents in his term often identified people who local law enforcement tagged as gang members — and then they targeted them for crimes, not affiliations.
They did that even if the crimes were small and yielded small federal prison sentences, Dunn said because it gave prosecutors a pathway to remove known gang members from the streets for a couple of years to “cool them off.”
That included going after people for illegally carrying a firearm, he said.
“Being in a gang is not usually a crime, but engaging in organized criminal activity can be and those are the people we would try to target,” he said. “We had a pretty good idea who the bad actors were in Denver or Pueblo or Colorado Springs … and we made concerted efforts to target those individuals. We would go after them and figure out what were the best laws to use.”
Dunn said it was much easier to prove a felon in possession of a firearm than a narcotics trafficking or an organized crime case.
“We found it was a great way to get the worst actors off the street for a few years, let them grow up a little bit, mature a bit,” he said.
Trump’s weekend order, now under court challenge, avoids all that investigative and prosecutorial work and allows agents to simply grab people whose immigration cases may still be in process and put them on a plane.
Hans Meyer, a Denver immigration attorney representing a number of people picked up in mass enforcement actions, said he’s seen federal immigration officials detain people “en masse and then cheat their way back to justify the arrest.”
“They change the facts or change the sequence of events,” he said. “Or they rely on the fact that most people don’t have access to counsel.”
