[4] Tren de Aragua is also the first Venezuelan criminal organization to expand abroad; it has a presence in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Panama, Costa Rica, Chile, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States.

[6] The organization engages in a variety of criminal activities, such as arms trafficking, bribery, drug-trafficking, illegal mining, kidnappings-for-ransom, and money laundering.

[8] Amidst the Tarapacá migrant crisis in northern Chile, Tren de Aragua engaged in trafficking of women across from the Bolivian border to Santiago.

[11] The leader of Chile's Tren de Aragua branch, Rafael Gámez, was arrested in the U.S. state of Texas in December 2024 on charges of human trafficking.

[8] On 11 April 2024, Chilean authorities implicated the Tren de Aragua in the murder of Ronald Ojeda, a Venezuelan political dissident and opponent to Nicolás Maduro who had been living in exile in Chile.

[12] Chilean authorities accused Venezuela's interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, of ordering Tren de Aragua to carry out the killing and paying the assassins.

[5] Tren de Aragua began emerging throughout the United States during the early 2020s, which saw a surge of migrants crossing the Mexico-U.S. border, particularly from Venezuela.

[15] Telemundo, citing multiple criminal cases against suspected members of the gang, wrote in March 2024 that the group evidently "also has an increasingly widespread presence in the United States.

[18] In 2024, U.S. officials at the U.S.-Mexico border implemented enhanced interviews of single Venezuelan male migrants in order to screen for Tren de Aragua members.

"[20] In New York City, the gang has been linked to shootings, thefts in retail stores, street robberies, forced prostitution, extortion, and drug dealing.

[28] In 2024, a state investigator told KUTV that a number of crimes in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area were linked to Tren de Aragua, including a September 2024 shooting in Herriman.