President Donald Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, was on a Sunday talk show last weekend to defend the administration’s use of wartime powers to label Venezuelan immigrants as gang members and deport them without due process.
“How do your people in the field determine that someone is a gang member?” Jonathan Karl, a co-anchor of ABC’s “This Week,” asked.
“Look, there’s various methods,” Homan responded. “I’ve noticed in the media people saying, ‘They don’t have criminal histories.’ Well, a lot of gang members don’t have criminal histories, just like a lot of terrorists in this world — they’re not in any terrorist database, right?”
It was a rare moment of transparency for Homan, a former acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, best known to most Americans for his time as a tough-talking political commentator on Fox News.
His analogy — likening suspected Venezuelan gang members to Al Qaeda or Islamic State fighters — was telling. Both, he implied, operate in ways that make proving connections nearly impossible, allowing the government to label anyone a threat.
For two decades after the September 11 attacks, the federal government inflated the threat of Islamist extremism in the U.S. by running undercover sting operations. The arrests were made to much fanfare, but actually locked up people who posed little or no threat to the country. Instead of bolstering public safety, what these operations did was bolster expanded post-September 11 law enforcement powers and bloated counterterrorism budgets.
Now, the Trump administration is returning to that playbook: exaggerating to the public the threat of a Venezuelan transnational prison gang, Tren de Aragua, to justify expanded powers.
Claiming a growing and direct threat from Tren de Aragua, the Trump administration invoked a law dating back to 1798 to begin mass deportations of Venezuelans.
More than 200 Venezuelans have already been deported under the law, some to a prison in El Salvador, even as a federal judge has ordered the U.S. government to stop using these wartime powers for deportation operations.
Trump claimed that “evidence irrefutably demonstrates” that Tren de Aragua, now treated as a terrorist organization by his administration, is invading the United States.
But that isn’t true.
This isn’t a national crisis. It’s a moral panic — manufactured, inflated, and easily deconstructed.
Public reports tie alleged members of the gang to several violent crimes, including a robbery and murder in Miami, a kidnapping and double homicide in Chicago, and, most infamously, the killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.
That these crimes were isolated and relatively limited in number hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from treating Tren de Aragua as an existential threat. The gang has become the latest stand-in for fears about immigrants — “proof” that open-border policies have allowed dangerous foreign enemies into the country.
Yet this isn’t a national crisis. It’s a moral panic — manufactured, inflated, and easily deconstructed — with unexpected origins in rundown apartment buildings in Colorado and a PR firm in Florida.
A Gang “Takeover”
The Tren de Aragua hysteria started with a company called CBZ Management, which was facing civil and possible criminal liabilities for conditions at its apartment buildings in Aurora, a suburb of Denver.
In 2023, Venezuelans arrived in Colorado, many bused in by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Some of those Venezuelans took up apartments at CBZ Management’s properties, placed there by local nonprofits.
In August 2024, Red Banyan, a PR firm in Florida hired by CBZ Management, began pitching a story that the property management company couldn’t maintain its buildings because Venezuelan gang members had taken them over — even though complaints about the buildings, including claims of no running water, rodent infestations, and broken heat, had been documented as far back as 2020, long before the Venezuelans arrived in Aurora.
Stories about a Venezuelan gang menacing residents of apartments in Colorado soon popped up in the local media and in the New York Post. Then a video went viral: A doorbell camera video showed men carrying rifles and handguns and entering one of the apartments. After the video received millions of views on X, Trump, then running for president, said in a press conference: “If you look at Aurora, Colorado, they’re taking over the place; they took over buildings.”
“What we’re learning out here is that gang members have not taken over this complex.”
Local officials, however, including Aurora’s mayor and interim police chief, denied claims at the time that the apartment buildings had been taken over by a gang. The city of Aurora issued a statement describing gang-related crimes there as “isolated.”
“What we’re learning out here is that gang members have not taken over this complex,” Aurora’s interim police chief, Heather Morris, said as she stood outside the apartment building that had become a national flashpoint, in a video her department produced.
As the 2024 presidential campaign heated up, Trump continued to claim that Venezuelan gang members had taken over Aurora. That prompted the city’s Republican mayor, Mike Coffman, to issue a statement describing Venezuelan gang activity in his city as “grossly exaggerated.”
That didn’t stop Trump. In a campaign speech in Aurora in October 2024, he announced his plans for what he termed “Operation Aurora.”
“We will send elite squads of ICE, Border Patrol, and federal law enforcement officers to hunt down, arrest and deport every last illegal alien gang member,” Trump said during his speech, “until there is not a single one left in this country.”
“Operation Aurora”
What was effectively “Operation Aurora” came to Colorado in early February, just a couple of weeks after Trump took office for the second time.
More than 400 agents with ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Drug Enforcement Administration conducted eight operations in the Denver area. They trumpeted their targeting of more than 100 members of the violent Venezuelan gang.
The result? Following those eight operations, they found just one suspected gang member.
When asked about this by a local Denver broadcaster, Tim Lenzen, a Homeland Security agent, responded, “I won’t measure the success in the number that we have.”
While we can only point to a small number of reports about violent crimes nationwide involving suspected members of Tren de Aragua, the U.S. government claims that the Venezuelan gang represents a significant threat. ICE’s X account is now filled with photos of captured men the agency claims are members of Tren de Aragua.
As with terrorists during the post-September 11 era, the government has the sole authority to designate someone a member of Tren de Aragua — and, just as during the post-September 11 era, the U.S. government has a policy incentive to do so.
The images, blasted out on social media, are meant to fill the public imagination with a sense of danger: a transnational gang hiding in plain sight.
A few current and former FBI agents told me on background that they do view the Venezuelan gang as a concern. “The serious agents are going after it,” one former agent told me.
This theater serves a purpose: It’s a justification for denying due process rights to immigrants.
It’s also clear inside the bureau that the Trump administration is creating theater. FBI field offices have been given quotas — with each special agent in charge now expected to participate personally in at least some ICE-led removal operations. The purpose: photo ops, like one raid in Sacramento, California, where official photos show a conspicuous FBI vest at the rear of a perp walk.
“And the X posts always show the agents photographed from behind,” the former FBI agent told me. “That is mandated. They have to pose.”
This theater, however, serves a purpose: It’s a justification for denying due process rights to immigrants. Under the current policy, the Trump administration only needs to accuse someone of being a member of Tren de Aragua to make the case for their immediate removal, no need to prove that the accusation is true.
On ABC’s “This Week,” Homan, the border czar, was asked about this specifically: Do those accused of being gang members have recourse to challenge the accusation before being thrown into a prison in El Salvador?
“Due process? What was Laken Riley’s due process?” Homan answered, referring to the student killed by an alleged Tren de Aragua member. “Where was all these young women who were killed and raped by TdA — where was their due process? How about the young lady who was burned alive on the subway — where was her due process?”
If the U.S. government can label any immigrant a gang member without being required to prove the claim, then due process rights for all immigrants are under threat.
Homan appeared to hint at this, even if accidentally. He cited the horrific case of a woman burned alive on the New York subway in December — a crime allegedly committed by Sebastian Zapeta, a Guatemalan immigrant. But Zapeta has never been accused of ties to Tren de Aragua.
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