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The Department of Justice announced murder and kidnapping charges on Wednesday against eight illegal migrants who are allegedly members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang.
The charges were filed for two separate crimes. In one case, four men allegedly murdered a father in front of his teenage daughter outside Dallas, Texas, said acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
In the other case, three men were accused of kidnapping a man in Chicago before beating and shooting him to death.
The defendants crossed the U.S.-Mexico border between December 2021 and April 2024, according to Blanche.
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“None of these men should have been in this country. The father in Texas should be alive today. His daughter and nephew should have never been kidnapped. The young victim in Chicago should be alive,” Blanche said, before placing blame at the feet of the Biden administration for its “open border” policies.
U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould, who leads Texas’ Northern District, said the victims outside Dallas were a man, his 13-year-old daughter and his 12-year-old nephew.
On Aug. 24, 2024, the four alleged TdA members kidnapped them all in the middle of the night and demanded money from the father, Raybould said.
“Once the TDA members realized the man could not pay them any money, they pulled over by a bridge in Dallas and told the man to jump off. When he refused to do so and attempted to flee, a TDA member gunned him down execution style in front of the two children,” Raybould said.
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Local police found the man on the side of the road, bleeding through a single gunshot wound in the head, Raybould said.
A Texas grand jury indicted the four men involved — as well as a fifth man involved in other related crimes — for murder, kidnapping and ATM jackpotting.
One of the men indicted was a high-ranking TdA official, Raybould said.
Separately, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Chicago filed charges against three alleged TdA members who are accused of murdering a man in May.
Andrew Boutros, the top prosecutor in the Northern District of Illinois, said at the Wednesday news conference that the three defendants forced the victim into their car while he was walking in a park.
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They drove him to a Chicago apartment, Boutros said, where they tied his wrists and left him for hours. After that, the men transported him to an abandoned building, where they shot him in the head and body, Boutros said.
“I want you to think about those facts for a moment. A man kidnapped from a park in Chicago in broad daylight, beaten, held against his will, taken to an abandoned building and shot multiple times and left in a bathtub. All in the name of Tren de Aragua,” Boutros said.
Boutros added: “And to show just how brutal and merciless this gang is — someone then went and called the victim’s mother and told her where she could find her lifeless son’s body.”
FBI Director Kash Patel, also present at the news conference, praised federal law enforcement in his remarks for increasing arrests of violent gang members under President Donald Trump’s second administration.
“We’ve arrested 29,000 violent gang members since President Trump was sworn in,” Patel said. “We have seen, specifically as it relates to Tren de Aragua, a 519% increase in arrests.”
According to the federal government, Tren de Aragua was formed around 2014 inside the Tocorón Prison in Aragua, a state in Venezuela. It has since grown into a transnational criminal organization.
U.S. authorities have tied the gang to sex trafficking, drug trafficking, kidnappings, murders and other crimes. TdA has been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department since February 2025.
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