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As Trump Management publicly casts Venezuela Tren de Aragua (TdA) as an associated unified terrorist force President Nicolas Maduro And operating within the United States, hundreds of internal US government records obtained by WIRED tell a far less certain story. Intelligence missions, law enforcement bulletins, and drug task force evaluations show that agencies spent much of 2025 struggling to determine whether the TdA operated as a regulated entity in the United States at all — let alone as a coordinated organization. National security to threaten.
While senior administration officials have portrayed the TdA as a centrally directed terrorist network active across American cities, internal mission directives and threat assessments repeatedly point to “intelligence gaps” in understanding how the group operates on American soil: whether it has a defined leadership, whether its local activity reflects any coordination beyond small local crews, and whether incidents occurring in the United States point to a foreign trend or are merely the work of independent, profit-driven criminals.
The documents, which were designated as sensitive and not intended for public disclosure, were widely distributed across intelligence offices, law enforcement agencies, and federal drug task forces throughout the year. Repeatedly, they point to unresolved questions about the TdA’s footprint in the United States, including its size, financing and access to weapons, warning that key estimates — such as the number of members operating in the United States — are often inferred or extrapolated by analysts due to a lack of hard facts.
Together, the documents show a wide gap between policy-level discourse and intelligence on the ground at the time. While senior administration officials spoke of “invasion,” “irregular warfare,” and “narcoterrorism,” field-level reports in the United States consistently portrayed the Tren de Aragua as a fragmented, profit-seeking criminal group, with no reference to central command, strategic coordination, or underlying political motivation. The criminal activity described is largely opportunistic – if not mundane – and ranges from ATM robberies and takeovers to delivery app fraud and low-level drug sales.
In the March 2025 announcement Activating the Alien Enemies LawPresident Donald Trump claimed the gang had “thousands” of members who had “illegally infiltrated the United States” and were “waging irregular warfare and conducting hostile actions.” He claimed the group was “allied with the Maduro regime, and has already been infiltrated,” warning that Venezuela was becoming a “criminal hybrid state” invading the United States.
But at the same time a Internal Border Patrol Evaluation Officials have been unable to substantiate these claims, relying instead on estimates based on interviews rather than confirmed detections of gang members entering the United States, documents obtained by WIRED show.
In an interview with Fox News Same monthUS Attorney Pam Bondi described the TdA as a “foreign arm of the Venezuelan government”, alleging that its members “are organized. They have a command structure. They have invaded our country.” Weeks later, in a Justice Department press release announcing terrorism and drug distribution charges against a TdA suspect, Bondi insisted “It is not a street gang, it is a highly organized terrorist organization that took root in our country during the previous administration.”
The documents show that the picture within the intelligence community appears much less stable. Although the TdA’s designation as a foreign terrorist organization — following the State Department’s designation in February 2025 — immediately reshaped policy, internal correspondence shows that the group remained poorly understood even by senior counterterrorism officials, including those who work at the National Counterterrorism Center. Unresolved questions about the TdA — along with Mexico’s newly designated drug cartel entities — eventually led intelligence managers to… Issuing a nationwide task orderdirecting analysts to urgently address the wide “knowledge gaps” plaguing the US government.
The guidance, issued on May 2, 2025, highlights the breadth of these intelligence gaps, pointing to unresolved questions about whether entities had access to weapons other than small arms, relied on large cash shipments, cryptocurrencies, or mobile payment apps, or were supported by corrupt officials or state-linked intermediaries abroad.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, attributed the shortfall to competing priorities, telling WIRED that “the intelligence community was unable to devote the group’s resources to TdA” before the Trump administration bestowed the “terrorist” designation on it. “This is where the ‘knowledge gaps’ stem from.”
Task order It shows that those uncertainties extended beyond TdA’s prior activity to its potential response under stress. That report, issued by the Directors of National Intelligence who oversee counterterrorism, cyber, narcotics, and transnational crime, noted a lack of knowledge about how the TdA and several Mexican cartels might be able to adapt their operations or change their tactics in response to intensified U.S. law enforcement.