The State Division has supplied as much as $3m for info resulting in the arrest of Giovanni Vicente Mosquera Serrano.
The USA Treasury Division has sanctioned the alleged chief of Tren de Aragua (TDA), a Venezuelan gang that the administration of President Donald Trump has used as justification for its immigration crackdown.
In an announcement launched on Tuesday, the Treasury’s Workplace of Overseas Belongings Management stated Giovanni Vicente Mosquera Serrano was not solely sanctioned but in addition indicted by the Division of Justice.
In keeping with unsealed court docket paperwork, Mosquera Serrano faces prices associated to drug trafficking and terrorism. He was additionally added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wished record, with a $3m reward supplied for info resulting in his arrest or conviction.
Within the assertion, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent accused Tren de Aragua, below Mosquera Serrano’s management, of “terrorizing our communities and facilitating the circulate of illicit narcotics into our nation”.
It was the newest effort within the Trump administration’s marketing campaign to crack down on felony exercise that it claims is tied to the proliferation of international gangs and felony networks within the US.
Earlier this yr, the Trump administration designated Tren de Aragua and different Latin American gangs as “international terrorist organisations”, a class extra generally used to explain worldwide teams with violent political goals.
However Trump has used the specter of felony networks primarily based overseas to justify the usage of emergency powers throughout his second time period.
As an example, the Trump administration has claimed that Tren de Aragua is coordinating its US actions with the federal government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. That allegation was then used to justify the usage of a uncommon wartime legislation: the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
Claiming that the presence of teams like Tren de Aragua constituted a international “invasion” on US soil, Trump leveraged the Alien Enemies Act because the authorized foundation for pursuing the expedited deportations of alleged gang members.
Greater than 200 folks have been despatched to a maximum-security jail in El Salvador, the place lots of them stay to at the present time.
These deportations have drawn widespread criticism, together with a slew of authorized challenges. Critics have stated that the expedited deportations violated the immigrants’ rights to due course of. Additionally they identified that lots of the deported males didn’t have felony information.
Attorneys for a few of the males have argued that they seem to have been imprisoned primarily based on their tattoos and wardrobe decisions. The Division of Homeland Safety, nonetheless, has disputed that allegation.
At the very least one high US official has acknowledged that Maduro’s authorities could not direct Tren de Aragua.
An April memo from the Workplace of the Director of Nationwide Intelligence, obtained by information shops like NPR and The New York Occasions, likewise solid doubt on the concept that Venezuela was controlling the gang’s actions within the US.
Fairly, the memo stated that the Maduro authorities possible sees Tren de Aragua as a risk.
“Whereas Venezuela’s permissive setting allows TDA to function, the Maduro regime in all probability doesn’t have a coverage of cooperating with TDA and isn’t directing TDA motion to and operations in america,” the memo reads.
Final July, the US and Colombia supplied joint multimillion-dollar rewards for info resulting in the arrest of Mosquera Serrano and two different males believed to steer Tren de Aragua.
The group was additionally sanctioned in the identical month as a transnational felony organisation for “partaking in various felony actions, comparable to human smuggling and trafficking, gender-based violence, cash laundering, and illicit drug trafficking”, in keeping with a Treasury Division assertion.
Quite a few international locations in Latin America have struggled with the gang’s speedy development, which has been linked to political assassinations and widespread human trafficking, although specialists say there may be little to recommend the gang has infiltrated the US.
