Months after detaining 47 people accused of being Tren de Aragua in Austin, authorities offer no evidence of gang ties

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HAYS COUNTY — In late March, a group of Venezuelan relatives and friends, celebrating a pair of birthdays, rented a six-bedroom house in the southern tip of Austin with a pool and stunning views from every window of Texas’ Hill Country.

They decorated a table for a cake and blew up balloons. As the night faded, the kids went to bed and the adults kept hanging out.

Suddenly, at about 5 a.m. the next morning, the group heard explosions from flashbangs, followed by shouts from law enforcement yelling commands to get out of the house, according to interviews with two attendees.

“We all started shouting that there were babies — ‘Babies, there’s babies,’” recounted a 30-year-old Venezuelan man, who said he was at the house to celebrate the birthdays of his son, who turned 5, and his best friend, who turned 28.

“They were like bombs, like boom,” he said of the disorientating devices.

A cadre of Texas and federal authorities arrived as part of an operation that resulted in the apprehension of 47 people including nine minors — at least one as young as 3 — though it is not clear whether all were at the party. The authorities later claimed they had busted a gathering of members and associates of Tren de Aragua, a violent gang that began in a Venezuelan prison before extending to other parts of Latin America.

Two were arrested on state charges related to drugs. In the only press release to date, authorities said the sting was the result of a yearlong, multi-agency investigation that revealed the gang ties. They said they would release more details “as they become available.”

But two months later, authorities have yet to provide any evidence that the more than three dozen people they arrested that night have connections to the gang.

In an interview with The Texas Tribune, the Venezuelan father — who was apprehended with his 24-year-old wife and their kids, ages 5 and 3 — denied being associated with the gang and said an agent accused him of being a gang member because of two star-shaped tattoos on his shoulders. He asked that his name not be published because of fear of retribution from the U.S. and Venezuelan governments, as he has a pending asylum case and faces a deportation order.

The Hays County operation resembles arrests across the country since President Donald Trump invoked an 18th Century wartime law to expel Venezuelan nationals: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains someone, accuses them of being a Tren de Aragua member, and moves to deport them with little opportunity to mount a legal defense themselves or evidence to support the accusation.

In less than five months, the Trump administration has whisked immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador without court hearings, publicly attacked judges who have ruled against it, continued arresting alleged gang members and contended that Trump, as the commander in chief, has the ultimate authority to accomplish a mandate — mass deportations — he received from voters.

In some cases, the government has pointed to tattoos, social media posts and streetwear, like Michael Jordan basketball jerseys, to back its allegations of gang affiliation.

The actions have worried experts who see a troubling pattern of the government violating due process.

“This is about something much bigger,” said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute office at New York University School of Law. “If it happens to a person who is accused of being a (gang member) today, tomorrow it could happen to you and me. And if the alleged member of this gang does not have the right to contest [charges against them], how can you know I’ll have it? The next person will have it?”

A black box

The government agencies involved in the Hays County raid have not shared any evidence backing up their claims that they busted a gang party, as is the case in many other immigration operations across the country. A copy of the search warrant has little information about what authorities knew before the raid, and a district court judge sealed an accompanying document that includes details about the officer’s request for the warrant.

ICE has refused to release the names of who was detained and where they are currently. The Tribune identified 35 of the people apprehended in the raid by reviewing documents provided by DPS in response to public information requests. All 35 were arrested on suspicion of illegally entering the country, a federal violation, and the government intends to deport them, DPS reports show.

DPS is asking the attorney general for permission to withhold other records — including footage from body-worn cameras or any documentation of injuries recorded during the operation — because their release could hinder an ongoing criminal investigation, a DPS lawyer argued in mid-May.

DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen said two people were arrested on state charges: Antonio Jesus Vizcaino Gonzalez and Jeankey Jhonayker Castro-Bravo, both accused of drug possession. Court records say state troopers confiscated nearly 4 grams of powder that tested positive for either methamphetamine or ecstasy, 7.6 grams of cocaine and three methamphetamine or ecstasy pills.

Two months after their arrest, both have detainers from federal immigration authorities, according to a Hays County prosecutor.

A lawyer for one of the men did not return requests for comment.

The Tribune ran the 35 names found in the DPS records through databases of federal, Travis and Hays County court cases. None of the 35 had previous criminal cases in those jurisdictions, according to that review.

The Venezuelan man arrested with his family said he showed the authorities his legal work permit, Social Security number and papers related to his pending asylum case.

He said the officers told him they meant nothing.

“Ever since I’ve been here, I haven’t had any problems with the law, no criminal record,” the man said, disputing officials’ statements that everyone arrested was connected to Tren de Aragua and adding that he has been working two jobs. “When they showed up, they treated us like delinquents.”

ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI did not respond to requests for comment.

Gang tattoos

After being handcuffed as the sun rose in Hays County, agents separated the Venezuelan man from his wife and kids, took him to a processing center and scanned his fingerprints, he said.

“I asked why we were there if we had been at a family birthday party,” he said. “They basically treated me like a criminal because I have tattoos.”

He said two of his tattoos honor his kids. His forearm is inked with April 3, his eldest son’s birthday, and his back with an homage to his youngest. He also has stars tattooed on his shoulders.

“They told me to my face: ‘You know what those stars mean? Those stars are styled by gangsters in your country,’” he recounted. “I said, no. I got these stars when — no kidding — I was starting to leave adolescence, started working. I got them because I liked them and I wanted to get them.”

He noticed the officers had more visible tattoos than he did.

While the Trump administration has increasingly emphasized tattoos as evidence of gang participation, criminologists say Tren de Aragua does not use tattoos for membership. And the extent of the gang’s presence in the U.S. is also unclear and difficult to measure.

Two criminologists who study Latin American gangs pointed to one-off arrests throughout the country in which local authorities have not provided evidence that alleged Tren de Aragua members in the U.S. take orders from the gang’s international leadership — or have any connection to that leadership at all.

“Tattoos are not at all a practice used by Venezuelan gangs to indicate association,” said Rebecca Hanson, an assistant professor at the University of Florida’s Department of Sociology, Criminology and Law, and Center for Latin American Studies. “I don’t think we can jump to the following questions about what do you do about a Tren de Aragua presence in the United States until their presence has been established, and I just think it’s highly unlikely there’s any kind of real Tren de Aragua presence in the U.S.”

When investigating possible gang ties in any investigation, police and researchers also must consider that they may be dealing with imposters who use the name of infamous gangs to add credibility to their illegal activities, which has been documented in South America with Tren de Aragua wannabees, the criminologists said.

Mike LaSusa, of InSight Crime, a nonprofit that studies organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean, echoed that sentiment.

“I don’t necessarily know why they have chosen to use tattoos as a way to identify alleged Tren de Aragua members,” he said. “Just because one or even several members of a gang have the same or a similar tattoo doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a gang tattoo. A lot of people just have tattoos of stars.”

Courts block Trump deportations

Doubts about the gang’s reach within the U.S. have done little to stop the Trump administration.

Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 against Tren de Aragua in March.The act grants a president wide discretion to imprison and swiftly remove people during times of war. It has been only used three previous times: during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II. During the second world war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt invoked it to imprison an estimated 120,000 people of Japanese heritage, including American citizens.

Already, the Trump administration has used the law to deport more than 230 men accused of being violent gang members to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. A series of news reports have found that few of those deported had a documented history of committing serious or violent crimes — which the administration knew. Yet, they have no recourse to defend themselves against the allegations because they can’t contact lawyers and both federal governments have claimed there is nothing they can do now.

Top Trump administration officials have suggested those individuals could spend the rest of their lives in that prison.

In the meantime in the U.S., legal challenges to the administration’s authority have popped up throughout the country resulting in a patchwork of rulings limited to certain judicial districts that have largely blocked such deportations; only one judge, in Pennsylvania, has ruled that the administration can fast-track deportations under the act.

The U.S. Supreme Court, for its part, ruled that the administration must offer detainees a proper opportunity to raise legal challenges. But the high court stopped short of prescribing what that procedure, known as due process, should look like.

As the lawsuits unfold, Trump administration officials have blasted judges — even those appointed to the bench by Trump — and floated the idea of suspending habeas corpus, a fundamental legal principle that’s meant to ensure that a person accused of wrongdoing knows what they stand accused of and can contest the allegation before a judge. It is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to any person, not just citizens.

Released, evicted and expelled from school

The Venezuelan man and his family were released from detention in Frio County after 23 days following the Hays County raid. They came home, wearing ankle monitors, to find an eviction notice on their Pflugerville home and a stack of past due bills. Their eldest son, whose birthday was going to be celebrated by splashing in the pool, was kicked out of school because of too many unexcused absences while they were detained, his dad said.

While they are glad to be out of detention and working again, the family’s future is unclear, he said.

He still has his pending asylum application but the entire family has received removal orders.

But perhaps nothing is as unclear to them as to why authorities treated them the way they did.

“I myself lived it, how they treat you,” he said.

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