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‘Living laboratory’: Trump admin urged to look to South America for lessons on fighting migrant gangs
By Peter Pinedo
Published August 13, 2025
A former high-ranking Venezuelan military officer is urging the Trump administration, particularly Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, to look to South America for best strategies in fighting against the migrant gangs and cartels that flooded the U.S. under the Biden administration.
José Gustavo Arocha, a former lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army and now national security expert at the Center for a Secure Free Society, told Fox News Digital that South American countries’ varied responses to organized crime groups hold the key to what the U.S. should do and not do.
He said the region especially teaches valuable lessons on how to respond to Tren de Aragua, also known by its acronym "TdA," a brutal transnational criminal group with alleged ties to Venezuelan socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro. The gang’s name means "Train from Aragua," indicating its origin as a prison gang in Venezuela’s Aragua region.
Following Noem’s visit to Chile and Peru in late July, Arocha said the U.S. should "think of the region as a living laboratory."
José Gustavo Arocha (left), a former lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army now national security expert at the Center for a Secure Free Society, told Fox News Digital that South American countries’ varied responses to organized crime groups hold the key to what the U.S. should do and not do. He said DHS Secretary Kristi Noem (right) can benefit much from looking to South American countries' examples. (Center for a Secure Free Society and El Salvador Press Presidency Office/Anadolu via Getty Images and Department of Homeland Security)
In line with this laboratory analogy, Arocha said that while countries like Chile and Ecuador "grabbed the scalpel early; Colombia left the petri dish wide open."
Overall, he said the lesson for Washington is "act fast, act in unison, or spend years mopping up a disaster."
He said that Chile acted decisively to unite all aspects of government together to fight the migrant gangs spilling over its borders, fusing police, tax and customs intelligence with one another. This enabled the Chilean government to quickly identify hundreds of members of a Tren de Aragua offshoot gang known as the "Los Gallegos clique" and march them into prison.
"Chile turned intel into jail time," explained Arocha. "Every migrant-shelter interview, every crypto-remittance slip, every fingerprint goes into one national fusion hub; detectives then launch ‘mega-operativos’ that knock out stash houses, mules, and shell companies in the same forty-eight-hour punch."
"That stops the gang before it can splinter and re-spawn," he said.
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As prisoners stand looking out from a cell, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT) on March 26, 2025 in Tecoluca, El Salvador. ((Photo by Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty Images))
Likewise, he explained that if Noem similarly connects U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations into a shared, real-time biometric feed, typical gang tactics like using a fake ID won’t outrun the database and "our prosecutors can bring bundle indictments the way Chile bundled Los Gallegos."
It is Ecuador, however, that Arocha said "set the gold standard hands down."
He explained that the Ecuadorian government "went one step further" by labeling Tren de Aragua a terrorist group, something the U.S. has also done under the Trump administration. Ecuador also unleashed joint police-military sweeps of prisons and border posts for gang activity so that today he said the country "still reports no major TdA enclave on its soil."
"By stamping TdA as a terrorist outfit before bodies piled up, Ecuador unlocked instant asset freezes and extradition-on-sight rules," he said. "We already have the Foreign Terrorist Organization label; now we need the Treasury-FinCEN [Financial Crimes Enforcement Network] sledgehammer, so every crypto hop tied to TdA or its Venezuelan sponsors, the Maduro Regime, trips an automatic choke."
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Peruvian police carry out the transfer of several members of the Tren de Aragua criminal organization in Lima on October 5, 2023. Peruvian police on Thursday captured the alleged leader and 31 other members of a faction of the Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan-born criminal organization that sows terror in several South American countries with murders and extortion, according to authorities. The offensive against what is considered the most dangerous gang operating in Peru was carried out in several regions of the country. (CRIS BOURONCLE/AFP via Getty Images)
By contrast, Arocha said the U.S. should look to Colombia for what not to do. He said the country reopened its borders and "hoped goodwill would tame the chaos."
He said that open borders without synchronized vetting turned the migrant route through the country into a "rolling ATM."
"TdA simply moved its toll booths from jungle trails to the shiny new bridges and kept fleecing migrants in broad daylight," he explained. "The misstep was policy without policing: agencies split their intel streams, extraditions stalled on politics, and the gang slipped through the seams."
"For Washington, that means no border liberalization unless vetting, rapid removal, and financial choke points are already locked in. Otherwise, the ‘train’ will ride our own policy gaps straight into every ZIP code," he said.
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Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and President Donald Trump (Getty Images)
"Tren de Aragua isn’t a rogue band of street punks; it’s the muscle car hitched to Maduro’s smuggling convoy," he went on. "Think of it as Caracas outsourcing hybrid warfare: the cartel ships cocaine north, the gang escorts the loads and terrorizes migrants, and the regime pockets hard currency while claiming clean hands."
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"If we freeze their dollars, seize their crypto, and indict their officers alongside TdA couriers, the whole war machine stutters. Anything less is just chasing boxcars while the locomotive keeps rolling."
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/living-laboratory-trump-admin-urged-look-south-america-lessons-fighting-migrant-gangs