A suspected member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, Anderson Zambrano-Pacheco, 26, was arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration and US Homeland Security Investigations officers in the Bronx, New York City, on Tuesday morning. He was wanted for burglary and felony menacing in connection to an incident in Aurora, Colorado, last August.
Zambrano-Pacheco is a high-ranking member of the Tren de Aragua gang, which was involved in gun trafficking and has ties to multiple states, including New York, Atlanta, Texas, and Colorado. The gang has been the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration and has been linked to multiple crimes.
The arrest is part of a series of immigration enforcement actions targeting suspected gang members, and comes as the Trump administration has ramped up immigration sweeps across the US. More than 4,000 people have been taken into custody in the last four days, including a number with serious criminal convictions or charges.
The sweeps have also led to “collateral arrests,” a term used by border czar Tom Homan to describe the arrest and detention of men and women from other countries without any criminal record.
The Trump administration is aiming for each of the 25 ICE field offices to make at least 75 arrests a day, and has called for heavy-handed tactics to achieve this goal. However, John Sandweg, the former acting director of ICE in the Obama administration, has expressed concern that the pressure to rack up large arrest numbers could result in the use of heavy-handed tactics.
The arrest comes as the Pew Research Center estimates that there are approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US. The Trump administration’s immigration policies have been the subject of controversy and debate, with some critics calling for a more humane approach and others supporting the administration’s efforts to crack down on undocumented immigration.
