A loose Venezuelan crime group that Donald Trump designated as a "terrorist" organisation, claiming it was a state-backed group conducting an "invasion" of the United States at the behest of the Venezuelan government. An appeals court rejected that claim on September 2nd 2025. On the same day the American military struck a boat that Trump said was carrying drugs and Tren de Aragua members—in effect subjecting the occupants to extrajudicial execution rather than the conventional approach of stopping, searching, arresting and trying suspected drug smugglers. Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, fired two senior career officers who oversaw an intelligence assessment that undercut Trump's claims about the gang.
On September 30th 2025 some 300 federal agents raided an apartment building at 7500 South Shore Drive in Chicago, detaining 37 Venezuelan immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security said the operation targeted Tren de Aragua members, but produced no evidence to support allegations that the gang had taken over the building. The raid was part of "Operation Midway Blitz", the administration's immigration crackdown in Chicago, during which over a thousand immigrants were detained. Kristi Noem, the homeland-security secretary, was filmed at a nearby immigration facility. The National Guard was deployed to Chicago; Illinois sued Trump to block the deployment.
In case it's not obvious, any solution to this problem that introduces a dependency on Java is profoundly uninteresting to me. In fact, my indifference to that could only be described as "sexual" in intensity.