President Donald Trump made a very specific reference on Tuesday night to one criminal organization: the “Tren de Aragua,” a Venezuela-based gang he frequently mentioned when talking about immigration and crime on the campaign trail.

The group sprang out of the South American country in the 2010s and has been accused of setting up and running human trafficking and extortion rings in neighboring Colombia, Chile, and Peru. As border crossings, asylum claims, and migration from Latin America in general picked up since the pandemic, the group has been of particular interest for Trump and immigration hawks.

As Trump and his allies have tried to portray undocumented immigration as a threat to public safety, they’ve repeatedly highlighted the Tren de Aragua (or TdA)’s criminal activity in the US and abroad. That emphasis has coincided with TdA’s post-pandemic expansion in the US, though it’s deeply unclear how many TdA members are here — and how powerful the gang actually is.

Still, a few high-profile incidents — in which the perpetrators were accused of being TdA members — have caught Trump’s attention, and they’ve been a consistent focus of conservative media, immigration critics, and local law enforcement agencies. Those include a high-profile forced entry in an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, that Trump seized upon last summer and highlighted during his debate against former Vice President Kamala Harris.

But not much is actually known about the group, how it operates, or the extent of its reach within the United States. Still, that hasn’t stopped officials, politicians, and commentators from using real instances of crime and violence to paint a picture of a dangerous migrant “invasion.”

Trump himself did that on Tuesday night, referencing the murder of a 12-year-old Texan girl in the Houston area. Two undocumented Venezuelan men

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