By JOSHUA GOODMAN

MIAMI (AP) — Former federal agent Was Tabor says his phone has been lighting up with calls from police departments around the U.S. for advice on how to combat the growing threat from the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

Tabor was in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas in 2012 when the gang was still new and when Tabor had barely heard of it.

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Venezuela had long been a major transit zone for cocaine smuggled by Colombian guerrillas, with a leftist government that had close ties to some of America’s top adversaries, from Iran to Russia. So the homegrown street gang, although a concern to U.S. Embassy personnel in their daily movements around Venezuela’s dangerous capital, was not considered a major security risk to the United States.

Now, more than a decade later, the gang has become a menace even on American soil and has exploded into the U.S. presidential campaign amid a spree of kidnappings, extortion and other crimes throughout the western hemisphere tied to a mass exodus of Venezuelan migrants.

“What sets this group apart is the level of violence,” said Tabor, now retired from the DEA. “They’re aggressive, they’re hungry and they don’t know any boundaries because they’ve been allowed to spread their wings without any confrontation from law enforcement until now.”

That’s starting to change.

In July, the Biden administration sanctioned the gang, placing it alongside MS-13 from El Salvador and the Mafia-styled Camorra from Italy on a list of transnational criminal organizations and offering $12 million in rewards for the arrest of three leaders. Then, this month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared Tren de Aragua a Tier 1 threat, directing state police to target the gang and paving the way for stiffer penalties for members. Other states may soon follow suit.

Gang gains notoriety in the US

Focus on the gang jumped after footage from a security camera surfaced on social media showing a group of heavily armed men brazenly entering an apartment in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado.

That prompted former President Donald Trump to vow to “ liberate Aurora ” from Venezuelans he falsely said were “taking over the whole town.”

Police have called the reports exaggerated but nonetheless acknowledged that it is investigating 10 gang members for involvement in several crimes, including a July homicide.

Among them is a Venezuelan who was arrested in another Denver suburb and accused of helping someone else steal a motorcycle and pointing an AR-15 at a tow truck driver who had asked him to move his car. Another was suspected of stealing designer Gucci sunglasses in Boulder and has a multi-state criminal record, including for carjacking and vehicular assault.

Elsewhere, from the heartland to major cities like New York and Chicago, the gang has been blamed for sex trafficking, drug smuggling and police shootings as well as the exploitation of migrants.

The size of the gang and the extent to which its actions are coordinated across state lines and with leaders believed to be outside the U.S. are unclear.

The Tren originated in an infamous prison

The Tren, which means “train” in Spanish, traces its origin more than a decade ago to an infamously lawless prison with hardened criminals in the central state of Aragua. It nonetheless has expanded in recent years as more than 8 million desperate Venezuelans fled economic turmoil under President Nicolás Maduro’s rule and migrated to other parts of Latin America or the U.S.

One of the founders is Hector Guerrero, who was jailed years ago for killing a police officer, according to InSight Crime, a think tank that monitors organized crime in the Americas. Guerrero, better known by his alias El Nino, Spanish for the “boy,” later escaped and then was recaptured in 2013. He fled prison again more recently, as Venezuela’s government tried to reassert control over its prison population, and is believed to be residing in Colombia.

Authorities in countries such as Chile, Peru and Colombia — all with large populations of Venezuelan migrants — have accused the group of being behind a spree of violence in a region that has long had some of the highest murder rates in the world. Some of its more sensationalist crimes, including the beheading and burying alive of victims, have spread panic in poor neighborhoods where the gang extorts local businesses and illegally charges residents for “protection.”

Republican lawmakers make an issue of the gang

Now there are concerns about its ruthless tactics reaching U.S. shores as members infiltrate the nearly 1 million Venezuelan migrants who have crossed into the U.S. in recent years.

Eleven Republicans led by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, the vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland last week calling for a coordinated strategy from the Biden administration to combat the gang.

“The administration’s weak enforcement of immigration laws allows gangs, like Tren de Aragua, to control routes and exploit migrants,” the letter said.

Venezuelan officials express bafflement

Meanwhile, back in Venezuela, officials have watched the attention on Tren de Aragua in the U.S. and have expressed their bafflement.

A year ago, President Nicolas Maduro’s government claimed it had dismantled the gang after retaking control of the prison where the group was born. In July, Foreign Minister Yván Gil declared that the Tren de Aragua is a “fiction created by the international media.”

More recently, Diosdado Cabello, a longtime ruling party-leader, linked the criminal group to an alleged plot backed by the U.S. and the opposition to kill Maduro and some of his allies following the July 28 presidential election.

“The United States knows how to carry out destabilization operations,” Cabello said Friday when he announced the arrest of several people, including a U.S. citizen, for their alleged roles in the foiled anti-Maduro plan. “Why don’t they stop them?”

AP Writer Colleen Slevin in Denver, Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela and Astrid Suarez in Bogota, Colombia, contributed to this report.

By ALI SWENSON

In Georgia, election workers will have to hand count the number of ballots cast after voting is completed. In North Carolina, some students and university staff can use their digital IDs to vote. In Wisconsin, ballot drop boxes are newly legal again, although not every voting jurisdiction will use them.

Across the country, including in some of the nation’s presidential swing states, new or recently altered state laws are changing how Americans will vote, tally ballots, and administer and certify November’s election.

It can be a challenge to keep track of these 11th-hour changes, especially since state election processes already vary so widely. Even more changes are looming in some states, with Election Day on Nov. 5 now just weeks away. Several states already have started sending out mail ballots, and in some states, voters have begun casting ballots in person.

“Last-minute changes to election rules — whether from a state legislature, an election authority or a court — can lead to confusion for voters and election officials,” Megan Bellamy, vice president of law and policy for the Voting Rights Lab, said in an email response. “Election season is underway. Lawmakers, administrative bodies and courts must recognize that.”

Here’s a look at some of the election processes that are new or have been recently modified.

New hand-counting requirements

Georgia and Arizona will both require election workers to hand-count ballots at polling sites on Election Day. Election officials say it could delay the reporting of results.

The Georgia State Election Board passed its new rule on Friday. It requires that the number of ballots — not the number of votes — be counted by hand at each polling place by three separate poll workers until all three counts are the same.

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Georgia voters make selections on touch-screen voting machines that print out paper ballots. Those ballots include a list of the selections so voters can verify their accuracy and a QR code that is read by a scanner to tally the votes.

Proponents say the new hand-count rule is needed to make sure the number of paper ballots matches the electronic tallies on scanners, check-in computers and voting machines. The three workers will have to count the ballots in piles of 50, and the poll manager needs to explain and fix, if possible, any discrepancies, as well as document them.

The rule goes against the advice of the state attorney general’s office, the secretary of state’s office and an association of county election officials. Critics worry it could delay the reporting of election night results, undermining public confidence in the process.

A similar change to state law this year in Arizona is also likely to cause delayed results in the swing state this fall. It requires counties to hand count ballot envelopes that are dropped off at polling centers on Election Day before the ballots are tabulated.

After the July primary, Maricopa County Elections spokesperson Jennifer Liewer said the new step resulted in a roughly 30-minute delay in reporting the county’s results, and said the impact could be greater in the general election “if we have hundreds of thousands of ballots dropped off.”

Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, estimates between 625,000 and 730,000 voters will drop off their ballots on Nov. 5.

JP Martin, a spokesperson for Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, said in an email that the ballot counting mandate will “require considerable time, particularly since poll workers have already completed a 12-15-hour shift.”

Changes for early and mailed ballots

Chaos and disinformation about mail-in ballots and drop boxes have prompted partisan disagreements — and new rules — in several states over how these accessible voting methods should be used.

In Wisconsin, the then-conservative majority state Supreme Court outlawed drop boxes in 2022. But a new liberal majority on the court made them legal again in July. Some communities opened them for the state’s August primary, but more will be in use for November.

Their use in Wisconsin is voluntary and some conservative towns have opted against using drop boxes, citing security concerns. The state’s two most heavily Democratic cities, Milwaukee and Madison, used them in August and will again in November.

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, issued a directive to county election boards in August that said only a voter can drop their personal ballot in a drop box. Anyone who assists someone else must return that ballot inside the county board office and complete an attestation form.

In Pennsylvania, a court battle is pending at the state Supreme Court that could decide whether counties must count provisional ballots cast by voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected for relatively minor mistakes, such as not inserting the ballot into an inner secrecy envelope. Practices vary by county and state law is silent on it. Republicans have argued that nothing in state law explicitly allows a voter to cast a provisional ballot in place of a rejected mail-in ballot.

Separately, the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court earlier this month threw out a case on a technicality after a lower court had ruled that rejecting mail-in ballots for “meaningless and inconsequential paperwork errors” — such as a missing handwritten date — violates the constitutional right to vote. As a result, counties are expected to continue the practice of disqualifying those ballots. Some counties — primarily Democratic ones — strive to help voters fix those errors or cast a provisional ballot instead.

This is the first presidential election since Florida’s Republican-controlled Legislature made a series of changes to mail balloting in 2021. While those aren’t recent changes, their impact could be significant this year in a state that traditionally has had robust interest in voting by mail. One change makes a voter’s request for a mail ballot valid only for the next general election, rather than two general election cycles, meaning voters will have to reapply. Requesting a mail ballot also now requires a driver’s license number, state ID number or last four digits of a Social Security number.

Verifying a voter’s identity

In North Carolina, the State Board of Elections last month voted that students and staff at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill could show digital identifications on their smartphones to qualify to vote under the state’s recently implemented photo voter ID law.

It marked the first such digital ID the board has approved. Republican groups sued, contending that state law only allows physical cards.

A trial judge last week refused to block its use. Republicans have since filed an appeal notice. Only mobile IDs issued by UNC-Chapel Hill on Apple phones have been approved for use.

In Arkansas, a federal appeals court decision last week reinstated a rule that bans electronic signatures for voter registration. The state Board of Election Commissioners approved the rule in April, saying the state’s constitution allows only certain agencies, and not elections officials, to accept electronic signatures. Under the rule, voters will have to register by signing their name with a pen.

It was adopted after nonprofit group Get Loud Arkansas helped register voters using electronic signatures. The board said the rule was needed to create uniformity across the state.

The board’s director asked county clerks to identify any registration documents submitted using electronic signatures after the appeals court decision and make every effort to contact the voters as soon as possible to give them the chance to correct their application.

After the votes are in

Election administration doesn’t stop when the polls close, and a few states will have new processes in the post-election period.

The same Georgia election board that ordered counties to hand count the number of paper ballots had just weeks earlier passed new rules related to certification of the vote. One change provides for a “reasonable inquiry” before county election officials certify results, without defining what that means. Another allows county election officials “to examine all election-related documentation created during the conduct of elections.”

Democrats have sued to block the new rules, saying they could be used by local officials who want to refuse certification if they don’t like the election results.

In New Hampshire, Gov. Chris Sununu signed legislation in July that establishes postelection audits. It took effect in time for New Hampshire’s late state primary on Sept. 10 and will apply to general elections.

The audits allow the secretary of state’s office to check that electronic vote-counting equipment functioned properly. Ten polling locations were chosen at random.

The audit of electronic ballot counting devices was determined successful by the appointed audit team, with all results within expected margins.

In Nebraska, former President Donald Trump’s allies were pushing for the state to change how it allocates electoral votes to prevent Vice President Kamala Harris from potentially claiming one of them by carrying the state’s congressional district for the Omaha area. But that effort appears doomed because a Republican state senator said he wouldn’t support it, denying backers the two-thirds majority they would need to get it through the Legislature and into law before the Nov. 5 election.

“After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from Election Day, is not the moment to make this change,” state Sen. Mike McDonnell of Omaha said Monday.

Maine is the only other state that allocates Electoral College votes by congressional district.

Associated Press statehouse reporters across the country contributed to this report.

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