CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Debates over President Donald Trump’s hardline migration policies are focused on the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, to some a ruthless transnational criminal organization and to others the pretext for an overhyped anti-migrant narrative.

Trump labeled the Tren de Aragua an invading force on Saturday when he invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a little-used authority from 1798 that allows the president to deport any noncitizen during wartime. Hours later, the Trump administration transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador even as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring the deportations. Flights were in the air when the ruling came down.

The Alien Enemies Act requires a president to declare the United States at war, giving him extraordinary powers to detain or remove foreigners to whom immigration or criminal laws otherwise protect. It had been used only three times — the last time to justify the detention of Japanese-American civilians during World War II.

The Trump administration has not identified the more than 200 immigrants deported, provided any evidence they are in fact members of Tren de Aragua or that they committed any crimes in the United States.

Gang gains notoriety in the US

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 the nearly 1 million Venezuelan migrants have crossed into the U.S. in recent years. Trump told Congress this month that a Venezuelan migrant found guilty of murdering 22-year-old nursing student Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus was a member of the gang.

In this photo provided by El Salvador’s presidential press office, prison guards transfer deportees from the U.S., alleged to be Venezuelan gang members, to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, Sunday, March 16, 2025. (El Salvador presidential press office via AP)

The size of the gang is unclear as is the extent to which its actions are coordinated across state lines and national borders.

The Venezuelan gang entered U.S. political discourse after footage from a security camera surfaced on social media last summer showing heavily armed men entering an apartment in the Denver suburb of Aurora shortly before a fatal shooting outside. In response, Trump vowed to “ liberate Aurora ” from Venezuelans he falsely said were “taking over the whole town.”

The city initially downplayed concerns. But most of the apartment complex was closed under an emergency order last month after officials said they suspected Tren de Aragua members in the kidnapping and assault of two residents.

Most of the men seen in the video have been arrested, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement accusing them of gang membership.

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 has expanded in recent years as more than 8 million Venezuelans fled economic turmoil under President Nicolás Maduro’s rule and migrated to other parts of Latin America or the U.S.

FILE – Soldiers raid the Tocorón Penitentiary Center, where the Tren de Aragua gang originated, in Tocorón, Venezuela, Sept. 20, 2023. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos, File)

Countries such as 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 crimes have spread panic in poor neighborhoods, where the gang extorts local businesses and illegally charges residents for “protection.”

The gang operates as a loose network in the U.S. Tattoos, which are commonly used by Central American gangs, aren’t required for those affiliated with the Tren, said Ronna Risquez, a Venezuelan journalist who wrote a 2023 book about the gang’s origins.

Trump targets the Tren

On his first day in office, Trump he took steps to designate the gang a “foreign terrorist organization” alongside several Mexican drug cartels. The Biden administration had sanctioned the gang and offered $12 million in rewards for the arrest of three of its leaders.

Trump’s executive order Saturday accused the gang of working closely with top Maduro officials — most notably the former vice president and one-time governor of Aragua state, Tareck El Aissami, — to infiltrate migration flows, flood the U.S. with cocaine and plot against the country.

“The result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States,” Trump’s executive order alleged.

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Wes Tabor, who headed the Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in Venezuela when the gang first came onto law enforcement radar, said Trump’s decision to give the DEA and other federal agencies authority to carry out immigrant arrests is a “force multiplier” that will curtail the Tren’s activities in the U.S.

Tabor said authorities need to build a robust database like it did when combating El Salvador’s MS-13 containing biometric data, arrest information and intelligence from foreign law enforcement partners.

“We have to use a hammer on an ant because if we don’t it will get out of control,” said Tabor. “We need to smash it now.”

Venezuelan officials protest

In Venezuela, officials originally expressed bafflement at the U.S. interest in the Tren, claiming it had dismantled the gang after retaking control of the prison where the group was born.

As Trump’s immigration crackdown has intensified, they’ve conditioned their cooperation with U.S. deportation flights on progress in other areas in the long-strained bilateral relationship.

Last month, authorities gave a hero’s welcome to some 190 Venezuelan migrants deported by Trump, accusing the U.S. of spreading an “ill-intentioned” and “false” narrative about the Tren in the U.S. They said most Venezuelan immigrants are decent, hard-working people and that U.S. officials were looking to stigmatize the South American nation.

Over the weekend they protested the use of Trump’s invocation of the wartime rules, likening it to the “darkest episodes in human history, from slavery to the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.”

As NFL fans around the country wait for some sort of a resolution with future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers, the Vikings are continuing to search for other ways to improve their roster.

In search of more depth in the secondary, the Vikings announced Monday they were hosting cornerback Jeff Okudah on a visit at TCO Performance Center.

There’s some potential upside with Okudah considering he was the No. 3 pick in the 2020 NFL Draft. He has played for the Detroit Lions, Atlanta Falcons and Houston Texans in his career, and he could soon add the Vikings to that list. Though he will likely never be the elite player some thought he could be when he was a top prospect out of Ohio State, Okudah could benefit from working with defensive coordinator Brian Flores and defensive backs coach Daronte Jones.

If the Vikings are able to come to an agreement with Okudah, he would join a group of cornerbacks that includes Byron Murphy Jr., Isaiah Rodgers, Mekhi Blackmon and Dwight McGlothern, among others.

Houston Texans cornerback Jeff Okudah (11) and cornerback Kris Boyd (17) react after a missed field goal by the Jacksonville Jaguars during the second half of an NFL football game, Sunday, Dec. 1, 2024, in Jacksonville, Fla. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)

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By MELINA WALLING, Associated Press

For cattle fattened in fields instead of feedlots, the grass may be greener, but the carbon emissions are not.

A study out Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that even in the most optimistic scenarios, grass-fed beef produces no less planet-warming carbon emissions than industrial beef. The finding calls into question the frequent promotion of grass-fed beef as a more environmentally friendly option. Still, other scientists say grass-fed beef wins out on other factors like animal welfare or local environmental pollution, complicating the choice for conscientious consumers.

“I think that there is a large portion of the population who really do wish their purchasing decisions will reflect their values,” said Gidon Eshel, a research professor of environmental physics at Bard College and one of the study’s authors. “But they are being misled, essentially, by the wrong information.”

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When it comes to food, beef contributes by far the most emissions fueling climate change and is one of the most resource- and land-intensive to produce. Yet demand for beef around the world is only expected to grow. And carefully weighing the benefits of grass-fed beef matters because in most parts of the world where beef production is expanding, such as South America, it’s being done by deforesting land that would otherwise store carbon, said Richard Waite of the World Resources Institute.

Experts say this study’s finding makes sense because it’s less efficient to produce grass-fed cattle than their industrial counterparts. Animals that are fattened up in fields instead of feedlots grow more slowly and don’t get as big, so it takes more of them to produce the same amount of meat.

The researchers used a numerical model of the emissions produced across the process of raising beef, then simulated many herds of industrial and grass-fed cattle. It compared differences in how much food they would eat, how much methane and carbon dioxide they would emit and how much meat they would produce. Those differences mirror real-life scenarios; cattle in arid New Mexico and lush northern Michigan have different inputs and outputs.

Eshel and his team also analyzed previous studies that examined how much cattle grazing promotes carbon storage, but found that even in the best-case scenarios, the amount of carbon that grasses could sequester didn’t make up for the emissions of the cattle.

Randy Jackson, a professor of grassland ecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the study, said he has found similar results in his own research showing that grass-fed beef has higher emissions assuming the same demand. In fact, Eshel’s team cited his work. But he worries that the study is too focused on minimizing emissions “without concern for the environmental impacts beyond GHG load to the atmosphere,” like biodiversity and soil and water quality, he wrote in an email.

The American Grassfed Association, a nonprofit membership group for producers of grass-fed livestock, did not immediately provide a comment on the study.

Jennifer Schmitt, who studies the sustainability of U.S. agricultural supply chains at the University of Minnesota and also wasn’t involved in the study, said she thinks the paper “helps us get a little closer to answering the question of maybe how much beef should we have on the landscape versus plant proteins,” she said.

Schmitt said maybe if beef was scaled back on a large enough scale and if farmers could free up more cropland for other foods that humans eat, the localized environmental benefits of grass-fed cattle could make up for the fact that they come with higher emissions.

It would be harder to convince Eshel, however. He thinks climate change is “second to none” when it comes to global problems and should be prioritized as such.

“I have a hard time imagining, even, a situation in which it will prove environmentally, genuinely wise, genuinely beneficial, to raise beef,” Eshel said.

For consumers who truly want to be environmentally conscious, he added, “don’t make beef a habit.”

Follow Melina Walling on X @MelinaWalling and Bluesky @melinawalling.bsky.social.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Dawn Plitzuweit’s Gophers did not earn an NCAA tournament berth on Sunday as they had hoped, but they did earn a No. 2 seed in the second-tier WBIT tournament later that evening.

Unfortunately, the Gophers will not be able to enjoy the immediate spoils of that top seed, a home game, for the first or, if they advance, second rounds of the 32-team tournament because the boys state basketball tournament is setting up shop in Williams Arena this week.

“It makes it challenging, certainly,” Plitzuweit said.

The Gophers (20-11) were hoping their Big Ten resume would make them one of the last teams in the 68-team NCAA tournament, but they’re also happy to keep playing starting Thursday against MAC runner-up Toledo (24-8) in Ohio.

Tip at Savage Arena is set for 6 p.m. CDT.

“The positive to it is I guess we’ve done it in the past,” Plitzuweit said Monday. Last season’s team, her first at Minnesota, advanced to the WNIT championship, where the Gophers lost to St. Louis. The last of their five games were played on the road between April 2-6.

The Gophers stayed on the road for all three of those games.

“I thought it really helped us this year,” Plitzuweit said. “It helped us with doing some of those things and being better in adverse situations.”

The Gophers are ranked No. 39 in the NET (NCAA Evaluation Tool) rankings, behind the 11 Big Ten teams that made the NCAA tournament: No. 1 seeds UCLA and Southern Cal, No. 4 Maryland and Ohio State, No. 6 Iowa and Michigan, No. 7 Michigan State, No. 8 Illinois, No. 9 Indiana and No. 10 Nebraska and Oregon.

Toledo is ranked 115th in the NET rankings, and 0-2 in Quad 1 wins. The Gophers were 0-8. That doesn’t mean advancing in the WBIT wouldn’t be important, particularly for a program just beginning under Plitzuweit, who last season took West Virginia to the NCAA tournament, and in 2022 led South Dakota to the Sweet 16.

At one point this season, the Gophers were 17-2 overall and 5-2 in the Big Ten and ranked No. 23 in the Associated Press poll, their first appearance in the national poll since 2019, despite losing returning leading scorer Mara Braun (foot) and Michigan transfer Taylor Woodson (knee) early to season-ending injuries.

But the schedule got tougher, and while the Gophers played well against ranked teams such as Maryland, Ohio State and Southern Cal, they were never able to get over the hump. The winner of Thursday’s game will meet the winner of a first-round game between Missouri State (25-8) of the Missouri Valley and the Summit League’s Oral Roberts (24-8).

Although the Gophers would be the higher seed in that game, they wouldn’t be able to play that game — currently scheduled for Sunday — at home, either. Plitzuweit said it’s possible a third-round game could be played at the Barn but noted that to make that happen, her team has “a lot of work to do.”

“Right now we have one opportunity to play, and that’s at Toledo,” she said.

GOPHERS AT TOLEDO

What: WBIT, first round
When: 6 p.m. CDT Thursday
Where: Savage Arena, Toledo, Ohio
Streaming/Radio: ESPN+ / KFAN+ 96.7

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