Tren de Aragua, MS-13 and the Sinaloa cartel are among the two gangs and six drug cartels the US has officially designated as foreign terrorist organizations, fulfilling a long-standing goal from US President Donald Trump’s first term in office.
Trump previously ordered the US to declare cartels terrorist groups in a January 20 executive order, but until US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s official announcement on Thursday, none of the cartels had been specifically named. During his first term, Trump had considered a similar maneuver but refrained at the request of then-Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
In an order published in the federal government’s Public Register, Rubio named two gangs: Tren de Aragua of Venezuela and MS-13 of El Salvador; and six Mexican drug cartels: Cartel de Sinaloa, Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, Carteles Unidos, Cartel del Noreste, Cartel del Golfo, and La Nueva Familia Michoacana.
They join the ranks of other groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the US, including ISIS, Boko Haram, and Hamas.
Here’s what you need to know about each of these groups:
Tren de Aragua
Tren de Aragua began as a prison gang in Venezuela, according to the US Treasury Department, with much of their criminal enterprise focused “on human smuggling and other illicit acts that target desperate migrants.”
TdA became a political talking point during the last presidential campaign, after police in Aurora, Colorado, said several suspects in a 2023 kidnapping there were members of the gang. As he stumped for the presidency, Trump held up Aurora and Tren de Aragua as an example of what he said were migration’s inevitable results, claiming that the gang had taken control of vast swathes of territory in Colorado. Aurora police, however, pushed back, saying that the gang’s presence in the city was “isolated.”
For Trump, “cracking down on Tren de Aragua is part and parcel of cracking down on the era of mass migration,” said Will Freeman, a Latin America fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
MS-13
MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, is a Salvadoran-American street gang and criminal organization, notorious for its brutality and its deep roots in the United States. MS-13 was a prominent theme of Trump’s first term, with the president often referring to the group as “violent animals.”
Unlike any of the other groups listed in Rubio’s order, MS-13 is technically native to the US. According to a history of MS-13 from InSight Crime, a think tank focused on organized crime in Latin America, a group of Salvadorans originally founded the group in 1980s Los Angeles.
In the following years, MS-13 began to grow and evolve as more Salvadorans arrived in the US, fleeing the civil war back home. Though the group began as a Salvadoran gang, according to a 2008 FBI threat assessment, its ranks have opened to others from Latin America, including Hondurans and Guatemalans. When US authorities began deporting members of MS-13 back to the region in the 1990s, it caused an explosion of gang activity in El Salvador and neighboring countries.
By 2015, El Salvador was the murder capital of the Western Hemisphere. Ten years later, however, the murder rate has plummeted. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has focused much of his time in office on curbing violence from gangs like MS-13, arresting nearly 1% of the country’s population and throwing thousands of gang members in prison.
MS-13’s addition to the designation list is a “curveball,” said Freeman.
“It’s a bit weird,” Freeman pointed out. “One of the main countries it drew its strength from was El Salvador. It’s really been dismantled there.”
Cartel de Sinaloa
The Cartel de Sinaloa or the Sinaloa Cartel is closely associated with its former leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, known for his numerous prison escapes and immortalized in rapper Gucci Mane’s 2012 single “El Chapo.” After the US extradited Guzmán from Mexico in 2017 and convicted him on 10 counts of federal drug-related crimes two years later, his sons – El Chapitos – partly took control of the group. The DEA alleged in a 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment that the Sinaloa Cartel operates with four different components cooperating without a single, formal leader.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Sinaloa Cartel’s international presence is unmatched by any other Mexican criminal group, with a diverse empire of extortion rackets, weapons trading, prostitution and oil theft alongside their drug business. In 2023, former US Attorney General Merrick Garland alleged the Sinaloa Cartel operates the “largest, most violent, and most prolific fentanyl trafficking operation in the world.” In the same press release, the Justice Department alleged that the group is “largely responsible” for the manufacturing and importing of fentanyl for distribution in the US.
Cartel del Golfo
Journalist Ioan Grillo writes in his authoritative book “El Narco” that the Gulf Cartel got its start during the Prohibition era, smuggling heroin and whiskey over the border into the US. But it wasn’t until the 1990s and 2000s that CDG reached prominence under the stewardship of Osiel Cardenas Guillen.
Cardenas, whom Grillo describes as a “balding former car thief,” eventually enticed members of the Mexican Special Forces to join his syndicate as enforcers. Their unit eventually (and violently) branched off into Los Zetas Cartel in 2010, according to a 2022 report from the Congressional Research Service. Cardenas, meanwhile, was arrested and extradited to the US in 2007, where he was imprisoned. In 2024, the US handed him over to Mexico so he could stand trial on numerous charges there.
Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion
The Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG, is one of the “most powerful and ruthless criminal organizations” inside Mexico, according to the DEA’s 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment.
CJNG is led by Nemesio Oseguero Cervantes, a former police officer better known as El Mencho, according to InSight Crime. A Justice Department indictment of Oseguero says his organization is active in the Mexican states of Jalisco, Colima, and Veracruz, and has presences elsewhere.
The DEA alleges that the cartel “operates under a franchise business model,” allowing CJNG to rapidly expand and control significant swathes of narcotrafficking routes. Heavily involved in the production and trafficking of methamphetamine and fentanyl, the DEA claims that CJNG has deep connections with suppliers for chemical precursors in China. Jalisco exercises control over various maritime ports to import these chemical products and has an extensive network of smuggling routes.
Cárteles Unidos
In its latest incarnation, Cárteles Unidos formed in 2019 as an alliance of the Cartel of Tepalcatepec, Los Viagras, and other groups, with the shared goal of combatting CJNG and expelling them from Michoacán, according to InSight Crime.
Before disbanding, a prior version of the group formed in 2010 to stop the advance of the Zetas into Michoacán and Jalisco, InSight reports. It was composed of members from many organizations from the Sinaloa Cartel, the Knights Templar cartel, Milenio Cartel, and the Familia Michoacana.
The broader organization is led by Juan José Farías Álvarez, known as “El Abuelo,” the former leader of the self-defense group that fought the Knights Templar in Tierra Caliente. Carteles Unidos also is involved in growing avocados, one of Mexico’s chief exports. The cartel devotes significant energy to extorting avocado producers, and one recent report found that 80% of the avocado orchards in Michoacan were established illegally.
Cartel del Noreste
The Cartel del Noreste (CDN) operates primarily in northeast Mexico along the US border. The cartel emerged when Los Zetas – itself a spinoff of the Gulf Cartel – splintered after a series of high-profile leadership losses, according to InSight Crime.
A 2024 Justice Department indictment against several members of the organization accused CDN and Los Zetas of “using terroristic violence to control large swaths of Northern Mexico, including along the border between Mexico and the United States.”
In November 2024, Homeland Security said that the group was involved in smuggling migrants into the US, claiming that “in recent years it has added human smuggling to its list of illicit money-making operations, with Facebook and social media becoming invaluable tools to facilitate its new venture.”
La Nueva Familia Michoacana
According to the US Treasury, La Nueva Familia Michoacana is led by José Alfredo and Johnny Hurtado Olascoaga with a presence in Michoacán, Guerrero, and the state of Mexico. The US State Department has alleged that the organization is involved in “migrant smuggling” into the US, alongside the fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamine trades.
The group’s founder, Nazario “El Chayo” Moreno, was known for preaching Bible verses and self-help phrases to the members of his organization, according to the Mexican attorney general’s office. Moreno famously “died” twice: Mexican authorities initially claimed they killed him in 2010 but couldn’t produce an image of his dead body. The official story drew suspicion up through 2014, when Mexico’s Public Security System said he was shot and killed during a raid, acknowledging their previous announcement was incorrect.