This story was produced as part of the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. It first appeared at cpr.org.
Flanked by federal agents and local police last August, U.S. Attorney Peter McNeilly faced a bank of cameras and minced no words as he spoke of his determination to take down the Colorado operations of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
“I have a message specifically for TdA,” he said, as photographers clicked away. “We will not let you use Colorado as your headquarters in the United States … and we will go anywhere in the world in pursuit of you.”
But seven months later, McNeilly’s office has so far hasn't gone one place in pursuit of TdA: To criminal trial.
Of the 30 people whose charges were announced that day from two indictments last summer, nearly half have pled guilty in exchange for a chance at a reduced sentence.
In those 13 cases, court records show that the government has agreed to either recommend reduced sentences or reduce initial charges, or both, in exchange for the pleas. Two other possible agreements remain sealed until court appearances in upcoming weeks. But the agreements now public will potentially shave years off the prison sentences those defendants would have faced if convicted at trial on the original charges.
As many as 15 remaining defendants could still face juries one day.
But for a case that drew attention from the highest levels of the U.S. Department of Justice and served as at least partial underpinning for President Donald Trump’s rationale to invade Venezuela, the lack of convictions at trial followed by uncompromising sentences so far would seem to leave McNeilly’s tough talk unfulfilled.
Defense attorneys say that rather than serving to expose the deep reach of a criminal gang directed from Caracas and bent on poisoning Americans with drugs, the pleas have shown the group’s local operation for what it really is: A ragtag bunch of minor criminals desperate for cash whose offenses often started with meetings with informants, undercover local law enforcement and federal agents, not dictated by a leader in South America.
“Nothing that was done here is new,” said Jason Schall, whose client Jonathan Jose Ocopio-Villalobos pleaded guilty in late December to conspiracy to possess and distribute a methamphetamine mixture and a conspiracy to use a firearm during a drug trafficking crime. “If there was something new about it, it is how quickly resources were targeted towards a particular community.”
McNeilly had no comment on the plea deals or the way the case is now playing out seven months later. He said through a spokeswoman that he stood by his earlier comments about the takedown of Tren de Aragua in Colorado.
Plea agreements are a routinely-used tool in the administration of justice in the U.S. If every case went to trial, the system would grind to a halt. Instead, prosecutors and defense attorneys try to strike deals that protect defendants from longer sentences, while still offering meaningful punishment, and protecting the government from the risk of acquittals through dismissal of charges by a judge or because a jury found the evidence lacking.
Judges retain the authority to impose the sentences they want, within the law, but the government has latitude to make recommendations for lesser punishments as part of negotiations resulting in plea deals or to alter initial charges completely. They have employed both strategies in the agreements made so far.
Few cases in Colorado draw the attention of the main Justice Department in Washington or the White House, or generate headlines like “30 Charged for Drug, Weapons Trafficking As ‘Biggest TdA Investigation in the Country’ Unfolded in Colorado.”
This one did.
The sting operation led to the seizure of several pounds of illegal drugs and 69 firearms. But while the defendants involved are admitting to serious crimes, including distributing narcotics and obtaining illegal guns, and will likely face years in prison followed by deportation when sentenced in upcoming weeks, by any description, the results in court have failed to back up the hype surrounding TdA as a major threat to the public.
Instead, the two indictments of a total of 30 defendants announced in that press conference only mention the gang in one sentence — despite undercover officers repeatedly asking the defendants about it.
That doesn’t mean the gang doesn’t exist in Colorado. The government previously secured a plea from a man involved in a 2024 jewelry store robbery in which he admitted being part of Tren de Aragua. And a separate indictment filed in December charges two men with racketeering and robbery of Colorado jewelry stores on behalf of Tren de Aragua. The men haven’t ever been to Colorado, but authorities said they were steering gang-related operations from abroad.
That case, which Trump also referenced in his justification for invading Venezuela, will require prosecutors to provide evidence of Tren de Aragua’s reach in Colorado, if it goes to trial. It’s far too soon to know how that case might end: One of the men charged has yet to be moved from custody in Colombia and a second one is at large with a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture.
Guns, drugs and money — under the watchful eyes of undercover agents
The series of sting operations resulting in the summer indictments started just before President Trump’s November 2024 election. In October 2024, federal agents were asked by the local sheriff to help investigate an apartment complex in Arapahoe County where there was a spike in crime. The building had a lot of Venezuelan immigrants.
Throughout the fall of 2024, undercover officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives dressed mostly like Hells Angels motorcycle enthusiasts according to lawyers, struck up a few relationships with two Venezuelan men who eventually agreed to sell the undercover officers guns and drugs if the agents agreed to pre-pay for the products.
Over the course of several months, undercover agents made a series of gun purchases from two Venezuelans, Jose Manuel Guerra-Caballero and Luis Aguilera-Pericaguan. Others got involved, too, according to the federal complaint. And the Venezuelans were paid or offered thousands of dollars for the guns and drugs — including a $15,000 purchase of ten pounds of methamphetamine in a single transaction and $10,000 for eight firearms and ammunition.
Though the investigation’s start pre-dated the change in administrations, it turned out that the ATF undercover agents were doing exactly what they would soon be asked to do by the U.S. Attorney General.
On Feb. 5, 2025, newly appointed U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a directive to thousands of the nation’s federal prosecutors.
“The nation faces historic threats from widespread illegal immigration, dangerous cartels, transnational organized crime, gangs, human trafficking and smuggling, fentanyl and opioids,” she wrote. “Consistent with the core principle of pursuing the most serious, readily provable offense, U.S. Attorney’s Offices … shall pursue charges relating to criminal immigration-related violations.”
Later in the memo, Bondi continued, “President Trump has tasked the Department of Justice with an ambitious and historic mission: total elimination of Tren de Aragua, La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and the international drug cartels from the United States. The time is now.”
Ongoing operations, including the ones that had started in the waning months of the Biden administration, were given additional resources and manpower, Colorado’s U.S. attorney said when announcing the indictment. The feds continued to target apartment buildings with high numbers of Venezuelans.
Yet proof of organized and sophisticated gang activity — complete with hierarchies and transnational criminal organizations meant to earn money — has not appeared in the cases announced in August.
Rather, court documents in this case at least indicate that most of the more than two dozen men tied up in the operations were doing it, at least partly, out of financial desperation.
Guerra-Caballero, one of the ringleaders who took a plea deal late last month, told one of the undercover officers in Spanish during the investigation, “Gerardo, talk to them. Everything they want. Ask them what job they want, whatever it is, we’re willing to do it all. Tell them they can work with me. That whatever job, whatever it is, one’s there.”
He later said to another undercover officer, “I want to know how much you’re offering, talk to me about ‘plata’ and I’ll tell you yes it’s fine.” “Plata” is Spanish slang for money, according to court records.
On Jan. 29, 2024, about a week into Trump’s term and just before the Bondi directive, undercover agents working in Arapahoe County asked to buy more guns from the Venezuelans and also requested a “security” detail for a staged drug deal. Additional Venezuelans were brought into the fold and promised cash. Most of them didn’t have any criminal records, according to their attorneys, and were asked to bring a firearm and help secure a perimeter for the drug sale.
Defense lawyers described their clients as susceptible to the operations because of their circumstances.
Several of the lawyers representing men who have pled to crimes told CPR News they were hesitant to say anything about their clients’ lives or about the cases themselves ahead of the sentencing hearings, most of which are scheduled for March and April.
Deals lead to reduced sentences
Jhon Harrison Villalobos-Salas, 35, told undercover officers he knew someone who could deliver them cocaine, since they offered him money for it. A couple of hours later, when it arrived, the officers gave him $650 for a half an ounce.
Villalobos-Salas was originally charged with three drug crimes that could have resulted in as much as 30 years in prison if convicted at trial. Instead, after his plea deal to lesser included crimes, he could now serve as little as 6 months or as much as 9 years.
Santtys Jose Silva-Alvarez sold some undercover officers what they thought was tusi, a recreational drug mixture often made with ketamine and other substances, but subsequent testing didn’t detect any controlled substances. He also sold them two firearms. He was initially charged with two counts of conspiracy to illegally traffic firearms and another charge: alien in possession of a firearm. Conviction at trial could have resulted in 25 or more years in prison.
He pleaded guilty only to a conspiracy to traffic firearms, which could carry a minimum sentence of 27 months.
Schall’s 45-year-old client, along with six other Venezuelan men living in an Aurora apartment complex in January 2025, were mostly Temporary Protected Status holders, a temporary amnesty program granted during the Biden administration. To qualify for TPS, an individual cannot have a criminal record. By most accounts, according to court documents, they were also extremely poor and without high levels of education. Several of the men didn’t complete high school, and a couple of them only reached primary school. None spoke any English.
“Sting cases like this are a tried and true approach for federal investigators to identify and potentially arrest people in the community that they may not have known about before,” Schall said.
Another attorney noted the parallels of this case with the now infamous Chicago “stash house” project, in which federal agents systemically targeted poor neighborhoods with high populations of Black Americans for undercover reverse stings -- offering money in exchange for the people to commit crimes.
Faculty at the University of Chicago law school alleged the reverse sting operation was inherently discriminatory. “Of the 94 people selected by the ATF to commit this offense from 2006-2013, approximately 92% were Black or Hispanic,” documents said.
The litigation on equal protection grounds resulted in dramatically lower sentences for all of the clients and changed discovery law in the Seventh Circuit and other jurisdictions.
“It's easier when you fabricate the sting and the crime and then catch the people who commit the fake crime than it is to go out and actually try to stop people who are really committing crimes,” said Judith Miller, a University of Chicago law school professor who works in the Federal Criminal Justice Clinic and worked on the stash house litigation. “The ATF has a long record of using reverse stings to create crime. It’s a tactic the agency has repeated in multiple contexts, over decades, across the country.”
The difference with what happened to the Venezuelans here, defense lawyers point out, is that these clients are exclusively immigrants.
ATF officials in Denver declined to comment on the story and referred questions to the U.S. Attorney’s office.
David Pyrooz, a sociologist at the University of Colorado, has extensively studied gangs for more than 15 years. While he said he wasn’t an expert on this particular case, generally speaking, organized criminal gang members are highly skeptical of easy offers for cash in exchange for guns and drugs.
“Real gang members tend to be pretty untrustworthy to outsiders who were flashing around big sums of money,” Pyrooz said. “An instance where they’re provided with an opportunity to sell guns or steal cars, those opportunities get vetted and there must be a level of trust to it.”
Bob Troyer, a former Colorado U.S. Attorney, who was appointed and served during the Obama administration, called these opportunistic crimes for desperate people.
“We have called them clothesline crimes,” Troyer said. “They take everything off the clothesline. They’re poor. Whatever is there, they take it or do it, it doesn’t matter what it is.”
Court documents indicate that even a “murder for hire” plot that was described last August by federal prosecutors as proof of a nefarious element of the purported gang activity was promised out of financial desperation. Court records also indicate that the cash-based criminal transactions taking place between the Venezuelans and the undercover officers were happening only because the undercovers kept coming back to the same group and offering more money.
In other words, many of the drugs and the guns weren’t in their possession before the government got involved and began offering large sums of money for these illegal items. Court documents show that the immigrants went to great lengths to acquire what the officers were asking for.
One undercover officer called a man not charged in this case on a WhatsApp phone number and tried to lower the initial price for a rifle he wanted to buy. The man replied, “No, the price was $2,000 … We bought that for $1,400 and are not making any profit.”
In another exchange, the undercover officers pressed defendant Jose David Rivas-Mendez to sell them a firearm and he declined because he said the only one he had was his personal firearm. He then told the undercover officer that a friend was putting a firearm together for him but he didn’t have it yet because he didn’t have enough money.
Rivas-Mendez, whose case is still pending in federal court, and others were tied up in another sting that started in spring 2025 in and around the Ivy Crossing Apartment Homes complex. They were led to police by a confidential informant who was paid by police in exchange for giving law enforcement “reliable” information. The informant has past felony convictions.
The undercover officers, working with the informant, met Rivas-Mendez when the undercover officers said they wanted to buy firearms, ammunition, cocaine and other drugs.
As the relationship between the undercover officers and the men, particularly Rivas-Mendez, grew stronger through multiple firearms and drugs purchases, the Venezuelan told the undercover agents that he was acquiring contraband for the undercover officers to meet their requests.
On April 16, 2025, he said he’d help the undercovers “with any type of job” and he would be willing to “kill people for a job if the undercovers needed someone taken out,” according to court records. Rivas-Mendez went on to tell the informant and the undercover officers that he just needed to know “how many people are needed for a job, how much money they will get paid to complete the job” before committing to anything.
It was unclear in court documents who initiated the idea of killing someone for money: the undercover officers or the defendants.
The undercover officers told Rivas-Mendez they’d pay $10,000 to kill two people. The episode as described in court records also reflected that the people involved in the crimes were not interested in drawing attention by attacking Americans, but more willing to engage in immigrant-on-immigrant crime. At the same time, it did indicate there was a certain gang hierarchy at work, according to the indictment.
“In your country, we will not kill a white dog,” Rivas-Mendez told the undercover officers. “A Latino will be easier. How much do you offer me so I can then talk to my boss. You give me a price and I can call him right away. He will then tell me, yes take it or leave it.”
Eventually, he agreed and brought along three other friends. They loaded guns into a car to allegedly drive to where a murder would take place.
They were arrested instead.
Michelle Pena is one of the defendants in the case. He was kind of marginally involved in the first sting and was asked by one of the alleged ringleaders to help provide security and “assistance” for undercover officers conducting a fake drug deal in exchange for $1,000, according to court records. Pena was told to furnish his own weapon, and he brought a silver pistol in his waistband.
As the staged deal was about to begin, Pena and five other men, paid to be there with guns, were arrested. Pena was initially charged with three felonies, including conspiracy to possess drugs with an intent to distribute and having a firearm in furtherance of a drug crime. The combined sentences could have resulted in life in prison.
Instead, on Jan. 28, Pena took a plea deal. He said he was guilty of a lesser included offense of intent to distribute more than 50 grams of methamphetamine “mixture” and a lesser firearm charge.
“I don’t know what to say,” Pena said in Spanish to the judge at his plea deal hearing. “I made a mistake.”
Though the judge will make his own decision at Pena’s sentencing, the 28-year-old Venezuelan with a primary school education who was once facing life behind bars could instead be sentenced to five years in prison.
