MANTRAYA ANALYSIS #88: 16 MAY 2025
THOMAS A. MARKS & SHANTHIE M. D’SOUZA
Abstract
Intelligence for asymmetric warfare remains critical, all the more so given the growing fusion of traditional asymmetric concerns, such as armed challenge to the state, with those of a glocal nature, the local with wider (especially global) implications. Numerous local conflicts, from the recent attacks in Kashmir to the ongoing conflict in Gaza, drive home the imperative to discern the nature of the problem and hence the identity and characteristics of relevant threat actors. This paper argues that policymakers require intelligence that speaks to the strategic battle for legitimacy, even as it reveals threat-critical vulnerabilities that may be targeted. Failure of analysis will result in misguided application of and emphasis upon force at the expense of mediation that will staunch the threat. An excellent illustration of this challenge is the ongoing U.S. treatment of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, or TdA. By examining several case studies, this paper argues that while dealing with asymmetric warfare, intelligence needs to first identify the nature of the problem and then use appropriate tools to deal with the threat, thereby balancing the kinetic and non-kinetic.
(Image Source: Marks Files)
Changing Nature of Asymmetric Warfare
Terminology continues to bedevil both warfighting and its necessary intelligence processes. Asymmetric warfare was once a label of choice, adopted not only to identify a static relationship but also to highlight a dynamic process whereby the weak challenged the strong. Necessarily, phraseology could apply to any level of combat from individual (David versus Goliath) to international (Ukraine versus Russia). Yet principally, the point of the exercise was to speak to non-state challenges to state power, especially when victory accompanied the effort of the former and demanded explanation.
This remains true today, but the stakes seem to have risen dramatically with the integral fusion of traditional asymmetric concerns (e.g., assessing an armed challenge to the state) with those of a glocal nature – the local with wider (especially global) implications (e.g., the prevalent use of proxies, which increasingly threaten to draw their sponsors into the struggle). The recent terrorist strikes in Kashmir may readily be seen to illustrate the process. In such a case, policymakers require intelligence that speaks to everything from the organisational specifics of the violent radical Islamist (VRI) group in question, to its command and logistical relationship with Pakistan. Ultimately, a critical reporting requirement, not unlike that Israel has faced in dealing with such groups: What is the dividing line between an independent actor and a controlled asset? Only intelligence can provide the answer.
Even as straightforward a query as this, though, becomes more complicated in asymmetric conflict. What, for instance, is the role of criminality concerning a sub-state challenge to a state? Much of the conflict in Colombia, 1990-present, for instance, has turned on being able to answer this query. At least through 9/11, the United States all but insisted that the major insurgent group, FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), was more a narcotics challenge than an ideologically driven insurgency. In this, Washington’s assessment was flawed, and Bogotá was correct. The strategic distortion that would have resulted from the Colombians acceding to American pressure to reorient their assessment should be obvious. An ideological project that funded itself through criminality (not only drugs but kidnapping and extortion, among others) could only be addressed by treating legitimacy as the centre of gravity and funding, together with structures (the organisation), as critical vulnerabilities. Reversing this formulation would have been disastrous. That the Colombians could make the correct call, of course, resulted from superior intelligence.
This raises a key point. The Colombians were strongest in the low-tech areas of human intelligence (HUMINT) and document exploitation (DOCINT).[1] They did not have the advanced technology of the United States for signals intelligence (SIGINT), but they had superior coverage at the local level, where information was richest. Photo intelligence (PHOTINT) could be important, but was rarely decisive. And so on. When the American focus pivoted in the post 9/11 period to support of Colombian “counter-terrorism,” enhanced assets, particularly the marriage of situational awareness and response, could in fact upgrade Bogotá’s systems. The quotation marks, though, bring again to the fore the danger of strategic distortion had the Colombians not acted upon their own superior knowledge of the conflict.
FARC was an insurgency that used terrorism as but one of its weapons.[2] To characterise its essence based upon but one of its tactics, terrorism, would have been to misdirect effort, in the same manner U.S. “strategy” in Afghanistan ultimately was swallowed by kinetic facets such as drone strikes and night raids.
Conceptualisation of the threat: ‘Getting it wrong’?
Intelligence, then, must in asymmetry be directed first and foremost at a correct conceptualisation of the threat. It will have been produced by a certain dynamic of causation, often labelled the roots of the conflict. The threat’s worldview and assessment of roots, its diagnosis, will normally be dissimilar, certainly strategically, from that of the state. Hence, necessarily, its prognosis – Lenin’s “What is to be Done? – will unfold in a strategy that synthesises the violent and nonviolent, or kinetic and nonkinetic, the tangible and the intangible. Whatever the state is doing in its counter is normally exacerbating the situation. Every aspect thus delimited above must be ascertained by intelligence. In reality, the key question, What is the problem?, can only be discerned by an interactive process that takes place as a system. The frequently derided “hairball diagram” of the conflict in Afghanistan, while admittedly complex, was in reality a quite accurate display of the system operating dynamically.[3]
The process – and the consequences of “getting it wrong” – can be treated by examining the present U.S. approach to the Venezuelan transnational gang, Tren de Aragua or TdA (also rendered TDA). From the day he was inaugurated, 20 January 2025, President Trump announced that he intended to designate several cartels and transnational criminal organisations (TCOs) as Foreign Terrorist Organisations (FTOs) and Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs). By 20 February 2025, this had been done, and eight organisations were added to the existing list for a total (with the Houthis of Yemen back on and two Haitian gangs added on 2 May 2025) of 79 entities.[4] Without getting into the minutiae, particularly the alphabet soup identifying what the British usefully tend to term simply serious organized crime (SOC), the point should be clear: particular criminal organizations which use terror as a tactic and cross borders to engage in their activities – the Sinaloa Cartel provides a useful example[5] – have been labelled a threat to the United States in the same manner as FARC, al-Qaeda, and ISIS. The distinct terminology offered here highlights the point: does the use of terror make an entity terrorist? We return to the point made in n.2. If that were true, we’d need a massive tome to list all the entities, from the Mongol hordes to the U.S. Army Air Corps turning Japan into a parking lot during the Second World War.
Though not relevant to the topic under discussion, it is necessary to note that a group lands on the FTO and/or SDGT lists if a policy decision by the State Department (with a limited time for Congressional objections) determines that three criteria are satisfied: (1) group has to be foreign, (2) it must engage in “terrorist activity,” “terrorism,” or retain the capability and intent to do so, and (3) it threatens “U.S. nationals or the national defense, foreign relations, or economic interests of the United States” (cf. n.2). By and large, all hinges on the definition of terrorism, which, as per above, has long been defined as a particular type of violence with political intent. The problem for categorisation of TdA (our subject) should be obvious, as should the intelligence challenge.
First, what is the problem? Is TdA a criminal entity or a political project? Since no analysis claims it is the latter, it would seem to be the former. How then can it be an FTO? True, it is foreign (Venezuelan), the first metric, and it can be said to pose a threat to at least some U.S. interests, the third metric. That leaves the second metric, which one astute assessment (from 2011) has noted can draw upon such a convoluted delimiting of “terrorist activity” that just about anything rotten and nasty, from assassination to hijacking to use of an explosive – or plotting any of a very long list – can, in an astute pleading, get under a very high bar and hence become “terrorism,” whether political or not.[6] With such wiggle room, all that remains is the most basic of intelligence input to establish TdA’s character for classification. This has been done.
What has complicated the matter is an intelligence question that mirrors our starting point above. Just what is TdA? And does it serve as a proxy for the Venezuelan government? Confusion began when, during his ultimately successful campaign for a second presidential term, President Trump sponsored and maintained a claim that the United States was being invaded in an unprecedented fashion by “Mexican drug cartels.”[7] By 15 March 2025, now in office, this claim had escalated to the extent that a presidential proclamation invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 “regarding the invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua.”[8]
Again, so as not to be drawn into areas beyond the purview of this analysis, suffice to say that a contested piece of legislation (then and now) remains on the books that allows a claim of invasion or armed incursion to be used in emergency fashion to detain and deport enemy aliens.[9] The presidential proclamation brought the circle round by alleging that the authoritarian regime headed by Nicolás Maduro Moros “engaged in and continues to engage in mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.” The proxy weapon was TdA, with the approximately one million Venezuelan refugees in the U.S. as the vector. These refugees number approximately 770,000 of the 8 million who have fled the Marxist-Leninist disaster that is Maduro’s Venezuela.[10]
The intelligence challenges fairly leap from the page. Imagine an analyst being asked simply, “Is the government of Venezuela using an irregular strategy, using a sub-state proxy to push drugs into the United States and wreak violence?” There is little evidence to support such a position. Most sources, to include the benchmark El Tren de Aragua (February 2023), not only claim that TdA is an independent gang – albeit with numerous linkages within Venezuela and its state fostered by the same corruption which has made the country a haven for criminality – but find the notion that it serves as a proxy for the state problematic.[11] U.S. intelligence itself downplayed the idea in a classified memo, which was released once it leaked.[12]
Further, there is just as little to support a position of TdA’s strength, much less an entity rising to the character and level of an FTO. The Brazilians have pointedly refused to agree to so-designate two of their own gangs, which have been given this status by Washington.[13] In the title of one well-done analysis, the sub-head reads “The gang, born in a Venezuelan prison, is considered a powerful criminal organisation, but it is not capable of being a national threat as Donald Trump claims.”[14] More to the point, it is not a weapon wielded by the state, as for instance, is Hezbollah in serving Iran. Of particular salience, the millions who have fled Maduro’s disaster – a Venezuela propped up, it will surprise, by all manner of authoritarian despotisms, from Russia to China to Iran and beyond – do not salt the fleeing masses with its nefarious TdA agents.[15]
Analytical Miscue
What appears to have happened is that the need to keep campaign promises of mass deportation, to satisfy the president’s “base,” led to the search for a legal way to cut corners.[16] Thus, the intelligence process was corrupted.[17] Certainly, the goal, very much that of New Delhi in Kashmir as cited at the beginning of this piece, is sound. In reality, however, no public source intelligence appears to have identified TdA as a particular threat one way or another. Instead, the gang provided useful access, through a claim of threat, to a vulnerable Venezuelan refugee community that could quickly be raided for suitable victims of rendition. This process was set in motion even before the 15 March 2025 presidential declaration cited at n.8 above and quickly became controversial, when court challenges made clear the lack of evidence connecting many of the deportees to TdA.[18].
The process of identifying individuals as gang members quickly was demonstrated to be as problematic as the identification of ostensible TdA power and agency itself. Though in reality a so-called megabanda (literally, a bigger-than-normal gang), TdA had little coherent structure, recruiting posture, operational methodology, or even objective beyond profit.[19] It had none of the body markings often associated with gangs in El Salvador, yet these were claimed to have served as one of a number of metrics to identify those arrested, with the metrics in their entirety contained in an “Alien Enemy Validation Guide.”[20] The site to which they were taken, the CECOT mega-prison, is used by El Salvador to hold gang members and has been secured as a destination by President Nayib Bukele, having been paid USD 6 million.[21]
Clearly, just what TdA was (or is) has at this point become beside the point. From start to finish, the process of analysis dealing with it was corrupted.[22] Still, the quest for a correct analytical picture must continue, since absent proper assessment, nothing else can take place, from fostering security to supporting the law. Ironically, such work does exist outside the skewed official versions.[23] Of particular value has been an exploration of the central concern in studying any asymmetric threat, “Who joins, who stays, who leaves?” Not surprisingly, strong pull factors provide ways forward for (especially) marginalised youth within a context of disruption and dislocation.[24] This is little different from numerous other studies of irregular threat emergence.[25] Likewise, its methodologies of local control are not unlike those of insurgencies,[26] with both the tangible and intangible domains impacted.[27]
Thus, the intelligence process, executed in accordance with its normal procedures and methodologies, has proved capable of assessing TdA as an emerging asymmetric threat. Its designation as an FTO has been driven, on the one hand, by the normal processes of categorisation;[28]; on the other hand, by urgent policy demands for skewed analysis.[29] Of particular importance, TdA does not appear to be a criminal insurgency, its manoeuvring to gain advantage from Venezuela’s corrupt state notwithstanding. Rather, it is certainly a parastate, exploiting the host while not seeking its responsibilities or transformation. In the United States, far from being the scourge portrayed as a necessary component for perverting the justice system, TdA appears to be one challenge among many, and certainly not of the power or reach of the Mexican cartels. Rather, what it has is a national affiliation with a vulnerable refugee population, which has been politically targeted by the current administration. The claim to state secrets has been an apparent attempt to avoid scrutiny of shoddy, unprofessional intelligence analysis.[30] Ironically, the result has been to magnify an asymmetric threat and to distract from more pressing targets.
When dealing with asymmetry, intelligence, before everything else, must focus on the central dictum of Clausewitz: “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.” In other words, what is the problem? Armed groups, whether political or criminal, are strategically symptoms of deeper contradictions within society. Were this otherwise, leaders would be unable to gain followers.[31] The centre of gravity is legitimacy, even for a criminal entity. Missing this point is to create strategic distortion, whereby the operational centres of gravity, the critical vulnerabilities, are mistaken for the business at hand. Response must always balance kinetic and nonkinetic, but to direct effort at tangential or incorrect facets of the challenge is to court defeat. To respond with only repression is to court strategic disaster. To avoid failure, there is a need to understand the nature of the threat and design concomitant responses for the long term.
END NOTES
[1] Necessarily, the nature of individual asymmetric challenges is both unique and dynamic. In Colombia, the FARC generated extensive written records that allowed insight into all facets of the organisation and its plans and operations. This should not surprise, because it is a characteristic of the bureaucratic process. Even the greatest crimes of history, such as those of the Nazi death camps or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, continue to provide researchers with written material for assessment. For a useful introduction to the various INTs, an independently published volume, Akshata Kumavat and Randall Stickley, Rethinking Thought: A Practitioner’s Guide to Critical Thinking in Intelligence Analysis (2024).
[2] Insurgency has, at least since World War II been recognised as the use of violence to build a new world to challenge the existing world. One form of violence used is terrorism, normally defined as non-state (usually, sub-state) actors targeting the innocent (persons and property traditionally thought of as protected by the laws of war) to communicate and achieve political goals. Though there is a school of thought that seeks to advance a category of state terrorism, this has remained a marginal application. To do otherwise would leave us studying everything from Hiroshima, to the Holocaust, to crimes against prisoners to troops violating their ROE (Rules of Engagement).
[3] Discussion and visual, Elisabeth Bumiller, “We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint,” The New York Times, 26 April 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html.
[4] For the list (prior to the Haitian additions), details of the process of inclusion (and removal), and the legal consequences, cf. the succinct and extremely useful, The Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) List (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2 May 2025), https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF10613. For the new listings, cf. Gladys Gerbaud, Chase Hamilton, and Khalea Robertson, “Which Cartels and Groups is Trump Designating as Foreign Terrorist Organizations?”, AS/COA, 5 May 2025, https://www.as-coa.org/articles/which-cartels-and-groups-trump-designating-foreign-terrorist-organizations.
[5] For detailed assessment, Maria Fernanda Arocha and Sandra Pellegrini, “How the Sinaloa Cartel Rift is Redrawing Mexico’s Criminal Map,” ACLED, 7 May 2025, https://acleddata.com/2025/05/07/how-the-sinaloa-cartel-rift-is-redrawing-mexicos-criminal-map/?utm_source=Armed+Conflict+Location+%26+Event+Data+Project&utm_campaign=6ff4f38937-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_09_21_06_50_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_26a454684a-6ff4f38937-516264097
[6] Cf. Robert Chesney, “Should Mexican Cartels be Designated as Terrorist Organizations?”, Lawfare, 31 March 2011, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/should-mexican-cartels-be-designated-terrorist-organizations. It may be noted that at the time he authored the piece, Chesney was the Dean of the University of Texas School of Law.
[7] A statement of this claim was an 8 February 2023 letter sponsored by the Virginia Attorney General but signed by twenty other Republican Attorney Generals, addressed to Democratic President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken, which demanded FTO designation for “Mexican drug cartels,” thus to address the fentanyl epidemic and its attendant extreme violence (which included, it noted, “an armed insurgency against the Mexican government). Cf. Jason S. Miyares, Attorney General, Commonwealth of Virginia, 8 February 2023, https://ago.wv.gov/Documents/Letter%20to%20the%20President%20and%20Secretary%20of%20State_2.8.2023.pdf.
[8] Text at https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/03/invocation-of-the-alien-enemies-act-regarding-the-invasion-of-the-united-states-by-tren-de-aragua/.
[9] The desired effect was very much that of the FTO designation itself: to leverage an extraordinary measure (the 1798 legislation emerged from the so-called “undeclared war with France”) to attack a designated group. The measure has been abused historically, most recently in the detention of nearly the entire Japanese-American population (outside Hawaii) during World War II.
[10] Cf. “By Terminating Legal Pathways, the U.S. Is Abandoning Venezuelans,” WOLA, 14 February 2025, https://www.wola.org/analysis/terminating-legal-pathways-u-s-abandoning-venezuelans/.
[11] Cf. Ronna Rísquez, El Tren de Aragua. La Banda que Revolucionó el Crimen Organizafo en América Latina (Dahbar/Cyngular Asesoría, 2023).
[12] Cf. National Intelligence Council, “Venezuela: Examining Regime Ties to Tren de Aragua,” Sense of the Community Memorandum SOCM 2025-11374 (7 April 2025), https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/b191b510-8c53-4910-ac2f-b1b7da9ceadd.pdf.
[13] Cf. “Brazil Rejects US Request to Designate Two Gangs as Terrorist Organizations,” Reuters, 7 May 2025, https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-rejects-us-request-classify-local-gangs-terrorist-organizations-2025-05-07/.
[14] Jusan Diego Quesada, “Truths, Lies, and Myths About Tren de Aragua,” El País [Bogotá], 6 April 2025, https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-04-06/truths-lies-and-myths-about-tren-de-aragua.html.
[15] The commentary of Ronna Rísquez (cf. n.9) is particularly telling on this point, Jeremy Jojola and Antonia Velez, “A Journalist Wrote a Book About the Venezuelan Prison Gang Tren de Aragua. Here’s What she has to say,” 9News [Denver], 5 November 2024 (6:28 PM MST), https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/venezuelan-journalist-talks-tren-de-aragua-gang/73-3e56a724-61bd-44ea-9f8d-02f0e83fcfd9.
[16] Useful background, Nicholas Dale Leal, “The Elusive Trail of Tren de Aragua Sets Off Alarm Bells in the United States,” El País [Bogotá], 30 September 2024, https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-09-30/the-elusive-trail-of-tren-de-aragua-sets-off-alarm-bells-in-the-united-states.html.
[17] The extent to which components, such as skewed intelligence analysis, are components of a system designed to sidestep the irksome realities of the normal justice system can be readily ascertained by viewing the entire file, with exhibits, in one such case, J.G.G., et al., Plaintiffs-Petitioners v. Donald J. Trump, in his official capacity as president of the United States, et al., United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Civil Action No. 1:25-cv-00766, filed 25 March 2025, https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A931/354494/20250401120252598_24A931%20Response%20Appx%202.pdf, exhibits continued at https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436.67.21.pdf.
[18] Detailed discussion, Zolan Kanno-Young et al., “Behind Trump’s Deal to Deport Venezuelans to El Salvador’s Most Feared Prison,” The New York Times, 1 May 2025 (updated), https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/30/us/politics/trump-deportations-venezuela-el-salvador.html.
[19] Useful is Verónica Zubillaga and Rebecca Hanson, “What is Tren de Aragua? How the Venezuelan Gang Started – and why US Policies may Only Make it Stronger,” The Conversation, 3 March 2025, https://theconversation.com/what-is-tren-de-aragua-how-the-venezuelan-gang-started-and-why-us-policies-may-only-make-it-stronger-250007.
[20] Available at Exhibit S to n.15, https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436.67.21.pdf. Excellent discussion (with live links) is Jake Horton, “British Man’s Tattoo Wrongly Linked to Venezuelan Gang in US Government Document,” BBC, 10 April 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly22xm8kx1o.
[21] Sukey Lewis, “What Are US Taxpayers Getting in $6 Million Deal With Salvadoran Mega-Prison?”, KQED, 7 May 2025, https://www.kqed.org/news/12038872/what-us-taxpayers-getting-6-million-deal-salvadoran-mega-prison. For Bukele’s own alleged links with the cartels, Michael Montgomery, “The Real Reason El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele Cozied up to Trump,” Mother Jones, 14 April 2025, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-trump-deportation/.
[22] Indeed the same processes that so horrified Latin America in its past – the disappearing of numerous individuals by unidentified snatch squads, providing no authorization and refusing to listen to explanations, illicitly securing both refugees (their targets) and citizens (collateral damage) – has now become routine and has begun to produce, accompanying the growing anger, the first signs of self-defense.
[23] E.g., Tren de Aragua: From Prison Gang to Transnational Criminal Enterprise (Venezuela Investigative Unit, InSight Crime, October 2023), https://insightcrime.org/investigations/tren-de-aragua-prison-gang-transnational-criminal-enterprise/.
[24] Excellent is Andrés Antillano, “Galaxia Prisón: Cómo la Cárcel Remodela la Vida de las Clases Populares en Venezuela,” Prisiones Revista Digital del Centro de Estudios de Ejecución Penal 3, no. 2 (June 2023), 29-46, http://saber.ucv.ve/handle/10872/22882.
[25] For treatment of the subject and its implications for counter, David H. Ucko and Thomas A. Marks, “Organized Crime as Irregular Warfare: Strategic Lessons for Assessment and Response,” Prism 10, no. 3 (2023), 92-117, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/prism/prism_10-3/prism_10-3_92-117_Ucko-Marks.pdf?ver=Zc9MiuRcT-P_mnMldGPJzw%3d%3d.
[26] Particularly good is “From Prison to the Neighborhood: Territorial Control of the Aragua Train, Veneuela,” in “En foco: La Gobernananza Criminal y el Estado en Brasil,” Espacio Abierto: Cuaderno Venezolano de Sociología 32, no. 2 (April-June 2023), 201-211, https://produccioncientificaluz.org/index.php/espacio/issue/view/3847.
[27] Most detailed analysis encountered, Lorena Andrea Erazo Patiño, Carlos Alfonso Laverde Rodríguez, and Emerson David Devia Acevedo, “Medio Digitales y Percepción de la Violencia: Un Análisis de la Expansión del Tren de Aragua,” Revista Científica General José Córdova (Revista Colombiana de Estudios Militares y Estratégicos) 22, no. 46 (April-June 2024), 457-482, https://revistacientificaesmic.com/index.php/esmic/article/view/1287.
[28] Excellent overarching treatment, Seth Loertscher, Daniel Milton, Bryan Price, and Cynthia Loertscher, The Terrorist Lists: An Examination of the U.S. Government’s Counterterrorism Designation Efforts (West Point, NY: Combating Terrorism Center, USMA, September 2020), https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-terrorist-lists-an-examination-of-the-u-s-governments-counterterrorism-designations-efforts/; succinct but accurate, Brendan Rascius, “US Labels Dozens of Groups – like Hamas – as Terrorists. How is This Decision Made?”, Miami Herald, 13 December 2023, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article282998293.html; historical discussion, Audrey Kurth Cronin, The “FTO List” and Congress: Sanctioning Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 21 October 2003), https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA445050.pdf.
[29] See e.g. the claim by “Border Czar” Tom Homan in “President Trump Delivers Justice to Terrorists, Security to Americans,” White House Press Release, 17 March 2025: “Last night, 238 Tren de Aragua members along with 21 MS13 gang members, were deported from this country adding to the thousands of criminal aliens already deported.”
[30] For recent claim, cf. Melissa Quinn, “Trump Administration Invokes State Secrets Privilege in Kilmar Abrego Garcia Case,” CBS News, 8 May 2025 (7:23 AM EDT), https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-invokes-state-secrets-privilege-kilmar-abrego-garcia-case/. For DHS campaign to defend its information gathering and assessment, “100 Days of Fighting Fake News,” Homeland Security Press Release, https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/04/30/100-days-fighting-fake-news.
[31] For this subject, Thomas A. Marks, “Combating ‘Terrorism’: A Strategic Warfighting Perspective,” in The Fragility of Order: Essays in Honor of K.P.S. Gill, ed. Ajai Sahni (New Delhi: Kautilya, 2019), 99-128.
(Dr. Thomas A. Marks is a member of the advisory board of the Mantraya Institute for Strategic Studies (MISS). Dr. Shanthie Mariet D’Souza is the Founder & Executive Director of MISS. This analysis has been published as part of Mantraya’s ongoing “Fragility, Conflict, and Peace Building” and “Mapping Terror & Insurgent Networks” projects. All Mantraya publications are peer-reviewed.)
