We are lucky to have an investigative reporter like Maureen Tkacik, someone who has the ability to connect dots and make sense of a chaotic world. She came to me about a month ago with a story about how Tren de Aragua has suddenly been elevated among the MAGA right into a supervillain on par with al-Qaeda or ISIS. It turns out the whole thing originated with a collection of run-down apartment complexes in the Denver metro area, and the high-priced PR firm the developers hired to escape accountability for numerous code violations, mushrooming trash piles, roaches and rodents, and other problems.

That sounded good, but one thing I know about Moe is that she never stops at the surface-level story. How Tren de Aragua got on America’s hit list was important; but she wanted to explore the lives of the tenants at the complexes that really were upended by violent gangs. And she wanted to understand the geopolitical context; not just the Trump administration’s endless efforts at regime change in Venezuela, but why nearly all of the Venezuelan migrants sent to the notoriously dangerous CECOT prison in El Salvador had no criminal records, while the actual Tren de Aragua suspects accused of crimes remained in the United States.

The result is a sprawling, challenging, provocative piece that says so much about the moment we’re living in. It’s about media manipulation, denial of the truth, and the power struggles behind closed doors that have led to this reality of mass deportation and incarceration. And it’s about how a neighborhood in Colorado was upended, and the impact on the people living there, some of whom turned to MAGA as a result.

The piece is called "Runaway Tren," and it’s on our website now, and I hope you can find some time to read it today.

An investigation like this takes enormous effort to report, write, edit, and produce. It means looking through thousands of pages of police reports, court documents, news reports, and other pieces of evidence. It means interviewing everyone involved to learn as much of the story as possible. And it means having the experience and creativity to piece it all together.

We’re going to have Maureen on our Weekly Roundup show this week, and she will be taking your questions about this story. Just visit our YouTube channel on Friday at 12:30 p.m. ET when we go live.

Stories like this are why I love working at the Prospect and working with our writers. It fits perfectly with our mission of ideas, politics, and power. I learned a lot editing it, and so will you. Here are a few paragraphs to give you a taste:

Runaway Tren

How a Colorado slumlord’s psyop turned into a brand-new ‘forever war’ on Venezuela

By Maureen Tkacik

Earlier this month, a middle-aged woman with shaggy, silvery hair and a pleasant smoker’s contralto flew from Denver to Washington to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. "My name is Cindy Romero," she began. "I am a wife, a mother of five, a grandmother of three, a part-time worker and student, and a former resident of Aurora, Colorado. I am one of the many victims across the nation of the violent transnational terrorist organization Tren de Aragua."

Romero’s journey from anonymous apartment dweller to MAGA heroine began last August, when she showed a local news reporter doorbell video footage of six young men with enormous guns storming into her hallway and beating down the door of the apartment opposite hers, sparking a half-hour-long gunfight. The men were among the tens of thousands of newly arrived Venezuelans who had flooded into the Denver area starting in late 2022. When the video went viral, the right-wing media ecosystem greeted it as "smoking gun" evidence that lax immigration policies had reduced crunchy idylls across the nation to what the New York Post termed a "migrant gang war zone"—and that the libs, as usual, were in denial about it.

On Don Trump Jr.’s Triggered podcast, the president’s son asked exiled right-wing Venezuelan politician María Corina Machado whether the Venezuelan government had "opened the prisons to invade America with criminals." She demurred a bit before declaring that President Nicolás Maduro was the leader of Tren de Aragua, and that he had promoted migration from his own country to facilitate the invasion. Speaking to the Miami Herald two weeks before the hearing, an ex-CIA station chief and Florida-based security consultant named Gary Berntsen, who claims to be leading a small team advising Trump administration officials on the topic, said the Tren de Aragua scare was the manifestation of a deliberate plot, in which Maduro had dispatched 5,000 gang members across the Texas border, including a smaller elite unit trained in paramilitary tactics, to wage "hybrid warfare" and "destabilize" the country.

But as frightening as it felt watching teenagers parade guns around her block, the kids didn’t seem like a disciplined force to Shannon Peterson, a longtime ESL teacher and neighbor of Romero’s who had become attracted during Invasion Summer to the cause of deporting Venezuelan gang members. "It was more like racing down the alley with a blunt and a beer in your hand, music blaring and no plates, no fears, no fucks given," she told the Prospect with a rueful laugh. "Not something that was super … organized. I think it was more like a franchise model."

What was, by contrast, extremely well organized and centrally coordinated was the public relations rollout by which Tren de Aragua metamorphosed from an arcane obsession of organized crime buffs into an existential threat to the American way of life. That’s because it was masterminded by a politically connected, $475-an-hour crisis communications firm at the apparent behest of Romero’s landlord.

But not all PR is misinformation and not all lies are devoid of truth. A handful of abandoned and neglected apartment buildings in Aurora had been de facto "occupied" by a legitimately violent and vindictive group of actors, and the peculiar insistence of Aurora’s Democratic councilmembers, its interim police chief, and most emphatically its regional housing advocacy organizations that Venezuelan gangs were simply "not a thing" was politically and substantively unwise. In the short term, the "gaslighting" seems to have offended the gangs’ previously woke neighbors far in excess of the crime itself; in the long term, the underlying crises at the heart of the hysteria were the products of foolish political decisions that had gotten virtually no media attention, much less sober analysis. And those foolish decisions, culminating in the buildup of Venezuelans with no criminal record languishing in CECOT while documented violent criminals and gang leaders enjoy at least a modicum of due process in domestic detention centers, could easily lead to much more foolish ones in the lunacy of the current political moment …