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Speaker 1: On the eve of your 30s, you will look for a man you've never known.
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Speaker 2: We think that you might be our biological father.
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Speaker 1: The search will take you across coasts and into the veiled landscapes of love, family, and memory.
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Speaker 3: Just because you're happy doesn't mean you get to erase your whole past.
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Speaker 1: I'm Sarah Quevedo, and this is Reaching Out.
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Speaker 3: Literally, when should I apologize? In the past?
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Speaker 2: Before I said it?
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Speaker 1: An audio memoir from Futudo and KCRW. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Or subscribe to Futuro Plus to binge the entire series now.
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Speaker 3: Futuro Investigates.
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Speaker 4: Futuro.
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Speaker 2: Futuro. Futuro.
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Speaker 3: Investigate.
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Speaker 2: Futuro. Futuro.
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Speaker 6: Futuro Nixon's days in el Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or SECOT, started at 4 a.m., with the sounds of a baton dragging across metal bars. SECOT is a maximum security prison in El Salvador, and reporters have documented all kinds of human rights violations there. But after hearing Nixon's account of his time at the prison, one thing really stuck with me. his head was always being pushed down for meals, getting sent into his cell, being pulled back out. We're picking Nixon's story back up at the very first of those moments, right after he heard his name called sitting on a tarmac at San Salvador International Airport.
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Speaker 2: When we got off the plane, the Salvadoran police caught us.
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Speaker 6: Salvadoran police rush Nixon off the plane, handcuffed, and onto a bus. He's running, trying not to fall, and then thrown into his seat. An officer whacks him in the shoulder with a baton. Put your head down, asshole. Back on the bus, reality is starting to set in. Nixon is crying. He looks around. The men sitting next to him are crying too.
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Speaker 2: Nixon starts to pray. Holy Father, get us out of this. Why am I here if I haven't committed any crime? And how long is this going to last? Nixon would spend 125 days in Sikot.
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Speaker 3: From Futuro Media, it's Latino USA. I'm Maria Hinojosa.
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Speaker 6: And I'm Mateo Schimpf, a producer from Colorado Public Radio.
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Speaker 3: Today, the final episode of The Whisper Game, a three-part series about a young migrant, an international gang, and how Aurora, Colorado became a test case for Trump's mass deportation campaign. A young man is accused of being a member of an international gang he sent to Secot in El Salvador. and we traveled to find out the truth about him. This is a Futuro Investigates story done in collaboration with Colorado Public Radio. Secot is a supermax prison, a giant steel and concrete fortress built into the Salvadoran countryside, complete with rows of slender rectangular buildings that looked like airport hangers. Nixon described the place he spent those 125 days as a warehouse. And on hot days, it was unbearably hot, Nixon said. It's just a shed, like something you'd use to keep pigs. Secloc can hold up to 40,000 people, making it one of the largest prisons in the world. And the U.S. and Salvadoran governments signed an agreement worth about $ 5 million to house 238 alleged members of TDA there. Nixon said Salvadoran officials were convinced he and the other men were terrorists if he misbehaved. the guards would threaten that they were going to make him vomit blood. This isn't the United States, they'd tell him. Here in El Salvador, you show us respect. Nixon said all of the guards took turns beating him, but the worst was from a guy they called Satan. Satan was the one who took prisoners to the island, Nixon told us, a room they called the Dark Place. Nixon thought he'd never see his family again. And at some point he said he realized that nobody was coming for him. It's the opposite of what happens in all the Hollywood movies he loved. American paratroopers weren't going to swoop down and rescue him because it was their own government who had sent him there. You're going to rot in here, the guards would tell him. That's when it hit him the hardest. Nixon said they'd tell him, if you do get out, it'll be once you're dead, being buried in the cemetery.
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Speaker 6: Back in Colorado, I was trying to figure out how Nixon's name ended up on that list that landed him in Secott. So just for like some backstory stuff, what was your position at ICE previously?
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Speaker 4: When I retired from ICE, I was the field office director for the Denver field office, which covers.
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Speaker 2: All of Wyoming and Colorado.
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Speaker 6: This is John Fabricatore.
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Speaker 4: I had gone through the senior executive service process. I'd been a GS-15 deputy director for Colorado before that.
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Speaker 6: I reached out to him pretty early in my reporting about Nixon's story. But he couldn't tell me much. He'd taken a different job in the federal government, working at the Department of Health and Human Services. And that limited what he felt like he could say. But about a year later, when I saw he'd resigned from the position at HHS, I immediately picked up the phone. What can you tell me about Nixon? He sent me the address for a coffee shop in Aurora. I reached out to APD about the case and, you know, his affiliation with TDA or not. What they told me is that they never fully vetted him as a member of TDA. What do you make of that?
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Speaker 4: I think at the time, it wasn't in their interest to do that.
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Speaker 6: Fabricatori left ICE in 2022, the year before Nixon moved to Colorado. but he kept doing immigration consulting work for the U.S.
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Speaker 3: Government.
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Speaker 6: It felt like this was as close as I was going to get to federal law enforcement, really any law enforcement, to tell me about what happened to Nixon.
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Speaker 4: I think the prior leadership that was there at Aurora PD wasn't ready to align some of these guys with TDA. And I'm not saying, and I mean, just to be clear, I'm not saying that Nixon was a full TDA member. He could have possibly just been an associate member. There's different levels of membership in this gang process.
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Speaker 6: These are the kinds of things that can make gang policing feel a bit tenuous. Are you a full-blown member? An associate? The degrees of affiliation are dizzying. If my brother hangs out with a gang member, does that make me one? I wanted Fabricatory to walk me through how that applied to Nixon's case. You know, last time we talked, you seemed... slightly more convinced that he was a member of TDA. Do you feel like you've learned any new information or understood the situation to be different? No, no, I do believe he was TDA.
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Speaker 4: We don't have a lot of information from Venezuela to go all the way back and say these guys are definitely hardcore TDA gang members. But were they claiming to be TDA members within the United States?
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Speaker 5: Yes.
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Speaker 4: I believe that he claimed to be a TDA member along with the other gang members in that apartment complex and hold the people in that apartment complex to a certain fear level so that they would pay them part of their rent.
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Speaker 6: This is similar to what we heard from Nixon's neighbor in our first episode. We've been calling him Marcos. Guys went around La Nome, the building complex where Nixon lived, claiming to be members of Tren de Aragua because they knew it would scare people. They could use the gang's name to squeeze them. to get them to pay money for rent.
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Speaker 4: I think we get too focused on TDA when they're committing the same types of crimes as a real TDA member and are claiming to be TDA inside the United States. And now it's easy for him to claim, well, I'm not TDA.
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Speaker 6: John Fabricatore and I had a long conversation. We talked about the night of the shooting at La Nome, and at one point he asked me, if you saw the footage of Nixon picking up the spent bullet casings and there was intent behind it, would that convince you he was a member of TDA? Maybe, I said, but the police won't show it to me. Before we'd completely talked circles around each other, there was one last thing I wanted to ask him about. I mean, last time we talked, you seemed somewhat convinced that a CI had identified Nixon as a member of TDA. Do you still feel that way?
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Speaker 8: Yeah, probably.
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Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
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Speaker 2: Yeah.
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Speaker 6: A CI. Confidential Informant. Based on Fabricatori's telling, an informant had identified Nixon as a member of the gang. Confidential informants are an important part of gang policing. But they can also be unreliable. I don't have access to a list of people who were talking to APD, HSI, or other law enforcement agencies about Tren de Aragua. But I did have a handful of police reports involving investigations about the gang in Aurora. And one in particular caught my eye. It involved a man who'd been arrested at another apartment complex owned by the same company as where Nixon lived, La Nome. And it happened a couple of weeks before the shooting where Nixon got arrested. Aurora police brought this man in for questioning. And the report suggests he immediately started trying to cut a deal. What do you guys know about Tren de Aragua? The detective asked him, how many Tren de Aragua members are there in Aurora?
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Speaker 4: In Denver?
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Speaker 6: Mucho, the man said, 200 in Denver, at least 40 to 60 in Aurora, and 30 of them lived at La Nome. This man who was arrested and brought in for questioning never mentioned Nixon by name in the police report I read, and it wasn't clear that detectives believed he was telling the truth, at least about the facts of his own crime. Aurora Police would actually later list him as a known member of Tren de Aragua. But the number he threw out stuck with me. 30 TDA members at La Nome? That would have been roughly a quarter of the people living there, based on a tenant list from June 2024. Were there even that many confirmed members in the entire state? Regardless of whether he was the informant who identified Nixon, it's not hard to think that someone, somewhere, with their own criminal case hanging over their head, was willing to say, yeah, That guy is a member of Trender Agua. But I still wasn't certain what I could say about it. I'd pored over police reports, pulled down court records. I'd talked to attorneys and to experts, people who lived at La Nome. I had some of my requests filled, others denied. Like evidence of Nixon's gang affiliation from ICE, plus an interview with its field office director. The Aurora police chief also turned down my interview request. along with a detective on the department's HSI task force. And so, after a year of searching for answers, it felt like there was really only one thing left to do.
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Speaker 3: So we are in Trujillo, Peru, which is a northern city. It's an hour plane ride north of Lima, the capital. Coming up on Latino USA, we go searching for answers about Nixon in Peru.
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Speaker 2: I said, but I don't understand how... Stay with us. No te vayas. It's Latino USA. I'm Maria Hinojosa. And I'm Mateo Schimpf, a producer from Colorado Public Radio.
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Speaker 3: Before the break, we heard about how allegations from U.S. law enforcement landed Nixon at a maximum security prison in El Salvador. We continue with our story now.
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Speaker 6: The deal between the U.S. and Salvadoran governments to hold Venezuelans at Secot generated a ton of international pressure. And eventually... Nixon and the other men were returned to Venezuela as part of a prisoner swap in July 2025. When Nixon landed in his home country, it was, in many ways, the same one he left when he was just 14 years old. The economy was a mess, and he couldn't find a job to support himself. That's around the time Nixon and I started talking. First by phone, then over WhatsApp. He told me he planned to go back to Peru because things were better there, a place where he had more connections. But then, after six months, he stopped responding. My first thought was that he'd run out of money to pay his phone bill. But the timing was a bit strange. I'd just asked him to help me get access to records about his alleged gang affiliation from the U.S.
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Speaker 3: Government.
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Speaker 6: Maria and I had already been talking about Nixon's story at that point. So when he resurfaced through a Facebook message, we immediately booked flights to Peru.
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Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you.
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Speaker 3: But Nixon is now 21 years old. The street he lives on is narrow. More of an alleyway, really. You could stumble out of his front door and into his neighbor's house across the street easily. And many of the buildings in the area are abandoned. Why have you decided to tell your story?
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Speaker 2: Well, the truth is... I always expected the moment to be precise, right?
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Speaker 8: Like.
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Speaker 3: Nixon said he'd been reluctant to tell his story because he was embarrassed, even ashamed, of what he went through. Two years after he was arrested and deported to Secot, Nixon maintains he was not a member of Tren de Aragua.
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Speaker 2: I never got a confirmation that I was a gang member because I.
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Speaker 3: Nixon said Aurora police came to visit him twice while he was in immigration detention. On one occasion, a detective asked him where he was from in Venezuela. He said, Guanare, in the state of Portuguesa. The detective pulled up Guanare on a map and then searched for directions to Aragua, as if their proximity might reveal something about Nixon's ties to Tren de Aragua.
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Speaker 2: I knew they were talking about... I knew they were trying to pin it on me, he said, to plead guilty to being part of Tren de Aragua.
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Speaker 3: Nixon said he kept on asking, Show me the proof that I'm a member of Tren de.
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Speaker 2: Aragua.
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Speaker 6: Nixon showed us a tattoo on his forearm. It's a rose with his mom's name, Norelis, in the middle. He got it when he was 13. The rose is one of the many tattoos law enforcement use to determine someone's affiliation with TDA. it scored you four points on the Alien Enemy Validation Guide, a form from DHS that, as the name suggests, could supposedly confirm someone's affiliation with the gang. Other things that counted against suspected gang members included law enforcement intelligence reporting, that counted for four points, and testimonies from informants, which counted for three. Aliens scoring eight points or higher, the form says, are validated as members of TDA. That means a tattoo alone got you halfway there. Nixon said ICE agents would pull Venezuelan guys out of the immigration detention center for interviews and show them notebooks filled with tattoos. And it was basically impossible for someone who had a bunch of tattoos not to have one from the notebook. Puma tattoos, Adidas tattoos, Jordan tattoos, Nixon said. I mean, pretty much every tattoo supposedly signals Trenderagua.
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Speaker 2: He said one of the guys that worked for Gio at the immigration detention center.
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Speaker 6: Had three Jordan tattoos of his own. The Venezuelans would joke around. Are you in TDA? they'd ask him. No, he'd say laughing. You guys are in TDA.
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Speaker 3: We'll be right back. No te vayas. It's Latino USA. I'm Maria Hinojosa.
00:19:57
Speaker 6: And I'm Mateo Schimpf, a producer from Colorado Public Radio.
00:20:01
Speaker 3: We're going to continue our story about the young Venezuelan migrant, Nixon Azuaje Perez. Back in Trujillo, in a cavernous white office flooded with fluorescent lights, we sat down with General Espinosa Cuestas. He is the police chief who put together the Tren de Aragua presentation for us and who proudly announced his 36 years of investigative experience.
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Speaker 7: Can you point out.
00:20:34
Speaker 3: What tattoos they have that point out that they're Tren de Aragua?
00:20:38
Speaker 6: The first one is the rose one.
00:20:44
Speaker 3: The general told us a rose tattoo definitely raises suspicions about whether someone's a gang member. He said all of them have a rose. The general said when members of Tren de Aragua started arriving in Peru that they came in very friendly and polite.
00:21:02
Speaker 1: And then he said they do the worst jobs, like cleaning bathrooms.
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Speaker 3: They were observing how things worked to see who was who. In their search for members of TDA, the Peruvian National Police would go to run-down buildings, multi-family buildings, the general said, that had been taken over by Tren de Aragua. It's at this point that Nixon's profile as an alleged member of Tren de Aragua becomes clear. He's a young Venezuelan man who ends up in a Peruvian city that has a history of gang activity, who is friendly and polite, who gets a remedial job cleaning the kitchen at a hotel in New York, who has a rose tattoo, who ends up at a multifamily building in a mid-sized U.S.
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Speaker 2: City.
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Speaker 3: And then you ask yourself, wait a second, how many people could that be?
00:22:05
Speaker 6: But as we worked our way through the interview, a few things the general said seemed to point away from Nixon. You can see the characteristics, he said. Tall, thin. It's an unusually small detail, and, if we're being honest, a bit strange. But most of the pictures he showed us were of skinny, light-skinned Venezuelan guys. In the videos, they spoke in a very specific slang, about the crimes they were going to commit. So fast, with so many invented words, that it was basically impossible to understand. It was a world away from how Nixon talked. And so we asked him, would a member of Tren de Aragua move here, to Trujillo, to live in a tiny concrete house and work a construction job for $ 30 a day? The Venezuelan criminal puts material things first, he answered. They would never work for a day's wage. This, of course, was circumstantial evidence. But So was a rose tattoo. And seeing Nixon's life in Trujillo really did make you wonder, is this how a member of a transcontinental terrorist organization would actually live?
00:23:30
Speaker 3: It felt like we were getting closer to tracing the game of telephone back to its source. And there was one person we thought of who might help us get all the way there. We met José Luis Pérez Guadalupe at his home in Lima. He was a chaplain at Peru's largest prison, Lurigancho, located just outside Lima, before serving as the president of Peru's entire prison system in 2015 and 2016.
00:24:01
Speaker 7: I mean, Yo entro y uno respira las cárceles.
00:24:10
Speaker 3: The prison is my home, he said. But a few years ago, José Luis said he started noticing something different about the home he knew so well. Uri Gancho was filling up with Venezuelans.
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Speaker 1: Uri Gancho was.
00:24:26
Speaker 2: Filling up with Venezuelans. Uri Gancho was filling up with Venezuelans.
00:24:36
Speaker 7: Pregunte cuántos venezolanos han entrado al penal.¿ Cuántos hay? Mil venezolanos en Lurigancho.
00:24:44
Speaker 3: A thousand Venezuelans in Lurigancho, he said. That would have accounted for more than 10% of the prison's entire population. That's when my anthropologist side kicked in, José Luis told us.
00:24:57
Speaker 7: He interviewed hundreds of Venezuelans incarcerated in Perú.
00:25:05
Speaker 3: Recorded those conversation, went on to write a book about all of this.
00:25:09
Speaker 7: Historias de vida, cómo son las cárceles allá, los trenes, porque no es un solo tren, son trenes, son varios trenes.
00:25:17
Speaker 3: And what he said he started to learn in those early days was that there were many trenes. Tren de Aragua, Tren del Sur, Tren del Llano, the anti-tren.
00:25:30
Speaker 2: La gente cree que es el Tren de Aragua. El Tren de Aragua es uno.
00:25:37
Speaker 3: It's a model of organization, he told us. Basically, a lot of things look like Tren de Aragua, but they are not actually the real thing. Where did you go on your search for Tren de Aragua in the United States?
00:25:51
Speaker 7: José Luis spent three months looking for TDA organizations.
00:26:01
Speaker 3: In Chicago in 2025. It's another city where federal law enforcement was actively pursuing the gang.
00:26:10
Speaker 7: Nunca encontré, digamos, la organización como tal.
00:26:14
Speaker 3: I didn't find the organization itself, he said.
00:26:18
Speaker 7: Pero sí encontré venezolanos, montones, miles, y dentro de ellos también delincuentes venezolanos.
00:26:26
Speaker 3: But what José Luis said he did find among the thousands and thousands of Venezuelan migrants in the U.S. were some criminals, perhaps people that at one point maybe did belong to an actual organization.
00:26:39
Speaker 7: Que hay presencia de miembros del Tren de Aragua en Estados Unidos?
00:26:44
Speaker 3: Sí. There are members of TDA in the U.S., he said.
00:26:48
Speaker 7: Una cosa es presencia, otra cosa es influencia y otra cosa es dominio.
00:26:53
Speaker 3: But it's one thing to have a presence. It's yet another to have influence, and yet another to dominate the territory. Do they have territorial influence in the criminal world in the U.S.? José Luis asked. I don't think so, he said. Do they have control? Even less so.
00:27:16
Speaker 6: After everything you just heard from José Luis, from the general, from John Fabricatori and Daniel Jurinsky, and of course, from Nixon... you start to get a sense for the full picture, how things might have come together. Half a million Venezuelan migrants arrived in the U.S. between 2022 and 2025. More than 40,000 came to Colorado. Many of them ended up living in Aurora. And some of them moved into the apartment complex where Nixon lived, La Nome. According to Nixon's neighbor, Marcos, Some of those Venezuelans went around La Nome saying they were members of TDA to scare people, mostly other migrants. The U.S. government didn't have diplomatic ties to Venezuela, so it wasn't getting a list of bona fide TDA members from that country's law enforcement. But it was gathering information about the gang in Colombia, Peru, and Chile. And so a sort of confirmation bias started to take hold. The things that look like TDA are TDA. and the gang is setting up its headquarters in Denver because of sanctuary city policies. This probably sounded right to local law enforcement. When a guy they've arrested says 30 to 40 TDA members are living at La Nome, it checks out. The game of telephone was long, from the Venezuelan prison of Tocoron, where Tren de Aragua started, to the streets of Aurora. But the whisper is carried on, and the name, Tren de Aragua, was useful to people along the way. Back at his house in Lima, José Luis told us, you need ghosts and you need enemies. And then you generalize, he said. All migrants are bad. All migrants are criminals. Every Venezuelan is a criminal. Every Venezuelan is Tren de Aragua.
00:29:12
Speaker 2: So that's it. You have your platform.
00:29:19
Speaker 6: Once you have your platform, he said, people want to believe it. This seemed to be how two facts that were true on their own, Nixon Asuaje Perez is a Venezuelan man, and Tren de Aragua is a gang that's from there, became something new. Nixon is a Venezuelan man who is a member of Tren de Aragua. By the time he picked up the spent bullet casings, in some ways, it had already been decided.
00:30:06
Speaker 3: When you see your little brother now, what do you see in him?
00:30:10
Speaker 2: How do you see him?
00:30:19
Speaker 3: One person you haven't heard from up until now is Nixon's brother, Dixon. What's it like to be here together now with your brother, with your father, a roof over your head? a certain amount of stability. Nixon, Dixon, and their father, Omar, were all living together in that house just outside of Trujillo in northern Peru. Dixon and his dad sharing a bed in one room, Nixon and his girlfriend in the other.
00:30:51
Speaker 5: Dixon's case played out quite differently from his brother's, even though they'd been charged.
00:31:03
Speaker 3: With the same crime. Unlike Nixon, Dixon was never sent to Secot. He stuck around Colorado to fight the tampering charge, which was eventually dropped to a misdemeanor. By the time Dixon received a final removal order, the U.S. had restarted deportation flights to Venezuela. One way to look at his situation is as an example of how the justice system is supposed to work. Dixon was afforded due process. He didn't win the case, but with a misdemeanor, the door is still open for him to come back to the U.S. Maybe the same would have happened for Nixon. But should someone have to endure six months in an immigration detention facility before they get their day in court? It's a sign that the system is simultaneously broken and and working the way it's intended to, a test of how much immigrants can take before they decide it's easier just to give up.
00:32:11
Speaker 5: Dixon said it wasn't until the second day, after they'd been arrested, that he even understood that what they'd done was a crime.
00:32:33
Speaker 3: And then they linked us to a gang we didn't even know about, he said. We don't have any connection to that gang.
00:32:39
Speaker 5: Dixon then said that his brother has changed a lot since Secot, that there are good days, but there are bad days too. Nixon notices it as well.
00:32:46
Speaker 3: When I'm alone, His mind starts racing when he thinks about everything that has happened to him.
00:33:09
Speaker 2: He feels guilty about his mom, about the burden she's had to carry, at times wondering whether her son was even alive. Nixon himself is colder now.
00:33:30
Speaker 3: Hardened in ways that maybe a 21-year-old shouldn't be. When he's doing construction, working up high, he says he's not scared about whether he stays on the top of the building or whether he falls. When you think of these words, Tren del Agua, now, what goes on for you?
00:33:53
Speaker 2: It makes me sad because... because... Those three words make him sick, he says. Tren de Aragua.
00:34:36
Speaker 3: This episode was reported and produced by Mateo Schimpf and me, edited by Laura Perez, with editorial supervision by Penilei Ramirez, and editorial support from Megan Verley from Colorado Public Radio. Our field producer in Peru was Milagro Salazar with Convoca Peru. The Whisper Game is a collaboration between Latino USA, Colorado Public Radio, and and Futuro Investigates. It was mixed by Mateo Schimpf, fact-checking for this episode, by Roxana Aguirre. Fernanda Chavarri is our managing editor. Nancy Trujillo is our production manager. Special thanks to Rachel Estabrook with the Portland Press-Herald and Chuck Murphy with Colorado Public Radio. The Latino USA team also includes Julia Caruso, Rebecca Ibarra, Reynaldo Leaños Jr., Stephanie Lebeau, Glorimar Marquez, Julieta Martinelli, J.J. Karubin, and Levi Sharp. Benilei Ramirez and I are executive producers. I'm your host, Maria Hinojosa. Latino USA is part of iHeart's My Cultura podcast network. Executive producers at iHeart are Leo Gomez and Arlene Santana. Join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, I'll see you on all of our social media. And dear listener, don't forget to join Futuro Plus to listen to all of our episodes ad-free. and you'll get some really cool bonus content. Join now. No te vayas. Chao.
00:36:06
Speaker 8: Latino USA is made possible in part by the Colorado Health Foundation, championing the health and well-being of every Coloradan by advancing health equity and racial justice. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Judith Scheuer and Joseph Melliger.
Speaker 1: On the eve of your 30s, you will look for a man you've never known.
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Speaker 2: We think that you might be our biological father.
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Speaker 1: The search will take you across coasts and into the veiled landscapes of love, family, and memory.
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Speaker 3: Just because you're happy doesn't mean you get to erase your whole past.
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Speaker 1: I'm Sarah Quevedo, and this is Reaching Out.
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Speaker 3: Literally, when should I apologize? In the past?
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Speaker 6: Futuro Nixon's days in el Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or SECOT, started at 4 a.m., with the sounds of a baton dragging across metal bars. SECOT is a maximum security prison in El Salvador, and reporters have documented all kinds of human rights violations there. But after hearing Nixon's account of his time at the prison, one thing really stuck with me. his head was always being pushed down for meals, getting sent into his cell, being pulled back out. We're picking Nixon's story back up at the very first of those moments, right after he heard his name called sitting on a tarmac at San Salvador International Airport.
00:01:48
Speaker 2: When we got off the plane, the Salvadoran police caught us.
00:01:53
Speaker 6: Salvadoran police rush Nixon off the plane, handcuffed, and onto a bus. He's running, trying not to fall, and then thrown into his seat. An officer whacks him in the shoulder with a baton. Put your head down, asshole. Back on the bus, reality is starting to set in. Nixon is crying. He looks around. The men sitting next to him are crying too.
00:02:21
Speaker 2: Nixon starts to pray. Holy Father, get us out of this. Why am I here if I haven't committed any crime? And how long is this going to last? Nixon would spend 125 days in Sikot.
00:02:46
Speaker 3: From Futuro Media, it's Latino USA. I'm Maria Hinojosa.
00:02:50
Speaker 6: And I'm Mateo Schimpf, a producer from Colorado Public Radio.
00:02:54
Speaker 3: Today, the final episode of The Whisper Game, a three-part series about a young migrant, an international gang, and how Aurora, Colorado became a test case for Trump's mass deportation campaign. A young man is accused of being a member of an international gang he sent to Secot in El Salvador. and we traveled to find out the truth about him. This is a Futuro Investigates story done in collaboration with Colorado Public Radio. Secot is a supermax prison, a giant steel and concrete fortress built into the Salvadoran countryside, complete with rows of slender rectangular buildings that looked like airport hangers. Nixon described the place he spent those 125 days as a warehouse. And on hot days, it was unbearably hot, Nixon said. It's just a shed, like something you'd use to keep pigs. Secloc can hold up to 40,000 people, making it one of the largest prisons in the world. And the U.S. and Salvadoran governments signed an agreement worth about $ 5 million to house 238 alleged members of TDA there. Nixon said Salvadoran officials were convinced he and the other men were terrorists if he misbehaved. the guards would threaten that they were going to make him vomit blood. This isn't the United States, they'd tell him. Here in El Salvador, you show us respect. Nixon said all of the guards took turns beating him, but the worst was from a guy they called Satan. Satan was the one who took prisoners to the island, Nixon told us, a room they called the Dark Place. Nixon thought he'd never see his family again. And at some point he said he realized that nobody was coming for him. It's the opposite of what happens in all the Hollywood movies he loved. American paratroopers weren't going to swoop down and rescue him because it was their own government who had sent him there. You're going to rot in here, the guards would tell him. That's when it hit him the hardest. Nixon said they'd tell him, if you do get out, it'll be once you're dead, being buried in the cemetery.
00:06:12
Speaker 6: Back in Colorado, I was trying to figure out how Nixon's name ended up on that list that landed him in Secott. So just for like some backstory stuff, what was your position at ICE previously?
00:06:25
Speaker 4: When I retired from ICE, I was the field office director for the Denver field office, which covers.
00:06:29
Speaker 2: All of Wyoming and Colorado.
00:06:31
Speaker 6: This is John Fabricatore.
00:06:33
Speaker 4: I had gone through the senior executive service process. I'd been a GS-15 deputy director for Colorado before that.
00:06:41
Speaker 6: I reached out to him pretty early in my reporting about Nixon's story. But he couldn't tell me much. He'd taken a different job in the federal government, working at the Department of Health and Human Services. And that limited what he felt like he could say. But about a year later, when I saw he'd resigned from the position at HHS, I immediately picked up the phone. What can you tell me about Nixon? He sent me the address for a coffee shop in Aurora. I reached out to APD about the case and, you know, his affiliation with TDA or not. What they told me is that they never fully vetted him as a member of TDA. What do you make of that?
00:07:21
Speaker 4: I think at the time, it wasn't in their interest to do that.
00:07:27
Speaker 6: Fabricatori left ICE in 2022, the year before Nixon moved to Colorado. but he kept doing immigration consulting work for the U.S.
00:07:35
Speaker 3: Government.
00:07:36
Speaker 6: It felt like this was as close as I was going to get to federal law enforcement, really any law enforcement, to tell me about what happened to Nixon.
00:07:44
Speaker 4: I think the prior leadership that was there at Aurora PD wasn't ready to align some of these guys with TDA. And I'm not saying, and I mean, just to be clear, I'm not saying that Nixon was a full TDA member. He could have possibly just been an associate member. There's different levels of membership in this gang process.
00:08:08
Speaker 6: These are the kinds of things that can make gang policing feel a bit tenuous. Are you a full-blown member? An associate? The degrees of affiliation are dizzying. If my brother hangs out with a gang member, does that make me one? I wanted Fabricatory to walk me through how that applied to Nixon's case. You know, last time we talked, you seemed... slightly more convinced that he was a member of TDA. Do you feel like you've learned any new information or understood the situation to be different? No, no, I do believe he was TDA.
00:08:43
Speaker 4: We don't have a lot of information from Venezuela to go all the way back and say these guys are definitely hardcore TDA gang members. But were they claiming to be TDA members within the United States?
00:08:54
Speaker 5: Yes.
00:08:56
Speaker 4: I believe that he claimed to be a TDA member along with the other gang members in that apartment complex and hold the people in that apartment complex to a certain fear level so that they would pay them part of their rent.
00:09:09
Speaker 6: This is similar to what we heard from Nixon's neighbor in our first episode. We've been calling him Marcos. Guys went around La Nome, the building complex where Nixon lived, claiming to be members of Tren de Aragua because they knew it would scare people. They could use the gang's name to squeeze them. to get them to pay money for rent.
00:09:28
Speaker 4: I think we get too focused on TDA when they're committing the same types of crimes as a real TDA member and are claiming to be TDA inside the United States. And now it's easy for him to claim, well, I'm not TDA.
00:09:40
Speaker 6: John Fabricatore and I had a long conversation. We talked about the night of the shooting at La Nome, and at one point he asked me, if you saw the footage of Nixon picking up the spent bullet casings and there was intent behind it, would that convince you he was a member of TDA? Maybe, I said, but the police won't show it to me. Before we'd completely talked circles around each other, there was one last thing I wanted to ask him about. I mean, last time we talked, you seemed somewhat convinced that a CI had identified Nixon as a member of TDA. Do you still feel that way?
00:10:16
Speaker 8: Yeah, probably.
00:10:16
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
00:10:18
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:10:20
Speaker 6: A CI. Confidential Informant. Based on Fabricatori's telling, an informant had identified Nixon as a member of the gang. Confidential informants are an important part of gang policing. But they can also be unreliable. I don't have access to a list of people who were talking to APD, HSI, or other law enforcement agencies about Tren de Aragua. But I did have a handful of police reports involving investigations about the gang in Aurora. And one in particular caught my eye. It involved a man who'd been arrested at another apartment complex owned by the same company as where Nixon lived, La Nome. And it happened a couple of weeks before the shooting where Nixon got arrested. Aurora police brought this man in for questioning. And the report suggests he immediately started trying to cut a deal. What do you guys know about Tren de Aragua? The detective asked him, how many Tren de Aragua members are there in Aurora?
00:11:17
Speaker 4: In Denver?
00:11:18
Speaker 6: Mucho, the man said, 200 in Denver, at least 40 to 60 in Aurora, and 30 of them lived at La Nome. This man who was arrested and brought in for questioning never mentioned Nixon by name in the police report I read, and it wasn't clear that detectives believed he was telling the truth, at least about the facts of his own crime. Aurora Police would actually later list him as a known member of Tren de Aragua. But the number he threw out stuck with me. 30 TDA members at La Nome? That would have been roughly a quarter of the people living there, based on a tenant list from June 2024. Were there even that many confirmed members in the entire state? Regardless of whether he was the informant who identified Nixon, it's not hard to think that someone, somewhere, with their own criminal case hanging over their head, was willing to say, yeah, That guy is a member of Trender Agua. But I still wasn't certain what I could say about it. I'd pored over police reports, pulled down court records. I'd talked to attorneys and to experts, people who lived at La Nome. I had some of my requests filled, others denied. Like evidence of Nixon's gang affiliation from ICE, plus an interview with its field office director. The Aurora police chief also turned down my interview request. along with a detective on the department's HSI task force. And so, after a year of searching for answers, it felt like there was really only one thing left to do.
00:12:57
Speaker 3: So we are in Trujillo, Peru, which is a northern city. It's an hour plane ride north of Lima, the capital. Coming up on Latino USA, we go searching for answers about Nixon in Peru.
00:13:13
Speaker 2: I said, but I don't understand how... Stay with us. No te vayas. It's Latino USA. I'm Maria Hinojosa. And I'm Mateo Schimpf, a producer from Colorado Public Radio.
00:13:45
Speaker 3: Before the break, we heard about how allegations from U.S. law enforcement landed Nixon at a maximum security prison in El Salvador. We continue with our story now.
00:14:05
Speaker 6: The deal between the U.S. and Salvadoran governments to hold Venezuelans at Secot generated a ton of international pressure. And eventually... Nixon and the other men were returned to Venezuela as part of a prisoner swap in July 2025. When Nixon landed in his home country, it was, in many ways, the same one he left when he was just 14 years old. The economy was a mess, and he couldn't find a job to support himself. That's around the time Nixon and I started talking. First by phone, then over WhatsApp. He told me he planned to go back to Peru because things were better there, a place where he had more connections. But then, after six months, he stopped responding. My first thought was that he'd run out of money to pay his phone bill. But the timing was a bit strange. I'd just asked him to help me get access to records about his alleged gang affiliation from the U.S.
00:15:00
Speaker 3: Government.
00:15:02
Speaker 6: Maria and I had already been talking about Nixon's story at that point. So when he resurfaced through a Facebook message, we immediately booked flights to Peru.
00:15:11
Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you.
00:15:41
Speaker 3: But Nixon is now 21 years old. The street he lives on is narrow. More of an alleyway, really. You could stumble out of his front door and into his neighbor's house across the street easily. And many of the buildings in the area are abandoned. Why have you decided to tell your story?
00:16:02
Speaker 2: Well, the truth is... I always expected the moment to be precise, right?
00:16:09
Speaker 8: Like.
00:16:19
Speaker 3: Nixon said he'd been reluctant to tell his story because he was embarrassed, even ashamed, of what he went through. Two years after he was arrested and deported to Secot, Nixon maintains he was not a member of Tren de Aragua.
00:16:35
Speaker 2: I never got a confirmation that I was a gang member because I.
00:16:40
Speaker 3: Nixon said Aurora police came to visit him twice while he was in immigration detention. On one occasion, a detective asked him where he was from in Venezuela. He said, Guanare, in the state of Portuguesa. The detective pulled up Guanare on a map and then searched for directions to Aragua, as if their proximity might reveal something about Nixon's ties to Tren de Aragua.
00:17:05
Speaker 2: I knew they were talking about... I knew they were trying to pin it on me, he said, to plead guilty to being part of Tren de Aragua.
00:17:14
Speaker 3: Nixon said he kept on asking, Show me the proof that I'm a member of Tren de.
00:17:44
Speaker 2: Aragua.
00:17:49
Speaker 6: Nixon showed us a tattoo on his forearm. It's a rose with his mom's name, Norelis, in the middle. He got it when he was 13. The rose is one of the many tattoos law enforcement use to determine someone's affiliation with TDA. it scored you four points on the Alien Enemy Validation Guide, a form from DHS that, as the name suggests, could supposedly confirm someone's affiliation with the gang. Other things that counted against suspected gang members included law enforcement intelligence reporting, that counted for four points, and testimonies from informants, which counted for three. Aliens scoring eight points or higher, the form says, are validated as members of TDA. That means a tattoo alone got you halfway there. Nixon said ICE agents would pull Venezuelan guys out of the immigration detention center for interviews and show them notebooks filled with tattoos. And it was basically impossible for someone who had a bunch of tattoos not to have one from the notebook. Puma tattoos, Adidas tattoos, Jordan tattoos, Nixon said. I mean, pretty much every tattoo supposedly signals Trenderagua.
00:19:08
Speaker 2: He said one of the guys that worked for Gio at the immigration detention center.
00:19:19
Speaker 6: Had three Jordan tattoos of his own. The Venezuelans would joke around. Are you in TDA? they'd ask him. No, he'd say laughing. You guys are in TDA.
00:19:35
Speaker 3: We'll be right back. No te vayas. It's Latino USA. I'm Maria Hinojosa.
00:19:57
Speaker 6: And I'm Mateo Schimpf, a producer from Colorado Public Radio.
00:20:01
Speaker 3: We're going to continue our story about the young Venezuelan migrant, Nixon Azuaje Perez. Back in Trujillo, in a cavernous white office flooded with fluorescent lights, we sat down with General Espinosa Cuestas. He is the police chief who put together the Tren de Aragua presentation for us and who proudly announced his 36 years of investigative experience.
00:20:33
Speaker 7: Can you point out.
00:20:34
Speaker 3: What tattoos they have that point out that they're Tren de Aragua?
00:20:38
Speaker 6: The first one is the rose one.
00:20:44
Speaker 3: The general told us a rose tattoo definitely raises suspicions about whether someone's a gang member. He said all of them have a rose. The general said when members of Tren de Aragua started arriving in Peru that they came in very friendly and polite.
00:21:02
Speaker 1: And then he said they do the worst jobs, like cleaning bathrooms.
00:21:12
Speaker 3: They were observing how things worked to see who was who. In their search for members of TDA, the Peruvian National Police would go to run-down buildings, multi-family buildings, the general said, that had been taken over by Tren de Aragua. It's at this point that Nixon's profile as an alleged member of Tren de Aragua becomes clear. He's a young Venezuelan man who ends up in a Peruvian city that has a history of gang activity, who is friendly and polite, who gets a remedial job cleaning the kitchen at a hotel in New York, who has a rose tattoo, who ends up at a multifamily building in a mid-sized U.S.
00:21:57
Speaker 2: City.
00:21:59
Speaker 3: And then you ask yourself, wait a second, how many people could that be?
00:22:05
Speaker 6: But as we worked our way through the interview, a few things the general said seemed to point away from Nixon. You can see the characteristics, he said. Tall, thin. It's an unusually small detail, and, if we're being honest, a bit strange. But most of the pictures he showed us were of skinny, light-skinned Venezuelan guys. In the videos, they spoke in a very specific slang, about the crimes they were going to commit. So fast, with so many invented words, that it was basically impossible to understand. It was a world away from how Nixon talked. And so we asked him, would a member of Tren de Aragua move here, to Trujillo, to live in a tiny concrete house and work a construction job for $ 30 a day? The Venezuelan criminal puts material things first, he answered. They would never work for a day's wage. This, of course, was circumstantial evidence. But So was a rose tattoo. And seeing Nixon's life in Trujillo really did make you wonder, is this how a member of a transcontinental terrorist organization would actually live?
00:23:30
Speaker 3: It felt like we were getting closer to tracing the game of telephone back to its source. And there was one person we thought of who might help us get all the way there. We met José Luis Pérez Guadalupe at his home in Lima. He was a chaplain at Peru's largest prison, Lurigancho, located just outside Lima, before serving as the president of Peru's entire prison system in 2015 and 2016.
00:24:01
Speaker 7: I mean, Yo entro y uno respira las cárceles.
00:24:10
Speaker 3: The prison is my home, he said. But a few years ago, José Luis said he started noticing something different about the home he knew so well. Uri Gancho was filling up with Venezuelans.
00:24:25
Speaker 1: Uri Gancho was.
00:24:26
Speaker 2: Filling up with Venezuelans. Uri Gancho was filling up with Venezuelans.
00:24:36
Speaker 7: Pregunte cuántos venezolanos han entrado al penal.¿ Cuántos hay? Mil venezolanos en Lurigancho.
00:24:44
Speaker 3: A thousand Venezuelans in Lurigancho, he said. That would have accounted for more than 10% of the prison's entire population. That's when my anthropologist side kicked in, José Luis told us.
00:24:57
Speaker 7: He interviewed hundreds of Venezuelans incarcerated in Perú.
00:25:05
Speaker 3: Recorded those conversation, went on to write a book about all of this.
00:25:09
Speaker 7: Historias de vida, cómo son las cárceles allá, los trenes, porque no es un solo tren, son trenes, son varios trenes.
00:25:17
Speaker 3: And what he said he started to learn in those early days was that there were many trenes. Tren de Aragua, Tren del Sur, Tren del Llano, the anti-tren.
00:25:30
Speaker 2: La gente cree que es el Tren de Aragua. El Tren de Aragua es uno.
00:25:37
Speaker 3: It's a model of organization, he told us. Basically, a lot of things look like Tren de Aragua, but they are not actually the real thing. Where did you go on your search for Tren de Aragua in the United States?
00:25:51
Speaker 7: José Luis spent three months looking for TDA organizations.
00:26:01
Speaker 3: In Chicago in 2025. It's another city where federal law enforcement was actively pursuing the gang.
00:26:10
Speaker 7: Nunca encontré, digamos, la organización como tal.
00:26:14
Speaker 3: I didn't find the organization itself, he said.
00:26:18
Speaker 7: Pero sí encontré venezolanos, montones, miles, y dentro de ellos también delincuentes venezolanos.
00:26:26
Speaker 3: But what José Luis said he did find among the thousands and thousands of Venezuelan migrants in the U.S. were some criminals, perhaps people that at one point maybe did belong to an actual organization.
00:26:39
Speaker 7: Que hay presencia de miembros del Tren de Aragua en Estados Unidos?
00:26:44
Speaker 3: Sí. There are members of TDA in the U.S., he said.
00:26:48
Speaker 7: Una cosa es presencia, otra cosa es influencia y otra cosa es dominio.
00:26:53
Speaker 3: But it's one thing to have a presence. It's yet another to have influence, and yet another to dominate the territory. Do they have territorial influence in the criminal world in the U.S.? José Luis asked. I don't think so, he said. Do they have control? Even less so.
00:27:16
Speaker 6: After everything you just heard from José Luis, from the general, from John Fabricatori and Daniel Jurinsky, and of course, from Nixon... you start to get a sense for the full picture, how things might have come together. Half a million Venezuelan migrants arrived in the U.S. between 2022 and 2025. More than 40,000 came to Colorado. Many of them ended up living in Aurora. And some of them moved into the apartment complex where Nixon lived, La Nome. According to Nixon's neighbor, Marcos, Some of those Venezuelans went around La Nome saying they were members of TDA to scare people, mostly other migrants. The U.S. government didn't have diplomatic ties to Venezuela, so it wasn't getting a list of bona fide TDA members from that country's law enforcement. But it was gathering information about the gang in Colombia, Peru, and Chile. And so a sort of confirmation bias started to take hold. The things that look like TDA are TDA. and the gang is setting up its headquarters in Denver because of sanctuary city policies. This probably sounded right to local law enforcement. When a guy they've arrested says 30 to 40 TDA members are living at La Nome, it checks out. The game of telephone was long, from the Venezuelan prison of Tocoron, where Tren de Aragua started, to the streets of Aurora. But the whisper is carried on, and the name, Tren de Aragua, was useful to people along the way. Back at his house in Lima, José Luis told us, you need ghosts and you need enemies. And then you generalize, he said. All migrants are bad. All migrants are criminals. Every Venezuelan is a criminal. Every Venezuelan is Tren de Aragua.
00:29:12
Speaker 2: So that's it. You have your platform.
00:29:19
Speaker 6: Once you have your platform, he said, people want to believe it. This seemed to be how two facts that were true on their own, Nixon Asuaje Perez is a Venezuelan man, and Tren de Aragua is a gang that's from there, became something new. Nixon is a Venezuelan man who is a member of Tren de Aragua. By the time he picked up the spent bullet casings, in some ways, it had already been decided.
00:30:06
Speaker 3: When you see your little brother now, what do you see in him?
00:30:10
Speaker 2: How do you see him?
00:30:19
Speaker 3: One person you haven't heard from up until now is Nixon's brother, Dixon. What's it like to be here together now with your brother, with your father, a roof over your head? a certain amount of stability. Nixon, Dixon, and their father, Omar, were all living together in that house just outside of Trujillo in northern Peru. Dixon and his dad sharing a bed in one room, Nixon and his girlfriend in the other.
00:30:51
Speaker 5: Dixon's case played out quite differently from his brother's, even though they'd been charged.
00:31:03
Speaker 3: With the same crime. Unlike Nixon, Dixon was never sent to Secot. He stuck around Colorado to fight the tampering charge, which was eventually dropped to a misdemeanor. By the time Dixon received a final removal order, the U.S. had restarted deportation flights to Venezuela. One way to look at his situation is as an example of how the justice system is supposed to work. Dixon was afforded due process. He didn't win the case, but with a misdemeanor, the door is still open for him to come back to the U.S. Maybe the same would have happened for Nixon. But should someone have to endure six months in an immigration detention facility before they get their day in court? It's a sign that the system is simultaneously broken and and working the way it's intended to, a test of how much immigrants can take before they decide it's easier just to give up.
00:32:11
Speaker 5: Dixon said it wasn't until the second day, after they'd been arrested, that he even understood that what they'd done was a crime.
00:32:33
Speaker 3: And then they linked us to a gang we didn't even know about, he said. We don't have any connection to that gang.
00:32:39
Speaker 5: Dixon then said that his brother has changed a lot since Secot, that there are good days, but there are bad days too. Nixon notices it as well.
00:32:46
Speaker 3: When I'm alone, His mind starts racing when he thinks about everything that has happened to him.
00:33:09
Speaker 2: He feels guilty about his mom, about the burden she's had to carry, at times wondering whether her son was even alive. Nixon himself is colder now.
00:33:30
Speaker 3: Hardened in ways that maybe a 21-year-old shouldn't be. When he's doing construction, working up high, he says he's not scared about whether he stays on the top of the building or whether he falls. When you think of these words, Tren del Agua, now, what goes on for you?
00:33:53
Speaker 2: It makes me sad because... because... Those three words make him sick, he says. Tren de Aragua.
00:34:36
Speaker 3: This episode was reported and produced by Mateo Schimpf and me, edited by Laura Perez, with editorial supervision by Penilei Ramirez, and editorial support from Megan Verley from Colorado Public Radio. Our field producer in Peru was Milagro Salazar with Convoca Peru. The Whisper Game is a collaboration between Latino USA, Colorado Public Radio, and and Futuro Investigates. It was mixed by Mateo Schimpf, fact-checking for this episode, by Roxana Aguirre. Fernanda Chavarri is our managing editor. Nancy Trujillo is our production manager. Special thanks to Rachel Estabrook with the Portland Press-Herald and Chuck Murphy with Colorado Public Radio. The Latino USA team also includes Julia Caruso, Rebecca Ibarra, Reynaldo Leaños Jr., Stephanie Lebeau, Glorimar Marquez, Julieta Martinelli, J.J. Karubin, and Levi Sharp. Benilei Ramirez and I are executive producers. I'm your host, Maria Hinojosa. Latino USA is part of iHeart's My Cultura podcast network. Executive producers at iHeart are Leo Gomez and Arlene Santana. Join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, I'll see you on all of our social media. And dear listener, don't forget to join Futuro Plus to listen to all of our episodes ad-free. and you'll get some really cool bonus content. Join now. No te vayas. Chao.
00:36:06
Speaker 8: Latino USA is made possible in part by the Colorado Health Foundation, championing the health and well-being of every Coloradan by advancing health equity and racial justice. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Judith Scheuer and Joseph Melliger.
