EL PASO, Texas – Hector Gonzalez dreams of someday becoming a barber in New York City.
The 23-year-old Venezuelan favors black baseball caps, worn backward, and tattoos on his left forearm.
On a recent afternoon, those traits – his age, the backward cap, the tattoos – made him a target of several passing El Paso Police officers, who ordered Gonzalez and several other young Venezuelan migrants to stand and face a wall on a downtown street corner in this border city. The police, some wearing balaclavas over their faces, checked the men’s pockets and backpacks, made them lift their shirts and explain their tattoos, some which depicted a rose, dice or barbed wire.
The officers said they were searching for a suspect in a stabbing, but they were also on the lookout for members of Tren de Aragua – A dangerous Venezuelan street gang some of whose members have slipped into the United States amid thousands of other migrants in recent years. The gang has become a flashpoint in the U.S. presidential election.