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Former ICE supervisory special agent Victor Avila joined Martha MacCallum on Fox News recently to discuss shocking reports involving members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — a deadly group that now has a presence in more than a dozen U.S. states.

Avila told MaCallum that his sources suggest Tren de Aragua may have ties to terrorism — specifically Iran and terrorist group Hezbollah.

“This is not a gang. This is reminiscent of a cartel. Because of the organization, because of the backing of money and finances … and more troubling is their association with … Hezbollah and Iran. I’ve been trying to put his out for the last several months because this is what my intelligence contacts are telling me,” Avila told MacCallum.

“It makes it a national security issue,” he added.

Watch the clip above. More on Tren de Aragua from Fox News below:

José Gustavo Arocha, a former lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army, told Fox News Digital that socialist Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro is behind much of TdA’s growth and rapid expansion, first in Latin America and now in the U.S.

Arocha fled Venezuela to the United States in 2015 after being imprisoned by the Maduro regime for eight months. Since then, he said the situation has only worsened with Maduro asserting ever more control over the region. This year, Maduro retained control of the country by prevailing in a hotly contested election that was widely believed to be fraudulent.

“We have to understand also something of the Tren de Aragua, the TdA. It’s a state-sponsored Maduro regime organization,” he said. “The real boss of the Tren de Aragua is in Caracas, Venezuela. It is the Maduro regime, because they created TdA, and they use the TdA as a blackmail [tool] for any situation.”

Arocha said the Maduro dictatorship’s counterintelligence agency – the Directorate of Military Counterintelligence, also known as “DGCIM” – has been using TdA as an asymmetrical warfare tool, giving itself “plausible deniability.”

Tren de Aragua first burst onto the scene in the U.S. when several members of the gang violently took control of an apartment building in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado. Since then, the gang has been responsible for a steady stream of violent attacks and gang-related crimes, including the high-profile murder of nursing student Laken Riley in Georgia.

More over at Fox News: