A 26-year-old Venezuelan who entered the U.S. illegally in 2024 was arrested near the White House with an AR-15, a MAC-10 and a Glock in a stolen truck. DHS says he told agents voices ordered him to come to Washington and kill President Trump.
WASHINGTON — A Venezuelan national who crossed the border illegally in 2024 was arrested shortly before midnight on Thursday a few hundred yards from the White House, with an AR-15-style rifle, a MAC-10, a Glock 43X and dozens of rounds of ammunition inside a stolen pickup truck. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the man told Secret Service officers that he heard voices in his head telling him to come to Washington, D.C., and kill President Donald Trump.
The suspect, identified by DHS as Ronny Yordrix Guanipa Chrinos, 26, was spotted by a Secret Service Uniformed Division officer on patrol, sitting in a blue Ford F-150 parked on Constitution Avenue, next to the White House complex. When officers approached, he allegedly made a finger-gun gesture at them. Speaking through Google Translate, he said he had the gun “because they tried to kill me with it,” and that it was “in the brown bag.” The truck had been reported stolen; NBC News reported that it belonged to his employer, who had lent it to him.
Released at the border
DHS says Guanipa Chrinos crossed from Mexico into Texas in March 2024, was arrested by the Border Patrol, and was then released into the country under the Biden administration’s border policy. Nineteen months later he was parked at the doorstep of the president with three firearms. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin credited “our brave Secret Service officers” for stopping “this illegal alien with three firearms” before anyone was hurt.
He was charged in D.C. Superior Court with carrying a rifle and a pistol without a license, unlawful transportation of firearms, possession of unregistered firearms and ammunition, possession of a dangerous weapon, unauthorized use of a vehicle, theft and receiving stolen property. He is being held without bond.
Why it matters
This is not an isolated scare. It follows the shooting at Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024, the armed man in the shrubs of Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course two months later, and the gunfire at a security checkpoint of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25 this year. Secret Service Director Sean Curran said the agency is “alarmed by the increase in threat cases that continue to arise” and will expand efforts to identify people who threaten its protectees before they reach Washington.
For readers in the Americas, the case also lands on a wound the region knows well. Venezuela’s collapse under the Chavista regime pushed nearly eight million people out of the country, many of them through Brazil’s northern border in Roraima. The same regime was received with honors in Brasília in May 2023, when Lula dismissed reports of Venezuelan authoritarianism as “a narrative.” The Lula regime has since kept the same tolerance toward the region’s captured institutions that it shows toward its own.
The record
Confirmed by officials: the arrest, the location, the three weapons and ammunition, the stolen vehicle, the charges, and the suspect’s illegal entry and release in 2024, all stated by DHS, the Secret Service and court filings. Reported by DHS but not yet tested in court: the statement that voices ordered him to kill the president. His mental state and whether he had a concrete plan are for investigators and the court to establish. He is presumed innocent.
What is already beyond dispute is the sequence: an illegal crossing, a release instead of a removal, a stolen truck, three guns, and a man parked by the White House saying he came to kill the president. The officer on Constitution Avenue did his job. The system that let him walk in from the border in 2024 did not, and the rising count of armed men reaching the president’s perimeter says the threat is no longer an exception.
The Watch Post Daily will continue to follow this story. Sources: U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Secret Service, D.C. Superior Court charging documents, NBC News and ABC News reporting.
Featured image: USSS Uniformed Division policeman on guard outside the White House on July 14, 2024 by Misha Komadovsky, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
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