For weeks, we’ve been told the threat posed by the trafficking of illegal drugs is indistinguishable from an outright declaration of war on the United States by foreign drug cartels. Trump and his toadies insist traffickers are bringing drugs across the border to “kill” Americans, which would be an entirely self-defeating business plan no self-respecting cartel would ever engage in. Obviously, he’s lying, as are those who speak for him.
But those lies are being used to buttress something even more awful than our usual War on Drugs: the extrajudicial murders of people only suspected to be moving drugs from Venezuela to… well, anywhere else but Venezuela. There are plenty of people between the United States and Venezuela who might be interested in purchasing/trafficking drugs. To insist that these drugs (if they exist at all) are headed to the US border with the intent of “killing” cartels’ customer bases is a lie so stupid it shouldn’t be given the dignity of a one-sentence debunking.
Trump is playing hardball in international waters, straight up murdering people simply because their boats have departed from Venezuelan shores. And while he keeps constructing his “Savior of America” facade, he’s so self-interested he can’t stop himself from undercutting his own narratives.
The man is a blend of involuntary muscle movements and brain stem-level thinking. “DRUGS ARE KILLING US” he screams into the bullhorn he owns (TruthSocial). Meanwhile, back at the Oval Office, he’s letting the drug dealers he personally likes off the hook.
President Trump announced on Friday afternoon that he would grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to a former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who, as the center of a sweeping drug case, was found guilty by an American jury last year of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States.
The news came as a shock not only to Hondurans, but also to the authorities in the United States who had built a major case and won a conviction against Mr. Hernández. They had accused him of taking bribes during his campaign from Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious former leader of the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico known as “El Chapo,” and of running his Central American country like a narco state.
As several current and former government officials noted in that preliminary reporting, Trump’s actions were not only harmful to foreign relations and ongoing anti-drug trafficking efforts, but also made a mockery of Trump’s other statements about going hard on drugs.
A day later, nothing had changed but the status of Juan Orlando Hernandez’s pardon, which was now a fact, rather than a threat. And, of course, it was Classic Trump™, all the way down to the New York Times’ coverage of it.
Mr. Trump signaled on Saturday that he was ratcheting up his campaign against drug cartels, saying in a social media post that airspace above and surrounding Venezuela should be considered “CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”
Less than 24 hours earlier, Mr. Trump had announced on social media that he was granting a full pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who had been convicted in the United States of drug trafficking charges in what was seen as a major victory for authorities in a case against a former head of state. That pardon has not yet been officially granted.
The two posts displayed a remarkable dissonance in the president’s strategy, as he moved to escalate a military campaign against drug trafficking while ordering the release of a man prosecutors said had taken “cocaine-fueled bribes” from cartels and “protected their drugs with the full power and strength of the state — military, police and justice system.” In fact, prosecutors said that Mr. Hernández, for years, allowed bricks of cocaine from Venezuela to flow through Honduras en route to the United States.
Oh NYT, that’s not “remarkable dissonance.” And it certainly isn’t the “display” of “contradictions” claimed in the headline.
The word the NYT is looking for (in both cases) is “hypocrisy.” These are hypocritical acts performed by a president who resolutely does not care that he’s the embodiment of hypocrisy. There’s no “contradiction” or “dissonance.” This is how Trump operates. His “shut down the borders” yelling obviously clashes horribly with his decision to pardon a foreign drug trafficker, but everything about it is entirely consistent with all known Trump actions/statements to date. It may look like dissonance to someone who just emerged from a 12-year coma today, but it looks exactly like Trump business as usual to everyone else.
This doesn’t mean this hypocrisy should be ignored. It absolutely shouldn’t. It just means we shouldn’t use nicer words that suggest an error of judgment might have taken place, because that just gives a deliberately hypocritical act (one of several!) by Trump a veneer of plausible deniability it certainly goddamn doesn’t deserve.
It was never enough to simply expel migrants as quickly as possible for the Trump administration. A massive conglomerate of federal officers was incapable of hitting Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s 3,000 arrests per day quota, no matter how many rights it violated. Any pretense of only going after migrants with criminal records was discarded during Trump’s previous administration, even though every administration spokesperson is guaranteed to repeat the lie in defense of every act of brutality.
For a few months now, the administration has been killing people in international waters. The supposed justification is that the people killed are transporting drugs destined for the United States. Maybe some of those killed were engaged in drug trafficking, but prior to Trump’s second term, the accepted approach was to intercept these boats and arrest their occupants.
That’s apparently unacceptable to Trump and the ex-Fox News commentator he elevated to the top position in the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth. Our country is now engaged in extrajudicial killings (more accurately: murders) in international waters under the pretense that the trafficking of drugs is the equivalent of engaging in actual war against the United States.
The zero due process executions in open waters would be distressing enough. But it’s even worse than that. The US military — under the direction of Hegseth and Trump — is making sure no one survives the initial attack.
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive,according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
This is America. We kill what we have no desire to save. Land of the Free (but for MAGA faithful only) and home of the people so brave they’re willing to circle back around to murder people clinging to life after an initial military strike.
If not war crimes, why war-crime shaped, one might ask. No one in the administration cares. It’s what the regime wants to do. Nothing else matters other than it getting done.
The consolation prize in the middle of this murderous race towards authoritarianism is this: some people — even some Republicans — are extremely uncomfortable with this operation, which definitely sports a war crime silhouette.
Republican-led committees in the Senate and the House say they will amplify their scrutiny of the Pentagon after a Washington Post report revealing that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken order to kill all crew members aboard a vessel suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea several weeks ago.
[…]
Late Friday, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the committee’s top Democrat, issued a statement saying that the committee “is aware of recent news reports — and the Department of Defense’s initial response — regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels.” The committee, they said, “has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”
These two lawmakers have since been joined by Rep. Mike Rogers (a Republican) and Rep. Adam Smith (Democratic Party), who have stated they’re interested in a “full accounting” of Trump’s international waters-based boat strike program. That brings the House in alignment with the Senate, ensuring both branches of Congress involved in US military oversight are involved.
While this is a positive development (given the political affiliation of everyone involved), we won’t know what this actually means until this investigation is well underway. On one hand, this could just be Republicans playing nice with Democratic party members in hopes of finding some way to justify these strikes after the fact.
On the other hand, even MAGA Republicans are probably upset they’ve been left out of the loop on this. The administration has steadfastly refused to allow congressional reps to directly interact with the OLC lawyers who couldn’t be bothered to reverse engineer a justification for extrajudicial killings until well after several killings had already taken place. Whether or not these Republicans agree with Trump, it’s becoming clear they’d like to be considered part of the process, rather than simply expected to cheer from the sidelines.
Blowing up boats the administration claims (after the fact) were filled with drug traffickers is one thing. (And what a fucking thing it is.) Sending in another strike to ensure no one survives the attacks is quite another. Never mind the moral obligations. The United States has legal obligations to survivors of military strikes, especially when it’s clear (as it is here in the case of people clinging to wreckage) they pose no danger to anyone.
A group of former military attorneys who have scrutinized the Trump administration’s military activities in Latin America released an assessment Saturday outlining relevant international and domestic laws, and said that regardless of whether the U.S. is in an armed conflict, conducting law enforcement or other military operations, the targeting of defenseless people is prohibited.
Under the circumstances The Post reported, “not only does international law prohibit targeting these survivors, but it also requires the attacking force to protect, rescue, and, if applicable, treat them as prisoners of war,” the group said in a statement circulated to news media. “Violations of these obligations are war crimes, murder, or both. There are no other options.”
While this may seem not all that different from the drone/military strikes authorized by the Obama administration — some of which involved several passes to ensure anyone merely wounded would be completely dead — it definitely isn’t the same thing. The extrajudicial killings authorized by Obama involved people in areas where the US was already engaged in military conflicts. The boat strikes, on the other hand, involve people from a country we’re not occupying or invading (Venezuela) and people who the administration openly admits are doing nothing more than moving drugs from one place to another.
Claiming these drugs are headed to the US is an allegation without basis in fact. And the killing of people suspected of nothing more than acts that could only be prosecuted if the traffickers and their drugs attempted to cross the US border while they’re still in international waters hundreds of miles away from the United States is nothing more than straight up murdering people just because you think you can get away with it. So far, the administration has. Maybe what’s happening now will bring this to a halt. But until it does, the Trump administration will continue to ensure every American has blood on their hands, whether they voted for him or not.
This won’t matter to Donald Trump or the dozens of administration officials who live to please him. In all likelihood, it will just lead to Trump and his administration smearing one of this nation’s allies for being weak on crime and too supportive of people who are being murdered by the US government.
But it should matter to everyone else. The United States was once the leader of the free world, even with all of its current and historical flaws. It’s no longer interested in any version of “freedom” that doesn’t involve making people feel it’s alright to engage in open bigotry. And it no longer deserves to be called the “leader” of anything, since it’s in the process of devolving into an authoritarian state with white Christian nationalist desires.
The mass deportation program that has been running at full speed since Trump retook the Oval Office has been abjectly and objectively miserable. Irrational hatred is now just public policy, overseen by grinning “Village of the Damned”-esque kids with swastikas pinwheeling in their creepy, dead eyes.
Not the UK has been much better for most of its history. It spent a lot of its history engaging in open racism and bigotry-as-public-policy colonialism. Even now, its desire to be more harmful to immigrants, privacy rights, and anything not completely Union Jacked has seen it devolve in the same direction the United States is now headed, albeit with a bit more internal division.
But Trump has gone so far that not even this new wave of UK Exceptionalism is willing to endorse it. Sure, it’s willing to be awful towards its own populace regularly, but it’s not exactly ready to sign up for an eventual appearance at The Hague. Here’s Natasha Bertrand, reporting on a sudden severing of surveillance access by the UK government in response to the administration’s killings of people in international waters.
The United Kingdom is no longer sharing intelligence with the US about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in US military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.
[…]
[S]hortly after the US began launching lethal strikes against the boats in September, however, the UK grew concerned that the US might use intelligence provided by the British to select targets. British officials believe the US military strikes, which have killed 76 people, violate international law, the sources said. The intelligence pause began over a month ago, they said.
The UK government did the right thing. Even if some in the UK government might be aligned with Trump in terms of going full Duterte, there’s no reason to continue to act as an accomplice in the extrajudicial killings. Even if the political winds fail to shift in the United States at the end of Trump’s second term, the man who has spent his entire presidential career antagonizing most of the rest of the world has made enough enemies that he won’t have many supporters if an internationally-backed prosecution attempt arises in the future.
Even military officials are starting to back away from the boat strike program, even as the Trump-beholden DOJ Office of Legal Counsel continues to issue questionable memos that claim “this all very legal, actually.” It certainly doesn’t look legal, which creates some problems in the court of public opinion. In courts that actually have the power to do something about it, these outrageous claims of absolute executive power have already worn thin.
As for the official US response, it’s limited to this for the moment:
The British embassy in Washington and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. A Pentagon official told CNN that the department “doesn’t talk about intelligence matters.”
LMAO. The Defense Department talks about “intelligence matters” in chats that have included journalists, family members, and family lawyers. And Trump himself has unilaterally (and very unofficially) declassified intelligence information by splattering it all over the pages of TruthSocial and X. All that’s being said here is that the government won’t talk about things it doesn’t want to discuss, right up until an administration official (or Trump himself) decides it’s time to get bitchy about this regime being treated like the untrustworthy piece of shit it is.
That will probably happen sooner, rather than later. As the CNN report notes, both Canada and Colombia have done the same thing, preventing the US military from using intelligence these countries have collected to target people in boats in international waters. Make America A Pariah Again is going just great.
Not content to simply deport as many South American migrants from this country as possible, the Trump administration leaned into its lies about the latent threat to national security the mere existence of foreign people poses to national security.
This administration pretends everything is a “war,” even as it actively avoids seeking congressional approval to engage in acts of war. Migrants crossing the border is a “war.” Migrants residing in this country without the proper paperwork is a “war.” And now, foreign people in boats departing from countries Trump deeply dislikes is now an act of “war,” apparently justifying whatever actions the government chooses to take. In this case, it’s a ton of extrajudicial killings predicated on the after-the-fact assertion that alleged drug trafficking is a literal violent attack on America.
The administration’s extrajudicial killing program debuted days ahead of the eventual legal “justification” for murdering people in international waters. Since then, the number of attacks has continued to increase. And yet the administration has refused to provide anything more than conclusory statements in support of its actions, all written by loyalist lawyers who apparently feel their continued employment rests upon their willingness to be on the wrong side of history.
No doubt it does. As the attacks escalate, the administration keeps digging deeper in hopes of finding the magic (legal) bullet that will justify something that looks like straight-up murder. It still hasn’t found anything capable of heading off legal challenges to its boat strike program, but it’s apparently hoping this memo recently issued by the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel will prevent anyone in the military associated with these extrajudicial killings from being held legally accountable for engaging in illegal activities.
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) stated in a classified opinion drawn up in the summer that personnel taking part in military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in Latin America would not be exposed to future prosecution, according to four people familiar with the matter.
The decision to pursue an opinion, drafted in July, reflects the heightened concerns within the government raised by senior civilian and military lawyers that such strikes would be illegal.
As the Washington Post report notes, more than few people in the higher ranks have questioned this shift towards attacking non-military targets who — at best — are only suspected of participating in drug trafficking. The administration insists (without facts in evidence) that everyone it kills is deeply involved in the international drug trade and are probably high-ranking members of drug cartels.
Obviously, that can’t possibly be true. And it definitely isn’t, as a recent investigation by US journalists made clear. These actions have prompted resignations by US military officials, including Admiral Alvin Holsey, who retired rather than serve a government that has deliberately unmoored itself from constitutional boundaries and long-held American ideals.
Of course, the Nimrods heading the “War Department” could care less about losing even more talent. All Trump and his immediate subordinates desire is more subordination from those in the ranks, especially those expected to support this regime’s authoritarian trickle-down effect.
A Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, has previously denied that Holsey had “hesitation or any concerns” about the mission. A spokesperson for Holsey said he had no information to provide about such discussions.
In a statement to The Post Wednesday, Parnell said, “current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law,” with all actions in “complete compliance with the law of armed conflict.”
Parnell, like all administration spokespeople, is not to be trusted. Everyone speaking for the administration lies constantly, when not otherwise engaged in social media posts even the most racist nine-year-old would find childish.
The memo issued by the OLC goes even further than the sock puppet currently speaking for the entire military. According to the OLC, boat strikes are justified because drug traffickers are using funds to engage in a “non-international armed conflict,” which seems pretty weird when everyone being murdered by the US military are in boats that have left foreign countries and are being sunk while still in international waters.
The OLC also claims the fact that drug money may be used to “finance campaigns of violence and extortion,” which apparently justifies what’s happening to whoever happens to be in boats destroyed by US military attacks. But that assertion is a deliberate twist of phrase that hopes to sweep these boat strikes under the Executive Branch’s absurdly large Article II powers rug. Violence and extortion are definitely part of drug trafficking, but those acts are committed to facilitate drug trafficking. Drug traffickers are not selling drugs to finance these criminal acts with the intent of targeting American citizens with violence. But that’s what’s being claimed here by the OLC, which is hoping to justify extrajudicial killings after the fact.
Just because this administration constantly says things that aren’t true doesn’t make them true, as legal professionals (including former OLC lawyers) are being forced to state with alarming frequency:
Adam Isacson, a scholar at the Washington Office on Latin America, said “there is no proof” that the gangs are using drug profits with the intent of promoting violence or mayhem in the United States.
“These groups are businesses,” he said. “If they are carrying out violence in the United States, they are doing it for profit, not for the purpose of sowing terror.”
Yeah, it’s an absurd assertion. I would assume the release of the OLC’s memo making these claims was greeted by constant [Many people are typing] messages in CIA chat groups. The CIA knows how to sell drugs and topple governments. The boats leaving Venezuela (allegedly) filled with drugs and traffickers ain’t it.
This is a government hoping to back its way into congressional and/or court blessing of its shoot-first, don’t even bother asking questions later off-shore murder operation. And now it’s telling those who might be first against the wall if and when it all falls apart that they don’t need to worry about being murderers because, at the very least, any DOJ run by Trump or one his successor puppets will never treat them like the accomplices they are.
The Trump administration has been ramping up its rhetoric against Venezuela since Day 1. Efforts to arrest up to 3,000 migrants a day focused on Venezuelans, many of whom had fled to the United States seeking a land with actual freedom.
Those who weren’t simply locked up in ICE’s many forever prisons were sent to places even worse than the autocratic government they had fled. Many Venezuelans were branded Tren de Aragua gang members by faulty databases, fired cops, and a collective of bigots willing to push Trump’s xenophobic agenda.
That meant many alleged gang members were sent off to be tortured by the corrupt El Salvadoran government while imprisoned in the country’s infamous CECOT. The few people who managed to fight back against the Trump regime were soon faced with options even less palatable than an indefinite stay in El Savador’s CECOT hellhole.
The Trump administration simply can’t find enough people to arrest to satisfy ghoulish racist/Trump advisor (but I repeat myself) Stephen Miller’s desire to eject one million brown people from this country by EOB 12/31/2025. Now, it’s decided it can bump those bigoted numbers up by simply murdering people in boats seen heading north from Venezuela.
The Trump administration has constantly engaged in war rhetoric to defend its actions. First, it claimed the mere existence of foreign gangs justified its mass deportation efforts. More recently, it’s claiming the mere existence of an international drug trade is all the justification it needs to engage in extrajudicial killings.
To date, the Trump administration — headed up by hard-drinking, OpSec-ignoring, leader-in-name-only Pete Hegeseth — has murdered the occupants of at least 17 boats in international waters. As has been the case almost always with Trump 2.0, the administration acted first and bodged together legal justifications later.
It’s unlikely these legal justifications will hold up in court — at least any court that isn’t 5/9ths wholly subservient to Donald Trump. But, for now, no court has stopped the administration from doing what it wants, which means it continues to kill people it openly admits it doesn’t have the evidence to bring criminal charges against. Instead, it continues to angrily tap the “King Trump” signs it has placed around the Oval Office, daring anyone in the government to try to rein in the Executive Branch.
The narrative is this: drug trade is roughly equal to terrorist attacks that justify violent military responses. Bringing drugs to purchasers and middle men is nothing more than an act of war. Therefore, killing people just because is nothing more than the US defending itself against an undeclared war perpetrated by… I guess… uncut fentanyl?
Unlike the Trump administration, the US press is actually putting people on the ground and talking to those directly affected by its new War on Boats. Venezuela isn’t a safe place to visit, much less leave. And yet, the Associated Press has managed to talk to people in that country who are now seeing people they know being straight up murdered to satisfy the GOP’s racist blood lust.
In dozens of interviews in villages on Venezuela’s breathtaking northeastern coast, from which some of the boats departed, residents and relatives said the dead men had indeed been running drugs but were not narco-terrorists or leaders of a cartel or gang.
Most of the nine men were crewing such craft for the first or second time, making at least $500 per trip, residents and relatives said. They were laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver. Two were low-level career criminals. One was a well-known local crime boss who contracted out his smuggling services to traffickers.
Now, most Trump fans will immediately point to this as evidence that the administration is right about the people it’s killing in international waters. But even the most charitable readings of administration statements will prove this wrong. Trump and Hegseth have continually portrayed the people they’ve killed as “narco-terrorists” with ties to the upper levels of international drug cartels. The reality — at least for a small portion of the people murdered by our government — is that these are people just trying to make a little bit of money to make their lives back in Venezuela a little less miserable.
The US government has killed at least 66 people this way. And that includes people who just happen to have operable boats at a time when that’s really all that’s needed to put your in the cross hairs of the next military drone strike.
One of the people killed in a boat strike was Robert Sanchez, who was just a fisherman trying to make a living and, hopefully, obtain a better boat to increase his success chances while out in open waters. But because he went fishing off the coat of Venezuela, he was determined eligible for death from above:
Sánchez had just finished offloading a day’s catch last month when he told his mother he would be taking a short trip and would see her in a couple of days. They had no idea where he was going.
After seeing clips on social media that mentioned his death, relatives broke the news to his mother, but not until after ensuring she had taken her blood pressure medication. Sánchez’s youngest son, a third grader, could not accept for days that his father was gone. He kept asking adults if his father could have survived the explosion, noting he might still be at sea.
No, the adults told the boy. His father was gone.
Even if we decide — for the sake of argument — that everyone killed by boat strikes was a person in a boat carrying drugs to another destination, that still doesn’t excuse the administration’s actions. Sure, there’s been a “War on Drugs” ever since Richard Nixon deputized a drug-addled Elvis Presley, but that war has always been carried out using the USA’s accepted rules of engagement. While due process might be a bit of joke — what with the reliance on plea bargains and sting operations that are pretty much just entrapment — it was at least considered something worthy of lip service, if nothing else.
Now, it’s just the US government sinking boats and killing people and pretending this is all OK because… well… the Trump administration says it’s OK. But if you’re OK with this, you’re pretty much going to be OK with any expansion of extrajudicial killings of alleged drug traffickers. If there’s no significant push back, the administration will move these efforts inland, much like it has with its “border security” actions. CBP and Border Patrol officers are now wandering the streets of cities far removed from this nation’s southern border. It’s only a matter of time before this administration decides that the quasi-legal stuff it does in non-US territory is what needs to happen on US city streets.
At that point, your belated objections will mean nothing. The time to protest is now. Waiting until you have to step over the bodies of your fellow US residents to express your displeasure with this administration will be far too little and far too late.
That’s the new line from Donald Trump, the guy who once told supporters he could personally commit murder and he wouldn’t lose any supporters. He said that last time. He’s president again, so apparently it’s time to see if this adage holds up.
Trump has already pretended the mere existence of foreign gang members anywhere in the world justifies whatever actions he chooses to take under the heading of “immigration enforcement.” That includes sending people to countries they’ve never lived in or back to countries they fled from for fear of getting tortured or killed. All of this has been greeted with shrug from a man with an ill-fitting jacket and head full of hate.
In recent weeks, things have escalated. Trump is pretending the mere existence of a worldwide drug trade is a combination of undeclared war on the United States and an ongoing act of terrorism. So, we’ve just started committing extrajudicial killings in international waters and expecting DOJ/DoD lawyers to work out the legal details after the fact.
A few legislators have started to speak up about this, suggesting that, at the very least, Trump should approach Congress to secure a declaration of war to justify these… well, let’s call them what they are: murders. Even though he’s got a majority working for him, Trump doesn’t want to do this. He’d rather just do whatever he wants and let everyone else deal with the consequences.
Trump has never been the most coherent or erudite of orators. And that’s what gives statements like these an extra edge: the boorish, almost-bored vow to commit murder spilling out of the mouth of the nation’s largest single-cell organism.
Trump: "I don't think we're necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war, I think we're just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We're going to kill them. They're going to be, like dead."
Here’s what Trump said, in case you can’t see the embed:
Trump: “I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war, I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like dead.”
That is chilling. There’s literally no precedent for that in this country. And he’s not just talking about the nearly daily sinking of boats Trump and Hegseth claim (without evidence) are filled with drugs and drug dealers. He’s talking about what’s in the works, which appears to be a land invasion of Venezuela and Colombia.
That’s the sort of thing that usually requires a declaration of war. But, of course, Republican presidents in particular have tended to feel congressional involvement isn’t necessarily needed. George Bush invaded Panama to take down Manuel Noriega. Ronald Reagan did the same thing in Grenada. And the less said about the forever war on terror, the better, because I’d hate to see what’s being discussed now turn into decades of misery for everyone involved.
This is horrific and it should have been immediately greeted by a deafening uproar by Democratic leaders. It should have been rejected out of hand by members of Trump’s own party. Instead, it has just become another part of the background noise that is the Trump administration grinding its way towards its authoritarian goals.
The “fresh hell” administration keeps on rolling. There’s no need to actually ask what fresh hell awaits. You need do nothing more than exist and a new fresh hell will be delivered, almost daily.
Here’s the freshest: the US military decided to blow up a boat traveling in international waters — one carrying eleven people, all definitely dead — because… well, no one really seems to be able to say definitively.
There’s a whole lot of vibes going on, but not much else. The man presumably capable of making a final call on extrajudicial killings during war time — famed accused day drinker and Signal chat enthusiast Pete Hegseth — said some stuff that lacked substance or, more importantly, any legal backing while being chatted up by PravdaUS:
The Trump administration has not offered any legal rationale. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday that administration officials “knew exactly who was in that boat” and “exactly what they were doing,” although he did not offer evidence.
For whatever reason, Secretary of State Marco Rubio felt compelled to offer his comments on the offshore murders, which went about as well as anything ever does for Marco:
Mr. Rubio had said on Tuesday that it was going to Trinidad, while Mr. Trump said the United States. On Wednesday, Mr. Rubio changed his version, saying the drug-laden boat was bound for the United States.
The secretary said in Mexico City that drug cartels and traffickers, including those on the boat, “pose an immediate threat to the United States, period.”
But no one actually offered any rationale for what happened (and was boasted about by Trump on Truth Social). While officials said some vague stuff about drug trafficking and made unsubstantiated claims about the eleven victims of this attack being Tren de Aragua members, the government was busy working its way backwards from the killings to find some reason for having already killed people:
Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.
A day later, the Defense Department must still have been working on a semi-plausible excuse for breaking all the rules of crime-fighting — especially one in which it certainly appears the US government destroyed a boat carrying eleven people but probably not much (if any!) drugs. The footage of the strike shows a boat more likely carrying refugees/migrants to another country (possibly even Trinidad). Half-mumbled claims about drug dealing and terrorism being pretty much the same thing were made by many in Trump’s cabinet.
Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, emphasized in a statement late on Wednesday that the strike took place in international waters and did not put American troops at risk. She said that Mr. Trump had directed the attack in “defense of vital U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations who have long suffered due to the narcotics trafficking and violent cartel activities of such organizations.”
“The strike was fully consistent with the law of armed conflict,” Ms. Kelly said.
First things fucking last: NO ONE WAS EVER IN THE LEAST BIT CONCERNED ABOUT THE SAFETY OF US TROOPS. This answers a question no one asked and does nothing more than pad an answer that really isn’t an answer. It’s just more of the same deflection and dribble from the Trump administration. Saying it took place in international waters doesn’t mean — like far too many people believe — that all bets are off and any country can do whatever it wants in waters that don’t actually belong to any single country.
Finally, saying the strike was “consistent” with the “law of armed conflict” only means something if the strike, in fact, complied with law of armed conflict. Simply saying it does doesn’t actually make it legal. That’s what judges call a “conclusory statement” and that’s one of the most worthless things any entity can offer in defense of its actions.
If it was indeed “fully consistent” with the law, you’d think the administration would have already released a memo or statement from the White House Office of Legal Counsel explaining (with citations) why this strike complied with all applicable laws.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, we got some people saying it’s defensible because drug cartels have been called “terrorists” by Trump and another person saying “this was legal because I’m saying it was legal.” Instead, what we’ve been given is an extrajudicial killing, followed by some administration gloating, followed by some administration deflection, which is now followed by the unsettling feeling that this is just beginning of a new wave of awfulness. As Charlie Savage’s headline for the New York Times puts it plainly: Trump has claimed the power of summary execution, which aligns him directly with authoritarian leaders he so obviously admires.
And as if all of this weren’t horrifying enough, here’s the president’s official “War Room” account responding to Senator Rand Paul’s obvious question about the morality of summarily executing people only suspected of committing a crime:
This administration has no use for slippery slopes. It races all the way to the bottom of them and then dares anyone to do anything about it. There’s nothing too unethical, immoral, or illegal to be taken off the table when accomplishing its end goals. The justification for the means can always be generated after the fact and if that fails to hold up to judicial scrutiny, the administration will simply move on to the next lawless act on the authoritarian to-do list — whatever it takes to convert the land of the free into the “vast ecumenical holding company” of the GOP’s fever dreams.
This story was originally published by ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News.Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license.
Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his hands, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him if he didn’t kneel alongside other inmates and lick their backs.
Now that he’s free, Juan José Ramos Ramos, 39, insists he’s not who President Donald Trump says he is. He’s not a member of a gang or an international terrorist, just a man with tattoos whom immigration agents spotted riding in a car with a Venezuela sticker on the back.
Now that he’s free, Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla, 40, said he wondered every day of his time in prison whether he’d ever hold his mother in his arms again. He’s relieved to be back home in Venezuela but struggles to make sense of why he and the other men were put through that ordeal in the first place.
“We are a group of people who I consider had the bad luck of ending up on this black list,” he said.
These are the accounts being shared by some of the more than 230 Venezuelan men the Trump administration deported on March 15 to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as CECOT. Throughout the men’s incarceration, the administration used blanket statements and exaggerations that obscured the truth about who they are and why they were targeted. The president has both hailed the men’s removal as a signature achievement of his first 100 days in office and touted it as a demonstration of the lengths his administration was willing to go to carry out his mass deportation campaign. He assured the public that he was fulfilling his promise to rid the country of immigrants who’d committed violent crimes, and that the men sent to El Salvador were “monsters,” “savages” and “the worst of the worst.”
Few cases have gotten as much attention as the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. They were deported against the instructions of a federal judge, frog-marched off American planes and forced to kneel before cameras and have their heads shaved. The administration rebuffed requests to confirm the men’s names or provide information about the allegations it had made against them. Meanwhile, the deportees were held without access to lawyers or the ability to speak to their families. Then, 12 days ago, they were returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap.
Now that they’re home, they’ve begun to talk. We interviewed nine men for this story. They are bewildered, frightened, angry. Some said their feelings about what happened were still so raw they had trouble finding words to describe them. All of the men said they were abused physically and mentally during their imprisonment. Their relatives say they, too, went through hell wondering whether their loved ones were alive or dead, or if they would ever see them again. All the men said they were relieved to be free, though some said their release was proof the U.S. had no reason to send them to prison to begin with.
Blanco, for example, has no criminal record in the U.S., according to the government’s own data. His only violation was having entered the country illegally. He’d come because he wasn’t earning enough to help his parents and support his seven children, ages 2 to 19, after his family’s wholesale dairy and deli supply business failed. He arrived in December 2023 and turned himself in to immigration authorities in Eagle Pass, Texas, to request asylum. Then he was released to continue his immigration process.
Afterward, Blanco moved to Dallas and found work delivering food. In February 2024, he accompanied his cousin to a routine appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. While he was there, he decided to notify the agency that he’d changed his address. On his way out of the building, an immigration agent stopped him and asked about his tattoos. He has several of them, including a blue rose, a father hugging his son behind railroad tracks and a clock showing the time his mother was born.
He said the tattoos signified his affection for his family, not evidence of affiliation with a gang. Records show the officials didn’t believe him and detained him. While in custody, a judge ordered his deportation. However, because Washington and Caracas don’t have diplomatic relations, the Venezuelan government was refusing to accept most deportees from the United States at the time. Immigration officials released Blanco back into the U.S. until they could send him home.
For the next seven months, Blanco continued on in Dallas and picked up additional work as a mechanic. Then, shortly after Trump was inaugurated, ICE officers asked Blanco to come in for another appointment and detained him. A month later, despite Venezuela agreeing to take back some deportees, Blanco was on one of three planes bound for El Salvador.
“From the moment I realized I was in El Salvador and that I would be detained, it was anguish,” he said. “I was shaken. It hit me hard. Hard, hard, hard.”
To deport the Venezuelans, Trump invoked an obscure law from the 1700s known as the Alien Enemies Act. He declared that the men were all part of a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren de Aragua that was invading the United States. Within days, CBS News published a list of the men’s names, and there were anecdotal reports indicating that not all of the deportees were hardened criminals, much less “savages.” By early April, several news organizations had reported that the majority of the men did not appear to have criminal records.
Administration officials dismissed the reports, saying that many of the deportees were known human rights abusers, gang members and criminals outside of the U.S. The fact they hadn’t committed crimes in the United States, they said, didn’t mean they weren’t a threat to public safety.
When asked for comment for this story, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, called ProPublica a “liberal rag hellbent on defending violent criminal illegal aliens who never belonged in the United States.” She added, “America is safer with them out of our country.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson echoed the White House’s claim. “Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
The fact that border encounters have plummeted to record lows after reaching record highs during the Biden presidency suggests that the administration’s efforts are having the effect that Trump intended. After what happened to him, Colmenares said he didn’t think migrating to the U.S. was safe anymore.
He’d been a youth soccer coach in Venezuela before setting off for the U.S. He followed the rules and got an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border last October, as had more than 50 of the men. At the appointment, Colmenares said an agent pulled him aside to take pictures of his many tattoos — then detained him. He never set foot in the U.S. as a free man.
“The country with the Statue of Liberty deprived us of our liberty without any kind of evidence,” he said in an interview two days after he was returned to his family. “Who is going to go to the border now, knowing that they will grab you and put you in a prison where they will kill you?”
The men we interviewed said the terror they felt in El Salvador began almost immediately upon arrival.
Salvadoran police boarded the planes and began forcing the shackled men off — shoving them, throwing them to the ground, hitting them with their batons. Five said they saw flight attendants crying at the sight.
“This will teach you not to enter our country illegally,” Colmenares said one ICE official told him in Spanish. He wanted to explain that wasn’t true in his case but could tell there was no point. He got off the plane and was loaded onto a bus to prison.
Once inside, guards stripped them down to white boxers and sandals. Those who tried to refuse to have their heads shaved were beaten. Blanco said he heard their screams and didn’t dare resist. Humiliated and enraged, he did as he was told: head down, body limp.
They were loaded up again on the buses and taken to another part of the compound. Blanco said the shackles were so tight that he couldn’t walk as fast as the guards wanted, so they beat him until he passed out and dragged him the rest of the way. Inside, they dropped him so hard that his head banged on the floor. As he opened his eyes and saw the guards, bright lights and polished concrete floor, he asked: “God, why am I here? Why?”
The men said beatings by the guards were random, severe and constant. Guards lashed out at them with their fists and batons. They kicked them while wearing heavy work boots and shot them at close range with rubber pellets. One man we spoke to said he suspects he will have a lasting injury from a hard kick to the groin.
Colmenares recalled seeing one man defecate all over himself after a particularly severe beating. Guards laughed at him and left him there for a day, saying that the Venezuelans weren’t “real men.”
Just as vicious, the men said, was the psychological abuse. They lost track of the days because they were never allowed outdoors. Blanco said that whenever he asked a guard for the time, they’d mock him: “Why do you want to know what time it is? Have somewhere to be? Is someone waiting for you?”
Over and over, the men said, the guards called them criminals and terrorists and sons of bitches who deserved to be locked up. They said the guards told them so often that they were nobodies and that no one, not even their families, cared about them that some started to believe it.
The men said they waged at least two dayslong hunger strikes, skipping the beans, rice and tortillas they were fed most days, to demand an end to the abuses and an explanation for why they were in prison. “They told us nothing about how the process was going, what was going to happen to us, when we were going to see a judge, when we were going to see an attorney,” Ramos said.
Several of those interviewed said suicide crossed their minds. Ramos said he thought: “I’d rather die or kill myself than to keep living through this experience. Being woken up every day at 4 a.m. to be insulted and beaten. For wanting to shower, for asking for something so basic. … Hearing your brothers getting beaten, crying for help.”
Four talked about a man who started cutting himself and writing messages on the walls and sheets with his blood: “Stop hitting us.” “We are fathers.” “We are brothers.” “We are innocent people.”
Some of them became friends. They made playing cards out of juice boxes and soaked tortillas in water and shaped the cornmeal into dice. They talked about their families and wondered if anyone knew where they were. They prayed.
About three and a half months into their detention, the men said they noticed a change in the guards and in the conditions in the facility. They were beaten less frequently and less severely. They were given ibuprofen, antibiotics and toothbrushes. They were told to shave and shower. And a psychologist came in to evaluate them.
Then, sometime after midnight on July 18, guards began banging their batons on the bars of the men’s cells. “Everyone take a shower,” they yelled.
This time, when Blanco asked for the time, a guard gave it to him. It was 1:40 a.m.
Photographers and reporters were allowed into the facility. Blanco wondered whether he was about to be a part of a publicity stunt. He told himself he wouldn’t give them what they wanted. No smiles for the camera.
Then, a top Salvadoran official walked in. “You are leaving.”
In a brief phone interview, Félix Ulloa, El Salvador’s vice president, denied any mistreatment and pointed to videos of the men looking unscathed as they left the prison as proof they were in good shape. He declined to comment on what role, if any, the U.S. had played in what happened to the men while they were in El Salvador. However, according to court records, the Salvadoran government previously told the United Nations that while it was physically holding the men, they remained under U.S. jurisdiction.
The Trump administration pledged millions of dollars to El Salvador to hold the deportees in CECOT.
Natalia Molano, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said the U.S. is not responsible for the conditions of the men’s detention in El Salvador. If there are complaints now that the men have returned to Venezuela, she said, “the United States is not involved in the conversation.”
During his months in CECOT, Ramos said he found solace in the Bible, the only book available. He said he felt particularly drawn to the Book of Job, a wealthy man whom God tested with loss and pain. Despite his losses, Ramos said, Job “never denied God.” He said Job “had a lot of faith.”
That’s how Ramos, a former telephone technician, saw his time in El Salvador: a divine test that he’d overcome with faith. The seven long months it had taken him to migrate from Venezuela to the United States — which involved walking through the treacherous Darién jungle — seemed easy by comparison.
As soon as his family and neighbors got word that he was on his way home to Guatire, just outside Caracas, they cobbled together $20 to help his mother, Lina Ramos, decorate the house and make a meal of chicken and rice with plantains.
Knowing that his mother had marched and fought for his release, that no one had forgotten him and the other men who’d been detained with him, he said, “was the best gift we could have gotten.”
But the effects of what he went through still linger. Now, when he tries to read the Bible, he said, he notices his sight is failing in his left eye. He thinks it was caused by a particular beating, one of many, where guards repeatedly hit him on his ears and head after he tried to bathe outside of the designated time. He said he has no money at the moment to see a doctor. He arrived home with nothing but the clothes he was wearing.
He is sure he’ll work something out, though. He has faith.
In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention.
Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas, and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter.
More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal authorities detained him at his apartment on Chicago’s South Side and accused him of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
“Are any of your tattoos gang related?” his attorney asked at the hearing, going through the evidence laid out against him in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. “No,” said Rodríguez, whose tattoos include an angel holding a gun, a wolf and a rose. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show his parents’ names inked across his chest.
He was asked about a TikTok video that shows him dancing to an audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you,” followed by a dance beat. That audio clip has been shared some 60,000 times on TikTok — it’s popular among Venezuelans ridiculing the stereotype that everyone from their country is a gangster. Rodríguez looked incredulous at the thought that this was the evidence against him.
That day, the judge didn’t address the gang allegations. But she denied Rodríguez bond, citing the misdemeanor shoplifting conviction. She reminded him that his final hearing was on March 20, just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be a free man and could continue his life in the U.S.
I told my editors and colleagues about what I’d heard and made plans to attend the next hearing. I saw the potential for the kind of complicated narrative story that I like: Here was a young immigrant who, yes, had come into the country illegally, but he had turned himself in to border authorities to seek asylum. Yes, he had a criminal record, but it was for a nonviolent offense. And, yes, he had tattoos, but so do the nice, white American moms in my book club. I was certain there are members of Tren de Aragua in the U.S., but if this was the kind of evidence the government had, I found it hard to believe it was an “invasion” as Trump claimed. I asked Rodríguez’s attorney for an interview and began requesting police and court records.
Five days later, on March 15, the Trump administration expelled more than 230 Venezuelan men to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, a country many of them had never even set foot in. Trump called them all terrorists and gang members. It would be a few days before the men’s names would be made public. Perhaps naively, it didn’t occur to me that Rodríguez might be in that group. Then I logged into his final hearing and heard his attorney say he didn’t know where the government had taken him. The lawyer sounded tired and defeated. Later, he would tell me he had barely slept, afraid that Rodríguez might turn up dead. At the hearing, he begged a government lawyer for information: “For his family’s sake, would you happen to know what country he was sent to?” She told him she didn’t know, either.
I was astonished. I am familiar with the history of authoritarian leaders disappearing people they don’t like in Latin America, the part of the world that my family comes from. I wanted to think that doesn’t happen in this country. But what I had just witnessed felt uncomfortably similar.
As soon as the hearing ended, I got on a call with my colleagues Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, both of whom cover immigration and had recently written about how the U.S. government had sent other Venezuelan men to Guantanamo. We talked about what we should do with what I’d just heard. Mica contacted a source in the federal government who confirmed, almost immediately, that Rodríguez was among the men that our country had sent to El Salvador.
The news suddenly felt more real and intimate to me. One of the men sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador now had a name and a face and a story that I had heard from his own mouth. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
As a news organization, we decided to put significant resources into investigating who these men really are and what happened to them, bringing in many talented ProPublica journalists to help pull records, sift through social media accounts, analyze court data and find the men’s families. We teamed up with a group of Venezuelan journalists from the outlets Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News who were also starting to track down information about the men.
We spoke to the relatives and attorneys of more than 100 of the men and obtained internal government records that undercut the Trump administration’s claims that all the men are “monsters,” “sick criminals” and the “worst of the worst.” We also published a story about how, by and large, the men were not hiding from federal immigration authorities. They were in the system; many had open asylum cases like Rodríguez and were waiting for their day in court before they were taken away and imprisoned in Central America.
On July 18 — after I’d written the first draft of this note to you — we began to hear some chatter about a potential prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Venezuela. Later that same day, the men had been released. We’d been in the middle of working on a case-by-case accounting of the Venezuelan men who’d been held in El Salvador. Though they’d been released, documenting who they are and how they got caught up in this dragnet was still important, essential even, as was the impact of their incarceration.
From the moment I heard about the men’s return to Venezuela, I thought about Rodríguez. He’d been on my mind since embarking on this project. I messaged with his mother for days as we waited for the men to be processed by the government of Nicolás Maduro and released to their families.
Finally, one morning last week, he went home. We spoke later that afternoon. He said he was relieved to be home with his family but felt traumatized. He told me he wants the world to know what happened to him in the Salvadoran prison — daily beatings, humiliation, psychological abuse. “There is no reason for what I went through,” he said. “I didn’t deserve that.”
The Salvadoran government has denied mistreating the Venezuelan prisoners.
We asked the Trump administration about its evidence against Rodríguez. This is the entirety of its statement: “Albert Jesús Rodriguez Parra is an illegal alien from Venezuela and Tren de Aragua gang member. He illegally crossed the border on April 22, 2023, under the Biden Administration.”
While Rodríguez was incarcerated in El Salvador and no one knew what would happen to him, the court kept delaying hearings for his asylum case. But after months of continuances, on Monday, Rodríguez logged into a virtual hearing from Venezuela. “Oh my gosh, I am so happy to see that,” said Judge Samia Naseem, clearly remembering what had happened in his case.
Rodríguez’s attorney said that his client had been tortured and abused in El Salvador. “I can’t even describe to this court what he went through,” he said. “He’s getting psychological help, and that’s my priority.”
It was a brief hearing, perhaps five minutes. Rodríguez’s lawyer mentioned his involvement in an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans. The government lawyer said little, except to question whether Rodríguez was even allowed to appear virtually due to “security issues” in Venezuela.
Finally, the judge said she would administratively close the case while the litigation plays out. “If he should hopefully be able to come back to the U.S., we’ll calendar the case,” she said.
Naseem turned to Rodríguez, who was muted and looked serious. “You don’t have to worry about reappearing until this gets sorted out,” she told him. He nodded and soon logged off.
We plan to keep reporting on what happened and have another story coming soon about Rodríguez and the other men’s experiences inside the prison. Please reach out if you have information to share.
This story was originally published by ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News.Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license.
The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in mid-March had not been convicted of crimes in the United States before it labeled them as terrorists and deported them, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data that has not been previously reported.
President Donald Trump and his aides have branded the Venezuelans as “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters” and “the worst of the worst.” When multiple news organizations disputed those assertions with reporting that showed many of the deportees did not have criminal records, the administration doubled down. It said that its assessment of the deportees was based on a thorough vetting process that included looking at crimes committed both inside and outside the United States. But the government’s own data, which was obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of journalists from Venezuela, showed that officials knew that only 32 of the deportees had been convicted of U.S. crimes and that most were nonviolent offenses, such as retail theft or traffic violations.
The data indicates that the government knew that only six of the immigrants were convicted of violent crimes: four for assault, one for kidnapping and one for a weapons offense. And it shows that officials were aware that more than half, or 130, of the deportees were not labeled as having any criminal convictions or pending charges; they were labeled as only having violated immigration laws.
As for foreign offenses, our own review of court and police records from around the United States and in Latin American countries where the deportees had lived found evidence of arrests or convictions for 20 of the 238 men. Of those, 11 involved violent crimes such as armed robbery, assault or murder, including one man who the Chilean government had asked the U.S. to extradite to face kidnapping and drug charges there. Another four had been accused of illegal gun possession.
We conducted a case-by-case review of all the Venezuelan deportees. It’s possible there are crimes and other information in the deportees’ backgrounds that did not show up in our reporting or the internal government data, which includes only minimal details for nine of the men. There’s no single publicly available database for all crimes committed in the U.S., much less abroad. But everything we did find in public records contradicted the Trump administration’s assertions as well.
ProPublica and the Tribune, along with Venezuelan media outlets Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters) and Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates), also obtained lists of alleged gang members that are kept by Venezuelan law enforcement officials and the international law enforcement agency Interpol. Those lists include some 1,400 names. None of the names of the 238 Venezuelan deportees matched those on the lists.
The hasty removal of the Venezuelans and their incarceration in a third country has made this one of the most consequential deportations in recent history. The court battles over whether Trump has the authority to expel immigrants without judicial review have the potential to upend how this country handles all immigrants living in the U.S., whether legally or illegally. Officials have suggested publicly that, to achieve the president’s goals of deporting millions of immigrants, the administration was considering suspending habeas corpus, the longstanding constitutional right allowing people to challenge their detention.
Hours before the immigrants were loaded onto airplanes in Texas for deportation, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, declaring that the Tren de Aragua prison gang had invaded the United States, aided by the Venezuelan government. It branded the gang a foreign terrorist organization and said that declaration gave the president the authority to expel its members and send them indefinitely to a foreign prison, where they have remained for more than two months with no ability to communicate with their families or lawyers.
Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney in the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal fight against the deportations, said the removals amounted to a “blatant violation of the most fundamental due process principles.” He said that under the law, an immigrant who has committed a crime can be prosecuted and removed, but “it does not mean they can be subjected to a potentially lifetime sentence in a foreign gulag.”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in response to our findings that “ProPublica should be embarrassed that they are doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens who are a threat,” adding that “the American people strongly support” the president’s immigration agenda.
When asked about the differences between the administration’s public statements about the deportees and the way they are labeled in government data, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin largely repeated previous public statements. She insisted, without providing evidence, that the deportees were dangerous, saying, “These individuals categorized as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gang members and more — they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
As for the administration’s allegations that Tren de Aragua has attempted an invasion, an analysis by U.S. intelligence officials concluded that the gang was not acting at the direction of the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro and that reports suggesting otherwise were “not credible.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, fired the report’s authors after it became public. Her office, according to news reports, said Gabbard was trying to “end the weaponization and politicization” of the intelligence community.
Our investigation focused on the 238 Venezuelan men who were deported on March 15 to CECOT, the prison in El Salvador, and whose names were on a list first published by CBS News. The government has also sent several dozen other immigrants there, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who the government admitted was sent there in error. Courts have ruled that the administration should facilitate his return to the U.S.
We interviewed about 100 of the deportees’ relatives and their attorneys. Many of them had heard from their loved ones on the morning of March 15, when the men believed they were being sent back to Venezuela. They were happy because they would be back home with their families, who were eager to prepare their favorite meals and plan parties. Some of the relatives shared video messages with us and on social media that were recorded inside U.S. detention facilities. In those videos, the detainees said they were afraid that they might be sent to Guantanamo, a U.S. facility on Cuban soil where Washington has held and tortured detainees, including a number that it suspected of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Trump administration had sent planes carrying Venezuelan immigrants there earlier this year.
They had no idea they were being sent to El Salvador.
Among them was 31-year-old Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, who left Venezuela and his job as a youth soccer coach last July. His sister, Leidys Trejo Solórzano, said he had a hard time supporting himself and his mother and that Venezuela’s crumbling economy made it hard for him to find a better paying job. Colmenares was detained at an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border in October because of his many tattoos, his sister said. Those tattoos include the names of relatives, a clock, an owl and a crown she said was inspired by the Real Madrid soccer club’s logo.
Colmenares was not flagged as having a criminal history in the DHS data we obtained. Nor did we find any U.S. or foreign convictions or charges in our review. Trejo said her brother stayed out of trouble and has no criminal record in Venezuela either. She described his expulsion as a U.S.-government-sponsored kidnapping.
“It’s been so difficult. Even talking about what happened is hard for me,” said Trejo, who has scoured the internet for videos and photos of her brother in the Salvadoran prison. “Many nights I can’t sleep because I’m so anxious.”
The internal government data shows that officials had labeled all but a handful of the men as members of Tren de Aragua but offered little information about how they came to that conclusion. Court filings and documents we obtained show the government has relied in part on social media posts, affiliations with known gang members and tattoos, including crowns, clocks, guns, grenades and Michael Jordan’s “Jumpman” logo. We found that at least 158 of the Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador have tattoos. But law enforcement sources in the U.S., Colombia, Chile and Venezuela with expertise in the Tren de Aragua told us that tattoos are not an indicator of gang membership.
McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said the agency is confident in its assessments of gang affiliation but would not provide additional information to support them.
John Sandweg, a former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said, “for political reasons, I think the administration wants to characterize this as a grand effort that’s promoting public safety of the United States.” But “even some of the government’s own data demonstrates there is a gap between the rhetoric and the reality,” he said, referring to the internal data we obtained.
The government data shows 67 men who were deported had been flagged as having pending charges, though it provides no details about their alleged crimes. We found police, court and other records for 38 of those deportees. We found several people whose criminal history differed from what was tagged in the government data. In some cases that the government listed as pending criminal charges, the men had been convicted and in one case the charge had been dropped before the man was deported.
Our reporting found that, like the criminal convictions, the majority of the pending charges involved nonviolent crimes, including retail theft, drug possession and traffic offenses.
Six of the men had pending charges for attempted murder, assault, armed robbery, gun possession or domestic battery. Immigrant advocates have said removing people to a prison in El Salvador before the cases against them were resolved means that Trump, asserting his executive authority, short-circuited the criminal justice system.
Take the case of Wilker Miguel Gutiérrez Sierra, 23, who was arrested in February 2024 in Chicago on charges of attempted murder, robbery and aggravated battery after he and three other Venezuelan men allegedly assaulted a stranger on a train and stole his phone and $400. He pleaded not guilty. Gutiérrez was on electronic monitoring as he awaited trial when he was arrested by ICE agents who’d pulled up to him on the street in five black trucks, court records show. Three days later he was shipped to El Salvador.
But the majority of men labeled as having pending cases were facing less serious charges, according to the records we found. Maikol Gabriel López Lizano, 23, was arrested in Chicago in August 2023 on misdemeanor charges for riding his bike on the sidewalk while drinking a can of Budweiser. His partner, Cherry Flores, described his deportation as a gross injustice. “They shouldn’t have sent him there,” she said. “Why did they have to take him over a beer?”
