President Donald Trump has long claimed that South American governments are sending violent gang members to the U.S. as a justification for his mass deportation efforts. But U.S. intelligence has found that that isn’t the case.
The National Intelligence Council, using findings from the 18 intelligence agencies, found in a secret assessment earlier this month that the Venezuelan government isn’t sending members of the prison gang Tren de Aragua to the U.S., according to The Washington Post.
The findings go against Trump’s rationale for the use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport those suspected of being gang members. The legislation was most recently used during World War II to detain more than 110,000 Japanese Americans.
Invoking the legislation last month, Trump said - without providing evidence - that the prison gang was conducting an “invasion” of the U.S. “at the direction” of the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Using the Alien Enemies Act, the Trump administration sent planes filled with alleged gang members to El Salvador’s infamous megaprison in the face of a judge’s order to turn the planes around to give the detainees due process.
The assessment of the intelligence community ascertained that there are some contacts between Tren de Aragua and the Venezuelan government at the lower levels, but the gang doesn’t follow orders from Maduro. Similarly, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence found in February that the Venezuelan government doesn’t control the gang.
The National Intelligence Council, the nucleus of the U.S. intelligence community, reports to the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. The council consists of national intelligence officers with regional or topical expertise, and it delivers classified assessments intended to represent the view of all the spy agencies.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence told The Post that the assessment was made by “deep state actors” working with the press.
“President Trump took necessary and historic action to safeguard our nation when he deported these violent Tren de Aragua terrorists,” a statement to the paper said. “Now that America is safer without these terrorists in our cities, deep state actors have resorted to using their propaganda arm to attack the President’s successful policies.”
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told The Post in a statement that Trump “is 100 percent committed to ensuring that terrorists and criminal illegal migrants are no longer a threat to Americans and their communities across the country.”
Two people familiar with the assessment told the paper that the finding among the agencies was close to unanimous, apart from the FBI, which found that there’s a moderate level of cooperation between Tren de Aragua and the Venezuelan government.
The quarrel over Tren de Aragua’s connections to the Venezuelan government comes as the Trump administration engages in a standoff with the courts, which has concerned constitutional experts, Trump’s political adversaries, and even some other Republicans.
Under the Alien Enemies Act, the president has the power to remove foreign citizens from countries that are at war with the U.S. or who are engaging in a “predatory incursion” into American territory. Legal experts have said that the law requires that the invasion or incursion has to be connected to a foreign government.
As Trump invoked the law, he claimed that the gang is connected to the “Maduro regime.”
“TdA is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela,” the invocation states.
A Venezuela expert at the Atlantic Council think tank, Geoff Ramsey, told The Post that “The idea that Maduro is directing Tren de Aragua members and sending criminals to infiltrate the United States is ludicrous.”
“Tren de Aragua has become more like a brand that any group of carjackers from Miami down to Argentina can invoke to further their criminal activity, but there’s really no clear sense of hierarchy,” he added. “And the reality is that Tren de Aragua has not always gotten along with the Maduro government: We saw just a few years ago, the military in 2023, stormed a prison that Tren de Aragua controlled and allegedly carried out extrajudicial executions.”
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