Donald Trump’s administration was well aware that many of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it shipped off to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador had no criminal records at all, according to a Friday report from ProPublica.
While Trump officials claimed that the deportees were brutal gang members and “the worst of the worst,” only 32 of the deportees had actually been convicted of crimes, and most of them were minor offenses such as traffic violations, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security reviewed by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, and a team of journalists from Venezuelan media outlets. One of the men, 23-year-old Maikol Gabriel López Lizano, faced a misdemeanor charge after he was arrested in 2023 for riding his bike and drinking a can of beer.
Little more than half of the deportees, 130 of the 238, were charged only with violating U.S. immigration laws. Twenty of them had criminal records from other countries. The U.S. government data showed that 67 individuals had pending charges, with only six being for violent crimes.
In several cases, the government data about the pending charges differed from what ProPublica was able to find. In some cases, the men had actually been convicted, and in one, the charges had been dropped.
But in many cases, these individuals were remanded to a foreign prison before their criminal cases were ever resolved.
The Trump administration has touted allegations of gang affiliation as a justification for denying the deportees their due process rights. But none of the mens’ names appeared on a list of roughly 1,400 alleged Tren de Aragua members kept by the Venezuelan government, ProPublica reported.
Trump’s border czar Tom Homan tried desperately in March to downplay reporting that many of these individuals did not have criminal records. “A lot of gang members don’t have criminal histories, just like a lot of terrorists in this world, they’re not in any terrorist databases, right?” Homan said on ABC News. But the methods the government relies on to classify individuals as gang members—such as identification of gang-affiliated tattoos—have been disproven by experts.
Not only were many of the men who were deported not proven gang members, they weren’t even criminals, and by denying them the right to due process, they were remanded to a foreign prison notorious for human rights abuses without ever getting to prove it.
Trump has continued to pressure the Supreme Court to allow him to sidestep due process as part of his massive deportation campaign, claiming that the judiciary has no right to intrude on matters of “foreign policy.” But immigrants residing on U.S. soil—who are clearly not the bloodthirsty criminals the administration insists they are—are still subject to protections under U.S. law.
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