About 90% of migrants sent to El Salvador lacked U.S. criminal record
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Trump administration officials have described the men deported to El Salvador prisons last month as “the worst of the worst,” suggesting they were gang members involved in murder, rape and kidnapping.
The reality is that of 238 migrants — mostly Venezuelan — that officials accused of belonging to the Tren de Aragua gang and expelled to the Central American country in mid-March, just a small fraction had ever been charged with serious crimes in the U.S.
Hundreds of pages of U.S. legal records and American government statements reviewed by Bloomberg News found five men charged with or convicted of felony assault or firearms violations. Three men were charged with misdemeanors including harassment and petty theft. Two others were charged with human smuggling.
For the rest of the men, there was no available information showing they committed any crime other than traffic or immigration violations in the U.S.
The high court ruled the Trump administration may use a wartime law to deport alleged members of a foreign crime gang, as long as the government’s claim can be challenged.
The findings raise questions about how the Trump administration determined that the migrants sent to El Salvador were violent criminals. The U.S. maintains that all of the Venezuelans on the flights had committed a crime because they were in the country illegally, a senior official with the Department of Homeland Security said in an email. The official said many of the men who lacked U.S. records were nonetheless terrorists, human-rights abusers or gangsters.
Many of the men allegedly associated with Tren de Aragua were deported under the rarely used Alien Enemies Act of 1798 without court review.
A U.S. judge ordered the administration to stop, but on Monday, the Supreme Court said the administration can seek to resume deportations under the act if migrants are given notice and a chance to make their case to a judge.
Media reports in the Washington Post and elsewhere have cast doubt on the White House’s portrayals of the men as criminals, and lawyers have said that some individuals were identified as gang members based on the types of clothing they were wearing or tattoos they had.
The decision is a victory for Trump and setback for federal judges who sought to check the check the president’s power.
A CBS News investigation found that three-fourths of the men sent to El Salvador couldn’t be connected with a U.S. or international criminal record. Now, Bloomberg’s review of U.S. court cases and government statements show there’s very little publicly available documentation to support the notion that only violent offenders were sent away.
The administration has acknowledged in court that not all the men have criminal records, but say it’s only further evidence of the threat they pose.
“It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile,” Robert Cerna, the acting field office director of enforcement and removal operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a legal filing in the battle over the deportations.
Bloomberg obtained a list of the passengers and examined their criminal histories by reviewing U.S. federal court records, media reports and public statements by government officials. The search also included state court dockets, though not all local courts make records available online. There were 13 court cases involving people with names that were similar to a deportee, though not an exact match; those weren’t included in the final tally because the connection couldn’t be confirmed.
President Trump has invoked a rarely used 1798 law that gives a president immense powers to arrest and deport noncitizens in a time of war, which he says exists in the form of a gang ‘invasion.’
The deportations are at the center of a high-stakes legal showdown that is testing the ability of federal judges to enforce limits on the president’s power. In its Monday opinion, the Supreme Court didn’t rule on whether the administration’s interpretation of the law was correct, but said it can resume using the law to try to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members. The court said detainees must have notice and a chance to make their case to a judge before they are deported.
U.S. deportations to El Salvador have received outsize attention in part because of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who immigration officials conceded was wrongly expelled. He was part of a separate group of Salvadoran deportees who were accused of being part of a different gang, MS-13.
Andrés Antillano, a professor at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas who studies organized crime, says it is possible that some individuals affiliated with Tren de Aragua are in the U.S., but panic about an organized crime wave is overblown. He compared it with previous concerns about immigrants bringing in crime, likening it to anti-Italian bias in the 1940s and 1950s focused on alleged ties to the mafia, anti-Cuban sentiment amid Miami’s drug wars of the 1980s and more recently stereotypes about Central Americans being involved with MS-13.
“Waves of migration have generated a lot of anxiety, and myths have emerged,” Antillano said in an interview. The Trump administration is “criminalizing young Venezuelans, mostly from working-class groups.”
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