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.
