The Trump administration took a victory lap for deporting 238 men to a prison in El Salvador, calling them gang members or violent criminals. None of them had a trial, a hearing, or any due process. Bloomberg News now reports that few of those deported had criminal records.
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 US.
Hundreds of pages of US 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 US.
The findings raise questions about how the Trump administration determined that the migrants sent to El Salvador were violent criminals. The US 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 interview.
There is more to the story. When I read it, it was not behind a paywall. No guarantees.
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