'They Just Made Sh*t Up': Declassified Spy Memo Undercuts Trump Pretext for Deportations to El Salvador

A memo released Monday by the Trump administration in response to a Freedom of Information Act request confirmed that U.S. intelligence agencies never agreed with President Donald Trump's claim in March that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro controls the criminal gang Tren de Aragua—an assertion that was used to justify sending hundreds of migrants to a notorious Salvadoran prison.

The document said that "while Venezuela's permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States."

Trump's claim about Maduro's connection to the group had been called into question by The New York Times in March, after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act for only the fourth time in U.S. history. The law empowers the federal government to summarily expel citizens of a country that is at war with or invading the United States.

The Times reported at the time, based on interviews with officials, that the intelligence community's findings about Tren de Aragua were "starkly at odds" with Trump's claims. The anonymous officials said the gang was not taking orders from Maduro's government.

That reporting prompted the U.S. Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into the "selective leak of inaccurate" information to the Times, with the Trump administration criticizing the Times for its "misleading" report.

Attorney General Pam Bondi also said in an April memo that the department would roll back press freedom protections in leak investigations after The Washington Postreported on the memo that was declassified Monday. The Post reported on the document from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in mid-April when it was still classified.

"The declassification proves that the material should have been public from the start—not used as an excuse to suppress sharing information with the press," Lauren Harper, the Daniel Ellsberg chair on government secrecy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told the Times. The group filed the FOIA request for the memo, dated April 7, to be released.

The memo noted that the FBI partially dissented with the intelligence community's findings about Tren de Aragua.

Analysts at the FBI agreed with the agencies' overall assessment but believed "some Venezuelan government officials facilitate [Tren de Aragua] members' migration from Venezuela to the United States and use members as proxies in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the United States to advance what they see as the Maduro regime's goal of destabilizing governments and undermining public safety in these countries."

"Most" of the intelligence community "judges that intelligence indicating that regime leaders are directing or enabling [Tren de Aragua] migration to the United States is not credible," the memo reads.

Intelligence agencies also noted in the memo that detainees accused of being members of the gang could have been motivated "to make false allegations about their ties to the Venezuelan regime in an effort to deflect responsibility for their crimes and to lessen any punishment by providing exculpatory or otherwise 'valuable' information to U.S. prosecutors."

Analysts said they had not collected information about communications or funding exchanges between Venezuelan officials and leaders of Tren de Aragua.

"So you mean kidnapping folks off the streets and sending them to a foreign gulag was not justified by our own intelligence?" said the Arkansas Justice Project. "They just made shit up to dog whistle their base. The AEA argument was never legitimate and they knew it all along."

After the memo was released, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said it was "outrageous that as President Trump and his administration work hard every day to make America safe by deporting these violent criminals, some in the media remain intent on twisting and manipulating intelligence assessments to undermine the president's agenda to keep the American people safe."

Courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have blocked the Trump administration from sending more migrants to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, and the ACLU last month asked a federal judge to facilitate the return of all Venezuelans sent to the country's Terrorism Confinement Center to ensure they have due process via immigration hearings.

But judges hearing cases regarding Trump's mass deportations under the Alien Enemies Act have not yet questioned the administration's debunked claims about Tren de Aragua and the Maduro government.

Writer and open government advocate Alexander B. Howard said the release of the memo proves that "sunlight remains the best disinfectant for falsehoods."