SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
office of the director of national intelligence
'They Just Made Sh*t Up': Declassified Spy Memo Undercuts Trump Pretext for Deportations to El Salvador
"Sunlight remains the best disinfectant for falsehoods," said one open government advocate.
May 06, 2025
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.
A declassified ODNI memo disclosed in response to a @Freedom.Press FOIA request confirms a @nytimes.com report from March: U.S. intel agencies rejected the claim Trump made to justify deporting Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/u...
[image or embed]
— Alexander Howard (@digiphile.bsky.social) May 5, 2025 at 10:27 PM
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."
Keep ReadingShow Less
More Proof of FBI Abuse Sparks Calls for Congress to Stop Warrantless Spying
"Government self-policing will never be an adequate substitute for the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement," said one expert as U.S. lawmakers consider whether to reauthorize or reform Section 702.
Jul 22, 2023
Privacy advocates renewed calls for swift congressional action to rein in warrantless spying on Americans following the Friday release of documents showing U.S. law enforcement's further misuse of a powerful surveillance tool.
"These disturbing new revelations show how Section 702 surveillance, a spy program the government claims is focused on foreign adversaries, is routinely used against Americans, immigrants, and people who are not accused of any wrongdoing," said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the ACLU's National Security Project, in a statement.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) "continues to break the rules put in place to protect Americans, running illegal searches on public officials, including a U.S. senator, and it's long past time for Congress to step in," he asserted. "As Congress debates reauthorizing Section 702, these opinions make clear why fundamental reforms are urgently needed."
Before the end of this year, members of Congress must decide whether to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows the U.S. government to collect the electronic communications of noncitizens who are believed to be located abroad and have specific types of information.
Americans' data swept up by such activities are supposed to be subject to extra protections, but a pair of redacted Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinions released in May revealed that in 2020 and early 2021, the FBI misused the Section 702 database over 278,000 times—a figure that experts warn is likely an undercount.
That FBI abuse—including searches for information on crime victims, protesters arrested after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd, donors to a congressional candidate, and people suspected of breaching the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—led to internal reforms at the bureau and additional training for the involved analysts.
On Friday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in consultation with the U.S. Department of Justice, released another redacted FISC opinion and related materials. The April 11, 2023 opinion addresses modifications to National Security Agency procedures as well as updates regarding FBI compliance.
Despite indications that the FBI's remedial measures after the previous abuse "are having the desired effect," compliance issues persist, the opinion details. "Some violations of the querying standard coincided with failure to follow an FBI policy that requires prior deputy director approval to use 'sensitive query terms'—e.g., identifiers of domestic public officials, domestic political candidates, members of the news media, academics, and religious organizations or persons prominent within them."
Additionally, the document notes, "in June 2022, an analyst conducted four queries of Section 702 information using the last names of a U.S. senator and a state senator" supposedly targeted by a foreign intelligence service. The New York Timesreported that "the opinion did not make public the identities of the lawmakers who had been subject to overly broad searches, but the member of Congress was notified, officials told reporters in a background briefing on Friday."
The opinion adds that "on October 25, 2022, a staff operations specialist ran a query using the Social Security number of a state judge who 'had complained to FBI about alleged civil rights violations perpetrated by a municipal chief of police.'" According to the Times, "An official familiar with the matter said it had led to accountability measures but declined to provide further details."
FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement Friday that "Section 702 is critical in our fight against foreign adversaries" and the April court opinion "confirms the significant improvement" in the bureau's querying compliance since the reforms.
"We take seriously our role in protecting national security and we take just as seriously our responsibility to be good stewards of our Section 702 authorities," he added. "Compliance is an ongoing endeavor, and we recently announced new additional accountability measures. We will continue to focus on using our Section 702 authorities to protect American lives and keeping our homeland safe, while safeguarding civil rights and liberties."
While Wray wants to work with Congress to continue allowing the FBI access to Section 702 information—and sent a related letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Friday—civil liberties advocates argue that the recent violations are further evidence of the need for serious reforms.
"One warrantless query for Americans' private communications is one too many, and this opinion shows the government is still conducting hundreds of thousands per year, including thousands in violation of their own lax rules," said Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's Security & Surveillance Project, in a Friday statement.
"These new revelations of misconduct show yet again that lack of oversight invites abuse, and that it's impossible to fix FISA 702 without adding a warrant rule for U.S. person queries," Laperruque added. Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program at New York University School of Law, agreed in a series of Friday tweets.
"Government self-policing will never be an adequate substitute for the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement," Goitein said. "The newest FISA Court opinion reaffirms that basic truth and underscores the urgent need for sweeping legislative reforms."
As the Times pointed out:
Privacy-minded lawmakers have long sought to impose greater limits on the program. But in previous cycles when Section 702 was about to lapse, they have been outvoted by hawks and centrists of both parties. This time, however, its liberal critics are joined by a faction of Republicans who have aligned themselves with former President Donald J. Trump's hostility to the "deep state" and see the issue as a chance to impose pain on the FBI.
[...]
Civil liberty and privacy activists have long pushed to require the government, or at least the FBI, to obtain a court warrant before using Americans' identifiers to search the repository of intercepted communications. They see the present odd-bedfellows alliance with the hard-right Republicans as a unique opportunity to achieve that reform.
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) noted in a Friday statement that "for years, as government officials have provided misleadingly narrow testimony about who is targeted under Section 702, I have pushed to get the government to come clean."
"The revelation that 702 is used against 'foreign governments and related entities' directly impacts Americans' privacy, as American journalists, businesspeople, students, and others all have legitimate reason to communicate with foreign governments," he said. "The fact they can be swept up in 702 collection further highlights the need for reforms to protect their privacy."
"While I commend the administration for these releases," Wyden added, "it remains the case that information the public needs in advance of 702 reauthorization has been unnecessarily redacted."
Keep ReadingShow Less
ACLU Sues CIA, DOJ, and NSA for Records About Warrantless Spying on Americans
The legal group argues that information about the surveillance program "is key as Congress considers reauthorizing Section 702—the law used to defend this unconstitutional spying."
Feb 03, 2023
The ACLU on Friday filed a federal lawsuit against top U.S. intelligence agencies that have failed to respond to public records requests for information about a "sweeping law that authorizes the warrantless surveillance of international communications," including those of Americans.
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, targets the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Department of Justice (DOJ), National Security Agency (NSA), and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI).
"Section 702 has morphed into a domestic surveillance tool for the FBI."
In December, the ACLU requested "recent Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) opinions concerning the government's surveillance activities, including those conducted pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)."
According to the ACLU's complaint, which was first reported on by Axios, "to date, none of these defendant agencies has released any responsive records," despite their legal obligation to respond to such requests within 20 working days.
"Though Section 702 is justified as a counterterrorism tool, in reality it permits surveillance far beyond what is needed to protect national security," the ACLU explains on its website. It continues:
It allows the government to target foreigners abroad if it believes they possess "foreign intelligence information"—a term so broadly defined that it can include ordinary information about foreign affairs that has nothing to do with national security. This means that targets of surveillance could include human rights defenders, journalists, whistleblowers, or business owners. The government collects the personal information of these individuals—including any communications they may have with people in the U.S.—and stores it in databases for years, and in some cases, indefinitely.
With Section 702 set to expire at the end of the year, the complaint explains, Congress in the coming months "will consider whether to reauthorize these surveillance powers and will newly examine the breadth and intrusiveness of the digital searches the government conducts under this authority."
"In 2021, the FISC took the unusual step of extending its review of the government's annual Section 702 application, in order to consider novel or significant issues raised by the proposed surveillance," the document notes. "But the government has not released the court opinions that resulted from that review, even though they bear directly on the public's understanding of the surveillance powers the government seeks to wield under Section 702."
"Timely disclosure of these FISC opinions is vitally necessary to an informed debate about whether these surveillance powers should be reauthorized or reformed," the filing argues.
\u201cBREAKING: We\u2019re suing the NSA, CIA, and DOJ to learn more about the mass surveillance of our texts, emails, and calls with friends and family abroad.\n\nThis information is key as Congress considers reauthorizing Section 702 \u2014 the law used to defend this unconstitutional spying.\u201d— ACLU (@ACLU) 1675440982
Echoing that argument, Patrick Toomey, deputy project director for the ACLU's National Security Project, told Axios that "these opinions are essential to an informed public debate, and the government should release them immediately."
Toomey took aim at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which falls under the DOJ. He said that "Section 702 has morphed into a domestic surveillance tool for the FBI."
Axios pointed out that the ODNI "disclosed in an annual report in April that the FBI conducted as many as 3.4 million searches of Americans' data in 2021 that was previously collected through 702."
Toomey asserted that "before Congress votes on reauthorizing this law, Americans should know how the government wants to use these sweeping spying powers."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular