The Daily - Trump Says They’re Foreign Gang Members. Are They?

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has deported hundreds of Venezuelan migrants by quickly labeling them as gang members and foreign enemies, and boarding them on planes to El Salvador. It’s sidestepping their rights to a court hearing where anyone might be able to scrutinize the claims against them.As a result, very little has been known about who these men are, or how they were targeted by immigration officials. Until now.Julie Turkewitz, the Andes bureau chief for The New York Times, explains who was actually on those planes, and discusses the secretive process that led to their deportations.Guest: Julie Turkewitz, the Andes bureau chief for The New York Times, based in Bogotá, Colombia.Background reading: Inside President Trump’s rushed effort to deport 238 migrants.The government is relying more on tattoos to identify gang members. Experts say that’s unreliable.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Alex Peña/Getty Images Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has deported hundreds of Venezuelan migrants by quickly labeling them as gang members and foreign enemies, boarding them on planes to El Salvador, and sidestepping their rights to a court hearing where anyone might be able to scrutinize the claims made against them. As a result, very little has been known about who these men are or how they were targeted by immigration officials, until now.

Today, my colleague Julie Turkowitz explains who was actually on those planes and the secretive process that led to their deportations. It's Wednesday, April 23rd. So Julie, over the past few weeks, part of the news cycle, part of the big story out there has been this case of a man named Jose Abrego Garcia. He was the Salvadoran man who was on one of the planes

carrying hundreds of people from the United States to El Salvador. And you have done something different. You have focused on the other 200 plus people on board these planes and dozens of other people who have been rounded up by immigration authorities. Can you just tell us what specifically you've been trying to look into?

Sure. Myself and a large team of reporters and researchers at the Times really wanted to understand who were the people sent to El Salvador and how they were identified. These are people who weren't just deported, they have also been incarcerated in a foreign country in a maximum security prison built for terrorists. And the Trump administration has made all kinds of claims about these individuals saying that they are members of this Venezuelan gang. But we found, for example, in the case of Abrego Garcia, is that what the government is saying

about the individuals that it is sending to El Salvador for incarceration doesn't always have a lot of evidence behind it. And so it was important to kind of dig in to who these people are, and if they are, in fact, members of a gang, these people are and if they are in fact members of a gang as the Trump administration says they are, because if that is not true, it opens up all kinds of questions about who else could be identified with very little evidence as a member of a gang and sent to a prison in a foreign country for a year or years to come. So you mentioned gang affiliations. That was one of the things on the government's agenda in terms of why it targeted these people.

Can you just talk about that a little bit more? Remind us, what did the government say specifically in its accusations against some of these people? So, right around the time that the Trump administration is sending these men to El Salvador, the administration's borders are Tom Homan comes out and says, these individuals are all members of the Tren de Aragua. Now the Tren de Aragua is this Venezuelan gang that has morphed into a transnational criminal organization, but until recently was not really considered a big deal in the United States. And then earlier this year, the Trump administration declares the Tren'Agua to be a foreign terrorist organization that is working with the Venezuelan government.

And not only that, but the administration says that this gang, in collaboration with the Venezuelan government, is perpetrating invasion of the United States. Wow. Now, this is really debatable because we don't have evidence that this group has arrived in the United States in very large numbers and whatever connection they might have with the Venezuelan government is not proven. But what the Trump administration is doing is claiming that there is an invasion so that it can invoke this 18th century law called the Alien

Enemies Act that allows the Trump administration to swiftly deport individuals who are part of a nation that has invaded the United States or is at war with the United States. Swiftly deport, meaning like no due process, no time in court. Correct. Now, the Supreme Court after the initial flights of 238 men went to El Salvador said that, no, going forward, the Trump administration must allow some kind of due process to these men. It must notify these men that they are being targeted, that they've been identified as alien enemies,

and it must allow them an opportunity to fight that claim before they're deported. And then on Friday, the Trump administration attempted to continue to send more individuals to El Salvador using the Alien Enemies Act, and the Supreme Court weighed in again and halted this effort and said, no, at this point, this is not permitted. And just to be clear, one of the things that the Supreme Court seems to want to preserve here is the right of these men to defend themselves, maybe say, hey, I'm not a gang member, present some evidence for their defense.

Because without that, then we don't know if mistakes are made. We don't know if the administration was correct in the evidence it presents. And it seems like you actually were the one digging into who these people were. Tell us about what you actually found when you started to do that reporting. To be very clear, the Trump administration is being extremely secretive about who has been sent to El Salvador and what evidence it has against them. The US government and the Salvadoran government have refused to even release a list of who is currently incarcerated in El Salvador. But my colleague, Hamed Alea-Sis, was able to obtain the internal list.

These names were initially reported by CBS and we ran them through databases. So we were doing background checks in Chile, in Colombia, in Peru. Now I should note that it's very difficult to find criminal records from all over the world. There's no international public database that we could just search and use to excavate information. So is it possible that we missed something? Of course. But a team of us reporters and researchers dedicated weeks to understanding the criminal backgrounds of these individuals. Right. And of the 238 men sent to El Salvador. We were only able to find serious criminal accusations or convictions for 32 of them.

What kind of serious crimes are we talking about? So for example, we found one person with a murder conviction in Venezuela. We found another individual who is accused of kidnapping and drugging and sexually assaulting a woman in Chile. Someone who authorities in Chile do believe is a member of Tren de Aragua. We found others who had been accused of being involved in an attack in Chicago. And so we found some folks with some pretty serious criminal accusations or convictions. Okay, so obviously those are very violent offenses. Did you find any other types of criminal activity?

Absolutely. We found about two dozen people who had these much lower level offenses, right? Speeding in a school zone, trespassing, driving without proper registration. But the vast majority of the people did not seem to have a criminal record beyond sometimes infractions related to their immigration cases. So we're talking about criminal records here, but what about the accusation that these men are, in fact, TDA or gang affiliated? Well, that is a good question because it's important to point out that while in a minority or in a handful of cases, for example, this individual in Chile, we did find some evidence

that maybe authorities believe they're trying to get a war for the vast majority of these people we found no evidence that they have any connection to this violent Venezuelan gang but as we spoke to families of many of the men on those planes we started to find a few common traits that appear to have led them to be targets for deportation. One person who I spent a lot of time speaking with his family is Arturo Suarez. Arturo left Venezuela in 2016. He had participated in anti-government protests in 2014,

sort of calling for change in Venezuela, and eventually decided because of the political situation, because of the economic situation, to move to Colombia. Then he moved to Chile. In Chile, he meets his wife, another Venezuelan, a woman named Natalie. I spoke with Natalie this month. She told me a little bit about him. He in Chile worked installing these sort of large-scale refrigerators, but his real

passion and what people really know him for, what his friends, his family know him for, is his music. And as a part of his sort of growing music career, he had a lot of tattoos. He has a palm tree, a hummingbird on his neck, with musical things. Some of them are sort of aspirational, inspirational. One of them is this hummingbird on his neck. And another is a phrase that his family sort of describes as emblematic of his outlook. And it says, the future is bright.

Money is tight, and eventually, Natalie gets pregnant. And they decide that Arturo is going to go to the United States and the idea is that he's going to go to the United States. You know, in the worst case scenario, I earning dollars to sort of assist my growing family. Maybe my wife comes to join me. Maybe I go back to Chile. In the best case scenario, I meet all kinds of amazing producers and you know, my career really takes off in the US where there's really just an opportunity to become like a global superstar as opposed to Chile,

where you're sort of relegated to a much smaller stage. So how does he eventually get into the U.S.? So he enters the country in September of 2024. He enters using this application called CBP-1. This is this Biden era application that allowed people in many Venezuelans took advantage of this to present themselves at the US border and essentially ask for the opportunity to come in and make a case that they should be able to stay. And actually once Arturo gets into the country, he's starting to make some money and he and

Natalie decide that eventually he's going to save up and he's going to go back to Chile, but he never gets the opportunity to make that trip back. Why what happens? So on February 8th, he arrives at this house in Raleigh to film a music video. And that is where he is apprehended by immigration agents. According to his family, immigration authorities tell him that he's being detained due to his immigration status. He is sent to a detention center in Georgia. He's able to make phone calls.

His wife, Natalie, is in touch with him. But after about a month in this detention facility, Arturo tells his wife that he actually wants to be deported, that he's ready to sort of have this nightmare be over and that it's way better to be back in Venezuela or back in Chile than to be in a detention center in the United States. And so on March 14th, he calls her and he tells her that he will probably be deported the next day. I've been told by American authorities that I am being sent back to Venezuela. I'm going to be fine because I'm finally going to be free. Natalie tells me that she's just so filled with relief.

And he sends a text that night saying, I love you, but we're going to be together forever. I love you, we'll soon be together forever. But after that message is sent, about a day passes, and Arturo is silent. He essentially disappears, and Natalie starts to get really nervous. And on March 16th, when Arturo has not showed up

in Venezuela, Natalie turns to Google. And on her phone, she types into this little search box, deportations to Venezuela. And what pops up are these photos of Venezuelan men deported and incarcerated in El Salvador. These are the photos that I think a lot of us saw, right, with men with shaved heads, their arms behind their back, edited some sort of prison complex it looked like.

Absolutely. She sees this photo with this sort of sea of men wearing these sort of white prison outfits on the ground sort of hunched over in a sort of identical form. She zooms in, sees the hummingbird tattoo, and realizes that one of them is her husband. We'll be right back. So, Julie, earlier you said that when you were speaking to families of the men on these planes, like Arturo's, you began to notice traits that they shared that seemed to have made them targets for deportation. Tell me about those traits. So earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security issued a internal guideline called the Alien Enemy Validation Guide.

And this guide gives us a window into how the Trump administration is identifying supposed members of the Tren de Aragua. This guide instructs officials to use a point system to grade suspected members of the gang. Once someone gets eight points, they become a quote, validated member of the gang and therefore an alien enemy who can be subject to this kind of deportation. And of course we know that these folks are not just being deported, but also incarcerated. Wait, so okay, so a point system, like if you get enough points, the government says you are a gang member? Do I have that right?

Correct. That's exactly how it works. Can you just explain that a little bit? Like how are the points actually assigned and what do you accrue points for? So this document instructs officials to give individuals two points if they are discovered to have lived with a member of the Trender Agua, two points for being photographed with a member of the group, two points for using social media to display symbols, unclear what those are, of the gang, and most important, the document instructs officials to give four points for having tattoos denoting membership in the Tren de Aragua and another four points for displaying quote

dress known to indicate allegiance to the gang. And that kind of dress includes high-end urban streetwear, and it includes wearing sports gear from U.S. sports teams with prominent Venezuelans on them. I mean, this strikes me as, like, not foolproof. I mean, is this point system that is used by law enforcement in this case to identify gang members, is this typical? Is this unheard of? Can you put this into context for us? So, U.S. law enforcement has used tattoos in the past to identify members of a gang.

And that is because there are some transnational gangs that have a presence in the United States like MS-13 that use tattoos as identifiers of membership. We've seen these sort of big MS-13 tattoos. The problem is that a member of our team in Venezuela spoke with five different experts on the Trendera Agua. These are people who have been working with this group for years, police officials, academics, and a journalist who wrote a book about

the Trendier Agua, and all of them say that Trendier Agua does not use tattoos as a marker of membership. And while there may be many gang members who have tattoos, there are also many young Venezuelan men who have tattoos. And were tattoos one of the common denominators you were finding among these men? We spoke with families and a couple of lawyers for 30 of the men who were sent to El Salvador. And we found that at least 27 of them have tattoos and these tattoos include like names of family members, names of girlfriends and wives, and they also include things like crowns for example, and you know inspirational messages.

And what we found is that even though the Tren de Aragua doesn't use tattoos as a marker of membership, the government has a list of tattoos that it considers to be suspicious. And that includes, for example, that crown tattoo that I mentioned that is also sported by Lionel Messi, the famous soccer star. It also includes the sort of Michael Jordan jump man silhouette that of course was popularized by Nike and by the basketball star. So the government appears to have taken this not really very definitive criteria, having tattoos or having crown and jump man tattoos and combining it with other not very definitive criteria like wearing urban street wear and

used it to identify someone as a quote validated member of this gang. Right, because presumably there might be fans of Michael Jordan and Lionel Messi who want tattoos of images that they help to popularize. And those people might not be in gangs, and similarly, people who wear urban streetwear might not be in gangs. So it sounds like from everything you have learned, this system of identification really has some kind of questionable flaws to it.

Absolutely. And the problem is that the sort of possible misidentification of people as gang members has dire consequences. These men are now in a prison. They have not had a court hearing. They have little or no access to lawyers or their families. And we know that the conditions in this prison that they have been sent to are extremely harsh.

This prison was built by the president of El Salvador to be sort of emblematic of his crackdown on terrible criminals in his own country. The head of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, has said that these individuals are not being held in the same conditions. But we don't really know that because no one has been given full and free access to the prison. And these folks, unlike when they were in US detention, now that they're in Salvadoran prison, these individuals do not have access to a telephone or a messaging app or a way to communicate to the outside world what their lives are like on the inside.

Do we have any sense how long they might be there? When these men were initially sent to El Salvador, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, said that they would be in prison there for at least a year. And at the same time, he called that sentence, quote unquote, renewable. But what we've seen since is that Christy Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, has come out and said that she believes these individuals should be held in the prison for the rest of their lives. Julie, I feel like it's totally fair for us to point out

that these deportations might have been extremely flawed, that these conditions might be extremely harsh. But I want to note two things. The first is that many Americans voted for President Trump and feel that the immigration system in this country is broken. Even if some people enter this country legally, they are still in some way taking advantage of the country to the detriment

of Americans. And the second thing I want to note is that it feels like we're in this moment right now where people can be divided into sort of two camps, just to make a really broad generalization. In one group, you have people who are alarmed by this lack of due process, who say, listen, maybe these guys should have been deported anyway, but we need to find out by putting them through a system so that we can make sure we're not, you know, deporting the wrong people, that everybody should have their day in court. And then what we also have is another group of people that feel that it is okay to have

collateral damage, in this case, potentially sending innocent men to a terrorist prison in order to overhaul a broken system. And I'm just curious if you are sort of seeing the landscape in that way. Yeah, I think that that is absolutely a fair summary of the situation. And I think that it's really important to point out that what we have seen in the last couple of months is a dramatic decline in people arriving at the US border. This is something that started under the Biden administration because of some of these sort of stricter policies that the administration put in place among other factors. but it has really been sustained and has become very

evident under the Trump administration. The messaging that the Trump administration is sending seems to have worked. The thing is we just don't know how deep the collateral damage will be. We don't know what people are exposed to in this prison in El Salvador. We don't know if they'll get out ever. And what my colleagues and I are learning from new reporting in the past few days is that there are additional people who are no longer showing up in this public database of migrants detained in the US, but who are not on the internal government list of migrants sent to El Salvador. Presumably the US government knows where they are, but their families don't

know where they are. We don't know where they are. They have essentially, for public purposes, been disappeared. Wow. And I think the concern of many people watching this play out is that the shift in policy runs deeper than just sending a couple of hundred people to a foreign prison. And so there's this fundamental question as to whether what we're seeing here is the American people accept that they are willing to give up certain rights in order to tackle this problem and feel somehow safer in their own country.

Julie, thank you so much. Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Secretary of State Marco Rubio unveiled a plan to make major cuts to the State Department, calling the government's diplomatic agency, quote, bloated, bureaucratic, and beholden to radical political ideology. The cuts focus on operations in Washington, but will also affect the work of embassies and consulates overseas, including the elimination of the office of the

Undersecretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, which is charged with advancing American values around the world. And the executive producer of 60 Minutes, the Tiffany brand of American television journalism, resigned on Tuesday, saying that he was no longer allowed to run the show the way that he always had and make independent decisions. The producer, Bill Owens, is only the third person to hold his position in the show's 57-year history.

And his departure marked a new period of turmoil for CBS News and 60 Minutes, which is facing a $10 billion lawsuit from President Trump. Today's episode was produced by Carlos Prieto and Caitlin O'Keefe, with help from Jessica Chung and Will Reid. It was edited by Liz O'Balin with help from Maria Byrne and Michael Benoit, contains original music by Pat McCusker, Alicia Beatupe, and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Rachel Abrams. See you tomorrow.