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.
Chapter 1: What is the controversy around the deportation of Venezuelan migrants?
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, as a lot of our listeners know, there's been one story that has really dominated the news cycle recently. It's been the case of this man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He was the Salvadoran man who was on one of the planes that deported hundreds of people from the United States to El Salvador to these prisons recently. But you've been focused on something else.
You have focused on the other 200-plus people who were on those planes, as well as dozens of people around the country who have been rounded up by immigration authorities. So can you just tell us what specifically have you been trying to look into?
Chapter 2: Who are the people being deported to El Salvador?
Sure. Myself and a large team of reporters and researchers at The Times really wanted to understand why 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 Aurelio Garcia, is that what the government is saying about the individuals that it is sending to El Salvador for incarceration is, doesn't always have a lot of evidence behind it.
And so it was important to kind of dig into who 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?
Chapter 3: What claims has the Trump administration made about these migrants?
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 de Aragua to be a foreign terrorist organization that is working with the Venezuelan government in And not only that, but the administration says that this gang, in collaboration with the Venezuelan government, is perpetrating an 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. Hmm.
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. 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 announced They 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.
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Chapter 4: What legal basis is used for these deportations and what has the Supreme Court ruled?
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 U.S. 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 Aziz 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.
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Chapter 5: What did Julie Turkewitz's investigation uncover about the migrants' backgrounds?
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 permission. 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, well, in a handful of cases, for example, this individual in Chile... We did find some evidence that maybe authorities believe they're trainder agua. 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 interacting 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, he has a hummingbird on his neck, like...
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.
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Chapter 6: How reliable are the accusations of gang membership against these migrants?
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.
He was told that he was going to be deported to Venezuela.
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Chapter 7: What is the personal story of Arturo Suarez and his deportation experience?
I've been told by American authorities that I am being sent back to Venezuela. Natalie... tells me that she's just so filled with relief. And he sends a text that night saying, 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 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, at 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. And... 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.
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Chapter 8: How did Arturo's wife discover his fate and what does it reveal about the deportation process?
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. You know, we've seen these sort of big MS-13 tattoos, right?
The problem is that a member of our team in Venezuela spoke with five different experts on the Tren de Aragua. These are people who have been working with this group for years. Police officials, academics, and a journalist who wrote a book about the Tren de Aragua. And all of them say... that Tren de Aragua 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.
Mm-hmm. 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 names of family members, names of girlfriends and wives. And they also include... things like crowns, for example, and, you know, inspirational messages and,
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.
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