A group of Venezuelan migrants in Florida, USA, hold a Venezuelan flag and placards. Photo: BBC.
By Misión Verdad – Apr 3, 2025
An order based on the Alien Enemies Act was issued by US President Donald Trump to supposedly stop an invasion of the defunct Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua (TDA). This is the first time said law has been invoked since World War II, although it dates back to 1798.
The contrived narrative about the Tren de Aragua has been spread since before Trump took office in the White House. Mission Verdad has analyzed the myths surrounding the gang’s supposed power and how it has been equated, without evidence, to narco-trafficking gangs such as the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), the Sinaloa Cartel, or the Gulf Cartel. All these narco gangs possess weapons from the United States.
In this regard, some data would help us to verify the lack of rigor and reliable evidence about the accusations made by the Trump administration against Venezuelan migrants allegedly linked to the Tren de Aragua.
The fake news about tattoos
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed an unclassified document from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that shows tattoos that allegedly indicate the bearer’s membership in Tren de Aragua.
This is the “Alien Enemy Validation Guidance,” which sets out a series of criteria that security officials should meet in order to designate persons as gang members. It establishes a rating system in which a person can qualify and be detained on the basis of eight points or more.
According to the document, any migrant who admits to being a member of Tren de Aragua is assigned 10 points, which means that he or she is automatically considered a member of the gang and subject to immediate deportation under the Alien Enemies Act.
The guidance allows officials to assign four points to a migrant simply for having “tattoos denoting membership/loyalty to the TDA” and another four points if law enforcement officials decide that the person in question “displays insignia, logos, notations, drawings, or clothing known to indicate allegiance to the TDA.”
Being “dressed in high-end urban apparel,” especially basketball jerseys of the Chicago Bulls or their former star player, Michael Jordan, are also considered tokens for deportation.
In February 2024, the New York Post published some images linked to Tren de Aragua. These included silhouettes of AK-47 rifles, phrases such as “Real to the death,” watches, stars, crowns, trains, gas masks, and winged grenades.
A reverse search of the images revealed that they were downloaded from the internet. None of the people who published their tattoos have anything to do with Venezuela or the gang. This was published by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a researcher at the American Immigration Council, in a thread on X.
Historical data and US intelligence reports disprove Trump
US intelligence agencies released findings on February 26 that contradict Trump’s claims. According to a report by the New York Times, the shared view of US spy agencies is that the Tren de Aragua gang was never controlled by the Venezuelan government.
This is not the first time that Trump has based his immigration policy on lies. At the beginning of March, Trump said that “last month’s illegal border crossings were by far the lowest ever recorded in history,” but the 8,326 people detained was a higher figure than the first seven years of the 1960s, for example.
Moreover, in the same speech to Congress, he stated, “In the last four years, 21 million people came to the United States. Many of them were murderers, human traffickers, and gang members.” The US Customs and Border Protection reported over 10.8 million arrests for illegal crossings from Mexico between January 2021 and December 2024.
However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there were restrictions on asylum in the United States, and many people crossed more than once until they made it, as there were no legal consequences for being returned to Mexico. Therefore, the number of people who crossed into the US is lower than the number of arrests.
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Fake news machine greased with the immigration issue
CNN counted some 20 false statements made by Trump in his inauguration speech and at events related to the start of his administration. The president deployed vague rhetoric, subjective assertions, and promises of action that cannot be verified.
His machinery of lies covers various topics ranging from elections through tariffs that he claims to be applying for the first time, to vociferating that the European Union does not “receive” agricultural products, automobiles or “almost anything” from the United States, all the way to riots in the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
However, the immigration issue is traditional in his collection of falsehoods and half-truths. Trump said during his presidential campaign that “many” Biden-era migrants came from prisons or psychiatric institutions in other countries and that they were being “dumped” in the United States. This information has not been corroborated by US authorities despite having intelligence agencies with high levels of detailed information.
In addition, he claimed that the world prison population has decreased. However, this figure increased from October 2021 to April 2024 from about 10.77 million people to about 10.99 million according to the World Prison Population List prepared by experts from the United Kingdom.
He has lied about the situation and length of the border wall with Mexico, as well as about birthright citizenship in the United States.
He also claimed that Tren de Aragua members were “taken off the streets of Venezuela and deposited in our country,” and that crime in Venezuela has plummeted, “because they took their criminals and gave them to us through an open borders policy of the previous administration.”
This fake was first spread by María Corina Machado’s friend, US Senator Ted Cruz, in July 2024, a month after President Nicolás Maduro launched the new prison system mechanism. The Tren de Aragua was dismantled in September 2023 through the Cacique Guaicaipuro Liberation Operation carried out in the Aragua Penitentiary Center, better known as Tocorón. Some of its fugitive leaders have been recaptured or remain wanted with Interpol alerts.
Venezuela has reorganized its prison population since 2011, when the Ministry of Penitentiary Affairs was created. Some establishments were closed, and inmates were transferred to others with greater security and order. Meanwhile, Trump has never substantiated his claims about Venezuela’s alleged practice of somehow intentionally dumping criminals or fugitives in the United States.
The evidence emerging from Trump’s own country makes it clear that, behind the story of TDA, there is the intention of resuming the “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela. It has become common for the United States to resort to false flag operations or outright lies as part of its regime change strategies, the most recent and notorious case, due to the bloodshed that it caused, being Iraq.
The Venezuelan government has declared the gang in question extinct, and associated its attempts to reappear until 2023 with a well-known US strategy of destabilizing target countries and intervening with the excuse that they are “failed states.”
This web of hoaxes is aimed at criminalizing the people of Venezuela to create a favorable scenario for interference. Just what the extremist opposition requires to disarticulate the social fabric, undermine people’s will through psychological operations, and succeed in imposing new coercive measures on the population.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/SF
Misión Verdad
Misión Verdad is a Venezuelan investigative journalism website with a socialist perspective in defense of the Bolivarian Revolution
