Report: 50 Venezuelans Sent to Salvadoran Prison Entered the U.S. Legally, Contrary to White House Claims
"It's not just one or two administrative errors," says the Cato Institute's David Bier.
The Trump administration insists that the Venezuelan men it sent to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador were all "illegal aliens" connected to a violent gang, but at least 50 of them entered the country legally, according to a new report by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
David J. Bier, director of immigration policy at the Cato Institute, tried to gather information on 238 Venezuelan men identified by CBS News who were sent to El Salvador by the Trump administration earlier this year—an incomplete list because the administration has never released a full manifest. Of the 90 cases where Bier could determine a method of entry, 50 men had entered the country legally as refugees, parolees, or temporary visa holders. They were vetted in advance and entered the U.S. through an official border crossing point. That is, they violated no immigration law.
The Cato report follows a CBS News investigation that also found that 75 percent of the men on the list had no criminal record in the U.S. or abroad.
"The basic framework that [Trump administration officials] are putting forward to the public is that these people aren't entitled to any rights in the United States because they were here illegally, and therefore they can do whatever they want with them," Bier says. "Obviously, there's a lot to take issue with that premise to begin with, but our review shows that in fact, they're doing this to people who did come legally and did follow immigration laws, and so whatever argument they're making is just not applicable to those people."
And the number of legal immigrants makes it hard to believe that it was a mistake.
"It's not just one or two administrative errors, as they like to say," Bier continues. "This was an intentional campaign that they've carried out to include legal immigrants in the group that they sent to El Salvador."
The Trump administration claims the men are "criminal terrorists" connected to Tren de Aragua (TdA), a violent Venezuelan gang. The White House justified their summary expulsion from the U.S. and incarceration in an El Salvador prison under a dubious invocation of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) of 1798, claiming that they were part of an "invasion" or "predatory incursion" of the U.S.
Under an extraordinary deal with El Salvador, the Trump administration sent those men to Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a maximum-security prison camp. The administration has claimed its sweeping powers under the AEA allow it to detain and deport suspected TdA members without any judicial review or due process.
But media investigations have shown that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) determined some of those men were TdA "terrorists" based on innocuous tattoos that DHS claimed were gang-related. In reality, the pictures of alleged TdA tattoos that DHS relied on were lifted from unrelated social media.
"For instance, DHS obtained its TdA 'Jordan' from a Michael Jordan fan account in the United States," the Cato report says. "It pulled its AK-47 tattoo from a Turkish tattoo artist."
For example, the report says that one of the 50 Venezuelan men, Gustavo Adolfo Aguilera Aguero, entered the U.S. legally as a parolee in 2023, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) targeted him for his tattoos: "a crown with his son's name, a star with his and his mom's name, and a song lyric 'real until death' from Puerto Rican reggaeton artists Anuel AA."
Despite this, DHS has continued to claim, both in individual cases where evidence shows otherwise and generally, that these men were illegal aliens.
In response to a request for comment for this story, the DHS continued to insist that CECOT detainees all entered the U.S. illegally, without providing any refutation of Cato's report.
"Illegal aliens in CECOT have final deportation orders and are high threat criminals," DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to Reason. "The media should take a beat from doing the bidding of vicious alien gangsters, peddling their false sob stories and finally write about American victims."
"Many of the individuals that are counted as 'non-criminals' are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don't have a rap sheet in the U.S." McLaughlin continued. "Further, every single one of these individuals committed a crime when they came into this country illegally. It is not an accurate description to say they are 'non-criminals.' This deceptive categorization is devoid of reality and misleads the American public."
For Bier, the most worrying implication of his findings is what would have happened if courts hadn't blocked the deportation flights after the first day.
"The most shocking thing I think is just the scale of this," Bier says. "This was 50 in one day, right? [The Trump administration] got shut down after that, at least partially. What would we be seeing if this was allowed to continue? They're not hiding their intention to continue it, either. This would be hundreds and hundreds of people, thousands over the course of a year, being sent to a foreign prison without any charges against them, without any due process. It's just incredible."
Of course, it's important to note that migrants who enter the country illegally are still entitled to due process under the Constitution, no matter how much the Trump White House insists they're not. But as George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin wrote, the Cato report underscores the lawlessness of the AEA removals.
"Elsewhere, I have argued that the distinction between legal and illegal immigration is not as morally significant as many tend to think," Somin wrote at The Volokh Conspiracy. "Nonetheless, the fact that most of the AEA deportees have no criminal records and many (perhaps a majority) entered the US legally makes the Trump Administration's actions even more odious than they would be otherwise. David Bier is right to call them a 'crime against humanity.'"
