The Five Big Lies about Venezuelans Sent to El Salvador

The true issue is that the administration is filled with evil people

My explanations of why people support Trump tend to be uncharitable, with an emphasis on his followers being dishonest, misinformed, and interested in little more than signalling vice and adhering to his cult of personality. I think this is true for the most prominent Trump supporters, including those who talk about politics for a living.

But there are casual observers of politics who may be inclined towards supporting Republicans and can be excused for not knowing how bad his policies are or how morally bankrupt the administration is. Over the first few months, it’s become clear on several issues that one of the things that makes the Trump movement so difficult to criticize is that it engages in multidimensional lying. They will lie about the “problem” they are trying to solve. They will lie about the effects of their policies. They will lie about the justification for that policy, and its legal basis. They will then pick examples of things they have done to solve the problem that will also be lies. They will lie about how the policy is working, and even what the courts have been saying about their policy. These aren’t misrepresentations that leave out context. We are talking about bald-faced lies by any definition, any one of which would be a scandal in most other administrations. It’s difficult to prove in most cases whether any particular official knows that he is lying, but the inference can often be made, and whether someone is a liar or a true-believing cultist in any particular instance, the effects are usually the same.

One of my failures in not seeing before the election how bad Trump would be was not grasping the extent to which moral nihilism now characterizes his movement. The casual political observer might find himself with a similar problem. Imagine the Trump administration has five talking points on issue X. A critic says that each one of those is a lie. That on its face may be difficult to believe. Surely the Trump administration could find one or two things that are true to say about its policy! It can’t just all be lies from top to bottom. The critics telling us that the Trump administration lies all the time, and that conservative media repeats these lies no matter how absurd, must just be hysterical.

Under previous presidents, these were reasonable assumptions. They would even be reasonable under most dictatorships, which do not try to bend reality to anywhere near the extent MAGA does. Yet, here they are simply not. You can assume maximum bad faith from this administration, and still underestimate how poorly thought out and ungrounded in reality its policies are, because the Trump movement will surprise you by expanding the limits of your understanding of how stupid and dishonest human beings can be. Trump is an outlier in how bad his character is, he’s taken over half the political spectrum, and there has been a selection effect within the conservative movement in which only the most corrupt can stay in good standing within MAGA.

Instead of just asserting all of this, I’m going to show you how this works in the example of Venezuelans sent to El Salvador. You can do something very similar with DOGE, and other administration initiatives. But the Venezuelan case is enough to make the general point. No one has the time to uncover and understand all of Trump’s lies. The hope here is that through a deep dive into this particular issue, you can understand the failings of MAGA more generally.

I’m focusing on the lies told. But we should not lose sight of the ultimate goal of the administration here: to lock up innocent men in labor camps. This is so self-evidently evil and wrong that there isn’t much left to say. An article on why this is evil and wrong seems kind of pointless, so I focus on the lies told in the service of that goal, in the hopes that it will change how people see the administration on every other issue going forward, as well as its supporters. The fact that they lie all the time and the fact that they have evil goals are not unrelated. They’re both products of a movement that is morally and ethically corrupt to its core.

1. They Lied about Immigrant Crime

Even before coming into office, the Trump administration lied about the existence of an immigrant crime wave that needed attention. As I pointed out, the empirical evidence indicates that if anything, migration makes natives safer. I explained why pointing to certain subgroups or regions for which the immigrant crime narrative might be true did not absolve the campaign of the charge that they were lying about the issue.

If your argument is that Trump is just talking about Venezuelans in Colorado and Haitians in Springfield, these are tiny populations, so this is a dumb thing to base a presidential campaign on. For Trump’s entire message of American carnage to make sense — and this is a message he’s consistently pushed since first running for president in 2015 — it has to rely on the idea that immigration in the aggregate makes the country more violent. This is true whether you take what the man says literally or what is implied by the narrative that he is running on. Trumpism and its perspective on crime simply have no validity or coherence in a world where immigration makes the country less dangerous in the aggregate, even if the same cannot be said when analyzing every population individually.

2. They Lied about Tren de Aragua’s Connections to Maduro

In order to provide a supposedly legal basis for sending Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act. This law requires that the enemy in question be a hostile nation, so the administration needed to declare that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua was working with the Maduro regime.

On its face, this seems pretty ridiculous. Maduro decides that he will defeat the United States by….sending some low level criminals abroad to push around a few tenants in a poor apartment building in Aurora, Colorado.

As it turns out, we now know that American intelligence agencies, with the exception of the FBI, did not believe that the evidence supported any direct connection between the Maduro regime and Tren de Aragua, while pointing to cases of the Venezuelan government even killing members of the gang. By late February, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was circulating a memo to that effect, which argued that the evidence the FBI had relied on to take the opposite perspective was not credible, in part because it came from sources who were in legal jeopardy and had an incentive to tell the government what it wanted to hear.

I’m genuinely impressed that the intelligence agencies are still doing their job at this point, given that the administration has shown that it prioritizes loyalty above all else. By the time they were circulating their findings, Kash Patel had already been confirmed as Director of the FBI. This is a man who made his name writing children’s books about Trump, which turned out to be a great strategy for getting a high-level government position. Given who was running the FBI at the time, we probably shouldn’t be surprised that the bureau twisted the facts to arrive at a predetermined conclusion. The Trump administration is full of toadies, but in this case it looks like the idea of a direct link between Maduro and Tren de Aragua was so lacking in evidence that you had to be a Kash Patel-level sycophant to find a way to argue the opposite position.

3. They Lied about the Criminal Records and Gang Ties of Those on the Flights

Alright, you might say, the legal basis for the flights to El Salvador is absurd. But surely the administration actually used that excuse to round up real criminals? In a few cases, yes. But not in the vast majority of them. The New York Times reports

Seeking to provide a fuller picture of who was imprisoned, a team of Times reporters and researchers ran the 238 names through three U.S. public records databases, checked backgrounds in Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Chile, scoured court documents and news articles, spoke to dozens of family members and interviewed experts on Tren de Aragua…

Some of the prisoners do appear to have committed grave crimes. At least 32 of the men sent to El Salvador have faced serious criminal accusations or convictions in the United States or abroad, including a man accused of participating in an assault in Chicago, another convicted of trying to smuggle arms out of the United States and others accused of theft, strangulation, domestic battery or harboring undocumented immigrants….

Beyond that, The Times found that another two dozen of the men locked up in El Salvador had been accused or found guilty of lower-level offenses in the United States or elsewhere, including trespassing, speeding in a school zone and driving an improperly registered vehicle.

But for the others, including Mr. Suárez, the musician, The Times found no evidence of a criminal background, beyond offenses related to being unauthorized migrants. Mr. Suárez’s family presented official certificates from Venezuela, Colombia and Chile — where he lived in the past — saying he had no convictions in those nations.

So in sum, of 238 men shipped to a prison camp without any kind of due process on the grounds they were supposedly members of Tren de Aragua, 32 had faced serious criminal accusations or convictions somewhere in the world, while the other 206 either may have committed minor violations or had no criminal records at all according to a search that spanned multiple countries.

How did the administration determine all of these men were gang members? Apparently, by looking at their tattoos. This is despite the fact that experts say that Tren de Aragua does not identify members this way. One guy got in trouble for an autism awareness tattoo he got in honor of his brother. Andry Hernandez Romero was a gay makeup artist who came to the United States in order to seek asylum from persecution by the Maduro regime. He loved his parents, so got tattoos on his arm with crowns saying “Mom” and “Dad.” The Trump administration decided that crowns were a sign of membership in Tren de Aragua, so determined that because they were facing such a dangerous invasion they had no choice but to send him to a Salvadoran labor camp. Those who were rounded up were collected in such a hurried and haphazard way that the administration ended up trying to give El Salvador six women, who were sent back because there was no place for them at the men’s prison. In fact, Bukele was apparently uncomfortable with the lack of evidence provided on the supposed criminal records and gang ties of the men that the Trump administration sent him. In other words, a developing country leader who is famous worldwide precisely for building large prison camps and locking up massive amounts of people in them thinks that the Trump administration is behaving in an authoritarian way.

Lie number 1 and lie number 3 are of course closely connected. Immigrant crime isn’t a serious problem. Trump told his voters that it was, and MAGA became fixated on a minor local news story in Aurora, Colorado. Then, Trump gets into power believing there are hordes of Venezuelan gang members terrorizing the country, and his administration decides to round up a bunch of them to put on a few flights for a good social media photo-op. But there aren’t even enough serious criminals from Venezuela to fill the planes, so they start rounding up random men with parking tickets or tattoos, and still they have enough room to bring a few women along for the ride too. Some of those picked up were even dissidents against the Maduro regime, whose “war” on the US was the justification for this entire policy. It’s truly hard to process how stupid and cruel all of this is.

4. They Lied about the Need to Send Migrants to El Salvador

All of this brings up the question of why the Trump administration didn’t just deport these Venezuelans back to their own country. Officials have claimed that Maduro would not take them back. This, as it turns out, is also a lie.

Rubio has said that the U.S. had to send the Venezuelans to El Salvador that day because their own country would not take back alleged gang members. But records reviewed by The Post show that two deportation flights to Venezuela were also scheduled to leave that weekend carrying dozens of alleged criminals, including at least one man Rubio has publicly accused of gang membership.

Those flights were canceled after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, prompting uncertainty about whether Venezuela could still safely send a plane to the U.S. to pick up deportees, according to two people involved in the discussions. Trump’s Alien Enemies Act proclamation says that property belonging to an “alien enemy” and used for hostile activity is subject to “seizure and forfeiture.”

It is important to realize that this isn’t a question about whether the administration has a right to deport people (the oft-made claim that this is the issue being another lie we could list). Immigration policy is often arbitrary, and people’s lives can be turned upside down at a moment when they do not have citizenship. But usually you are just sent back home. The Trump administration took the active step of locking migrants up in a prison camp.

5. They Lied about the Legal Status of Venezuelans

A MAGA might admit that 1-4 are lies, and then say “I don’t care, they’re here illegally! This is what happens.” Maybe you believe that a third world prison camp is a justified punishment for illegally crossing a border. This view, however, setting aside its repulsiveness, rests on a false premise. Reuters reviewed the circumstances of 50 Venezuelans shipped to El Salvador and found that 27 had active asylum claims before the courts. In other words, for the time being they had permission to stay in the US. The Trump administration will claim that Biden’s actions were somehow illegal or illegitimate, but it’s a generally accepted principle of justice that people are not punished for following the law as it was understood and enforced at the time they committed an act.

MAGA can at this point fall further into the abyss, and become even more morally deranged. “I don’t care if Biden told them they could stay. They’re not citizens, no promises made or reasonable expectations of safety can be honored. Trump can torture them to death for all I care because I’m America First! And plus they forced us to take the vaccine!! We’re a nation not an economy. So no dolls this Christmas!” At this point, you just have to shake your head and say, well, that’s a value system I guess. But if you have any moral system other than Trump is God or all foreigners should be made to suffer, this is not going to strike you as a compelling argument.

A Note on Abrego Garcia

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador, so his case is tangential to the Venezuelan issue. But there are a few lies in this case I feel compelled to discuss here. The Trump administration first admitted he was removed from the country illegally, but now denies that was the case. The Supreme Court ordered that the US facilitate his return to the country, and the administration alternates between saying there’s nothing they can do to bring him back and Trump claiming he could bring him back but doesn’t want to. They sometimes lie and say that they won by a 9-0 vote the Supreme Court case involving Abrego Garcia instead of losing it.

On April 19, the White House shared an image of Trump holding up a picture of Abrego Garcia’s knuckles with the characters MS-13 photoshopped on them.

Trump himself had previously sent out a message with the exact words “he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles.” I pointed out on X that this was a shocking lie, to which MAGAs responded I was being an idiot, of course those characters were photoshopped for illustrative purposes and the administration wasn’t trying to imply otherwise. Not too long after this, Trump during an interview clearly and emphatically stated that he did not believe that the picture was photoshopped.

Now, I’ve seen no compelling evidence that “Marijuana, smiley face, cross, skull” means MS-13. Maybe it does, or more likely, it’s another one of their lies. I’ve looked for some evidence of this and haven’t found it. Even if it did mean that, we generally don't send people to labor camps for having the wrong tattoos, but again, many Trump supporters are driven by sadism and hate and will of course justify doing so.

The overall point here is that you could for the Abrego Garcia case put together a list of lies on top of lies like I did for the Venezuelans above, but the knuckle story and the handful of lies briefly discussed above are enough to provide further evidence regarding how disconnected from reality and indifferent to the truth the current administration and its supporters are.

Dealing with a Movement of Limitless Lying

One thing about the lies told about the Venezuelan case is that even if administration officials were telling the truth on any particular issue, what they were doing still wouldn’t make any sense unless each lie was actually true.

You need the lie about the Maduro-Tren de Aragua connection to provide the legal basis for the policy, and you need immigrant crime to be a major enough issue to say that the country is in danger so has to take extreme measures. The people punished need to all be gang members too, and Venezuela has to refuse to take them back. If any one of these arguments isn’t true, the legal or policy basis for what the administration is doing falls apart. Yet on five major points, they are lying on each of them.

When I was still a reluctant Trump supporter, I would be embarrassed when debating leftists. I would go on Destiny’s podcast, and agree that, yes, the Trump campaign was lying about X, Y, and Z, but I still generally preferred conservative policies. It’s a relief I don’t have to do that anymore. The non-stop lying is much more grotesque when it is backed up by political power, and I clearly underestimated how difficult it would be to get smart and humane policy from people this lacking in basic integrity. An administration has to be rotten from top-to-bottom to invent a fake connection to justify a fake war for the ultimate purpose of locking up innocent men because they were born with the wrong nationality. The Trump movement is now a coalition of the sadistic, misinformed, and delusional. His remaining supporters generally have no one around who can embarrass them by pointing out that they constantly need to blind themselves to what is going on to support Trump administration narratives.

There’s a broader concern here with how we move forward with MAGAs in our midst. What do we do with a movement that is this dishonest? This whole society thing requires actors in it to feel a certain moral sense, or at the very least some capacity for shame. Everyone is tempted to twist the truth and government lies are common, but when you catch someone saying something dishonest or a narrative becomes too absurd to maintain, actors tend to adjust and pay some homage to reality. That doesn’t happen here. Trumpists lie, get caught in their lies, never apologize for or acknowledge their lies, and before you’re done pointing out one lie they’ve moved on to lying about something else, all the while claiming that they’ve been vindicated in their past lies through the process of making up more lies.

People often say Bush lied to get us into Iraq. But administration critics were able to narrow things down to two claims that were untrue: the supposed connection between Saddam and al-Qaida and the existence of WMDs. The latter in particular I don’t know if I would classify as a lie, since the administration was dealing with ambiguous evidence and had convinced itself that such weapons existed. But there are not simply one or two lies to rally around in the case of the deported Venezuelans. And the deported Venezuelans is just one issue! Again, just start looking into DOGE. Trump lying about the connection between Maduro and Tren de Aragua is perhaps the equivalent to hinting at a Saddam connection to al-Qaida. But in the latter case, Bush never signed an executive order finding an official relationship, it was simply something the administration implied. The Trump lie is much more blatant, and it is just one of countless lies the administration tells, on this subject and others, that are no less outrageous.

This all can have a demoralizing effect. Unlike with Bush or a normal administration, there aren’t a set number of lies you can rally around and bring to the public’s attention. People have limited attention spans, and it’s hard to know where to focus, or think of ways to convince them that the issue fundamentally isn’t about one or two lies but the moral flaws of Trump and his followers. For a more informed and curious audience, however, it’s useful to sometimes go through the exercise of showing how much they lie on one particular issue in order to help people understand how much trust they should place in the administration on other matters.

Perhaps the most important lesson to draw here is that it is difficult to imagine limits regarding what lies Trump and his supporters could theoretically tell and what actions they could justify. If you’re already at the point that you will repeat an entire constellation of lies about a fake war for no other reason than you need to justify Trump sending innocent men to rot in a brutal prison camp, are you going to have a crisis of conscience when he disobeys a court order, starts closing newspapers, or calls on his followers to murder his enemies while promising pardons? It’s hard to predict where this is all going. Trump’s brain is mush, and his subordinates and supporters have shown they will reverse engineer justifications for whatever nonsense comes out of his mouth. But if we can’t forecast what is going to happen in the future, the fundamental depravity of MAGA makes clear the moral obligation to do whatever we can to make sure these people are as restrained as they can possibly be over the next four years.