Administration Lied To Itself To Keep Pushing Its Fake ‘Tren De Aragua’ Terrorism Narrative

from the who-needs-facts-when-you-have-rhetoric dept

We always knew the narrative was false. The administration’s insistence that Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) was somehow an international menace always rang hollow — just another way to disappear brown people into an El Salvadoran torture prison.

For months, it’s been clear the intelligence doesn’t back the claims made by the deliberately stupid leaders of the Trump administration. A leak of intelligence information last May forced the Director of National Intelligence — personified in this administration by the always incredible (in the bad way) Tulsi Gabbard — to forcefully deny the TdA findings compiled by the Intelligence Community she supposedly oversees.

That’s on top of the sketchy system run by even sketchier federal law enforcement officers to determine who is or isn’t a member of a foreign gang like TdA. The stuff these slackers pointed to — tattoos, having any contact whatsoever with anyone else the government is pretending is a TdA member, etc. — wasn’t actually backed by any research or intelligence-gathering. Unlike MS-13 and other gangs, TdA doesn’t seem to require permanent skin ink as part of its onboarding process.

This hype about TdA was used to justify everything from the stripping of due process rights to the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to push past whatever minimal resistance was offered by courts or timid members of Congress. The administration may now be more focused on punishing Trump’s enemies, but the phrase “enemies both foreign and domestic” is still in play, which means the administration will still leverage “but their gangs” proclamations whenever possible.

But, in order to do so, the administration has to willfully ignore the growing body of evidence generated by its own agencies that contradict this narrative, as Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro report for Wired:

While senior administration officials portrayed TdA as a centrally directed terrorist network active across American cities, internal tasking directives and threat assessments repeatedly cite “intelligence gaps” in understanding how the group operated on US soil: Whether it had identifiable leadership, whether its domestic activity reflecting any coordination beyond small local crews, and whether US-based incidents pointed to foreign direction or were simply the work of autonomous, profit-driven criminals.

These are what the documents acquired by Wired — internal law enforcement documents marked “sensitive” and not intended for public disclosure — actually said about TdA and its alleged international efforts:

While senior administration officials spoke of “invasion,” “irregular warfare,” and “narco-terrorism,” field-level reporting consistently portrayed Tren de Aragua in the US as a fragmented, profit-driven criminal group, with no indication of centralized command, strategic coordination, or underlying political motive. The criminal activity described is largely opportunistic—if not mundane—ranging from smash-and-grab burglaries and ATM “jackpotting” to delivery-app fraud and low-level narcotics sales.

The boots on the ground can’t find anything that agrees with what’s coming out of the administration’s collective mouth on any given day. And the lack of connective tissue between TdA and the Venezuelan government makes Trump’ plan to “take over” the country look even more illegal than it already looked, back when Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department was limiting itself to murdering people in international waters.

Administration officials — especially those making the most noise about TdA = international terrorism — have always had access to this information. And they’ve deliberately chosen to ignore it because it undercuts the supposed justifications for their massive, continuous power grabs.

This is the fact-free environment that is being forced on us by an administration that has chosen to only serve itself. Here’s America’s racist grandpa expounding on his idiotic hatred of one particular nation:

Trump singled out Venezuela in particular. “I was so angry with Venezuela,” he said. “They emptied their prisons, almost entirely emptied their prisons, into the United States.”

Here’s the reality:

Over a 22-month period, CBP’s own detection methods identified no more than 83 known TdA members at the border. 

Not quite the prison flooding Trump claimed. And even after CBP engaging in some very imaginative extrapolation of this small number (by simply adding in the unproven assumption that “one-half of one percent” of all Venezuelans seeking to enter the US “had ties to TdA”) only raised that number to a little over 3,000 possible TdA gang members, which is far below the number anyone would reasonably believe amounted to an “invasion” by an international criminal cartel with a strong desire to get some terrorism on. It’s even more stupid when you add in the other intel: that most TdA activity tends to be random, low-level crimes of opportunity, rather than the sort of coordinated effort you’d find in larger, far more competent criminal cartels.

While it’s not that surprising that a presidential administration would filter out facts that don’t fit the narratives it’s trying to pitch, it’s far beyond abhorrent that a president who claims he loves America and Americans more than any president in history would consider them to be nothing more than occasionally useful rubes. But those who continue to love Trump no matter how often he lies to them have proven they don’t care what’s being said. They only care who’s saying it.

Filed Under: bigotry, dhs, ice, mass deporation, tren de aragua, trump administration