A declassified memo drafted by U.S. intelligence agencies contradicts President Donald Trump's claims that Venezuela's government controls the Tren de Aragua gang, an argument he has used to deport immigrants to an El Salvador prison.
The National Intelligence Council memo states that the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro allows criminal gangs to operate in its territory but that it is not orchestrating Tren de Aragua’s operations in the United States.
“While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States,” according to the April 7 memo.
The National Intelligence Director's Office released the memo in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization. The foundation provided a copy to NBC News. Titled "Venezuela: Examining regime ties to Tren de Aragua," the declassified version of the five-page memo included some blacked out-words and passages.
The New York Times first reported on the memo Monday.
Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act after declaring Tren de Aragua an invading force. The law had only been used in wartime.
He and administration officials have said that the Tren de Aragua gang is operating under the guidance and direction of the Venezuelan regime.
“TdA is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela,” Trump wrote in his proclamation invoking the act.
The law has been used to summarily deport Venezuelans and other immigrants to a prison in El Salvador. The prison is notorious for its brutal and abusive conditions.
The intelligence community said it based its judgment about Tren de Aragua on “Venezuelan law enforcement actions demonstrating the regime treats TDA as a threat; an uneasy mix of cooperation and confrontation, rather than top down directives characterizing the regime’s ties to other armed groups; and the decentralized makeup of TDA that would make such a relationship logistically challenging.”
The memo noted that FBI analysts took a slightly different view even though they agreed broadly with the assessment of the other intelligence agencies. FBI analysts “assess some Venezuelan government officials facilitate TDA members’ migration from Venezuela to the United States and use members as proxies in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the United States to advance what they see as the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing governments and undermining public safety in these countries,” the memo said.
The Washington Post first reported on the existence of the memo, and before that the Times reported that intelligence called into question assertions about the cartel and its ties to the Venezuelan government.
The Trump administration has sharply criticized media coverage of the issue as misleading and announced leak investigations related to the Post and Times reporting. The Justice Department cited the media reporting as an impetus to roll back limits on leak investigations.
Lauren Harper of the Freedom of the Press Foundation said the memo undermines the administration’s claims that the information in the document could pose a danger to public safety.
“The Trump administration claimed that the leak of this memo was so dangerous that it necessitated opening criminal investigations and creating new, stricter rules around leaks to the media,” Harper said in an email. “We wanted to see if that was true — or if the Justice Department was weakening journalists’ protections to help hide a document that the public has an obvious right to see.”
The declassified memo “not only shows that the Maduro regime does not direct Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, it shows the DOJ’s new media rules are an excuse to target journalists,” she said.
But the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said that the news media is “twisting” and “manipulating” intelligence assessments about foreign criminal gangs operating in the U.S. “to undermine the President's agenda to keep the American people safe.”
“Illegal immigrant criminals have raped, tortured, and murdered Americans, and still, the propaganda media continues to operate as apologists for them,” she said in an email relayed by a spokesperson.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence later issued a statement saying it “fully supports the assessment that the foreign terrorist organization, Tren De Aragua, is acting with the support of the Maduro Regime, and thus subject to arrest, detention, and removal as alien enemies of the United States.”
At a House Intelligence Committee hearing in March, Gabbard told lawmakers that there were conflicting findings on the ties between the gang and the regime. “There are varied assessments that came from different intelligence community elements,” she said.
The ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, and Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas, also a member of the committee, welcomed the memo’s release and said they had written a letter last month to Gabbard asking her to declassify it.
The lawmakers argued that the declassified assessment reinforced the finding of a federal judge last week that the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act related to the Tren de Aragua gang “was illegal.”
The Democratic congressmen also wrote that “Director Gabbard should explain why her public descriptions of this intelligence failed to correspond with the IC’s findings.”
They added: “The most basic responsibility of the Director of National Intelligence is to speak truth to power and, where possible, the American people.”
Asked about the declassified memo, the Republican chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, said in an email that he “fully supports President Trump’s tireless efforts to protect Americans from brutal thugs who seek to invade our homeland and terrorize the American people.”
Cotton added that he looks forward to journalists' "questioning his Democrat friends as to why they continue to defend foreigners who seek to do harm to their constituents."
Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the memo showed that the Maduro regime is not a sponsor of Tren de Aragua.
“It’s extremely concerning to see the DNI misrepresent nonpartisan Intelligence Community assessments,” he said in a statement. “It’s even more alarming to see this happening as part of an effort to give legs to Donald Trump’s unconstitutional attempts to expulse migrants without due process.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote in an op-ed on Fox News’ website that it was irrelevant if Tren de Aragua was acting on the orders of the Maduro regime, arguing the regime had “fostered its growth.”
“Whether TdA exclusively murders, smuggles drugs, and traffics illegal immigrants over our borders on the orders of Venezuelan leaders, or freelances for self-enrichment is beside the point,” he wrote. “It has killed on behalf of a hostile foreign government, that government has fostered its growth, and that government has encouraged it to invade the United States to advance its interests.”