Even Trump Doesn't Believe His Immigrant Lies
If the immigrants were really Venezuelan agents, Trump's top officials would be acting very differently
This guest column originally appeared at the Substack of journalist Jonathan Larsen, a veteran of ABC, CNN, and MSNBC, who served as executive producer of Up with Chris Hayes. You can check out and subscribe to Jonathan's Substack here
Accused Venezuelan gang members sent from the U.S. were transported within the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on March 16, 2025. (Uncredited / El Salvador presidential office photo.)
On March 15, 2025, the U.S. government shipped 261 people to El Salvador. More have followed.
Pres. Donald Trump is paying the country $6 million annually to imprison people he’s ordered forcibly removed from the U.S.
At the time, 137 of those people were sent to El Salvador under the provisions of the Alien Enemies Act. Trump is claiming they are Venezuelan gang members deployed to the U.S. to engage in hostile actions against American targets. Many, the Trump administration conceded, had no criminal record in the U.S.
Everyone understands that Trump is lying. But it’s worth looking at how we know both that his claims are false and that he knows he’s lying.
For one thing, Trump’s own intelligence community leaders know there’s no truth to it. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was asked directly under oath and wouldn’t substantiate Trump’s claims. CIA Director John Ratcliffe testified they had no assessment to back Trump’s claims.
The New York Times reported less than a week after Trump’s March 15 invocation of Alien Enemies Act powers that his own intelligence agencies had concluded in February that his premise for it was false. The Washington Post confirmed and deepened this reporting this week.
As I reported last week, Trump has been getting unofficial intel from a team that includes a former CIA agent who ran for Senate as a Tea Party candidate on a platform of hardline opposition to immigration. The Miami Herald first reported that the “team” consists of former U.S. and Venezuelan officials.
The former CIA agent, Gary Berntsen, is the only team member named by the Herald. He gave a followup interview about a week later to former Bush administration official Bart Marcois. Here’s what Berntsen said:
“Remember, sabotage includes arson … Many of these wildfires, industrial fires, the Los Angeles fires, taking advantage of wind and the local conditions, were started by arsonists. How many of them were paid or coerced by TdA or their surrogates?”
(The worst of the Los Angeles fires was allegedly started by Southern California Edison, a for-profit concern that deemed safety measures for discarded lines too costly.)
Marcois says Berntsen showed him “proof of the close relationships among Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan military and intelligence apparatus, Cuban intelligence, and the worst of the Latin American narcoterrorists.” This proof has yet to be made public.
The administration’s best evidence for its wild claims about Kilmar Abrego Garcia — the sheet-metal worker accused by the White House of being a terrorist drug lord and more — is previous law-enforcement records which fall well short of criminal convictions. He wore a Chicago Bulls hat, police noted as evidence of his criminal affiliations.
Gabbard refuses to release additional, ostensible evidence against Abrego Garcia or others. But Trump’s own actions — or lack thereof — should speak louder than his defamatory White House spokespeople.
The “team” feeding Trump info told the Miami Herald that the administration has arrested at least 800 Venezuelans based on information the team provided. Three-hundred of them, according to the former CIA officer, had participated in Venezuelan para-military training courses.
They learned how to use weapons, commit sabotage, and even crypto-currencies.
The team gave a presentation to unnamed administration officials, briefing them on how these gang members act as hit squads for the Cartel de los Soles, the drug traffickers said to run the gang.
So why on Earth would Trump ship these captured agents and operatives off to El Salvador? That’s not what intelligence or law-enforcement agencies do when they actually have valuable sources in custody!
The administration claims it captured scores of men — hardened criminals, some with para-military training — with deep knowledge of an international drug cartel and a covert plan by the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and Trump almost instantly just…sent them away.
If the accusations on which Trump is basing his claim for Alien Enemies Act powers were remotely near the truth, the last thing his administration would want would be to let these footsoldiers out of their grasp, especially right away.
If Trump and his top intel leaders really thought these hundreds of mercenary hostiles — allegedly 5,000 in total — were really here to wage a covert war against at least 20 locations in the United States, as the unofficial team alleges, the very first thing that law enforcement would try to do would be to determine where imminent attacks were coming.
We would have seen the entire national security and law-enforcement apparatus rapidly stand up a multi-agency task force to process these captives. Investigators, researchers, interrogators, lawyers, prosecutors, analysts.
In theory, capturing 800 covert, violent, foreign operatives would be a phenomenal intelligence victory. The FBI — or if we’re going the Bush route, the CIA — would rapidly begin assessing these sources for their potential intel value, triaging them to determine who to talk to first, and then beginning the complicated process of identifying who’s willing to talk and which ones will give up what info. They had, after all, a helluva stick to threaten these people with: Disappearance into an El Salvadoran black hole of human-rights violations.
If Trump were being remotely honest, it would actually be an intelligence failure of staggering, 9/11 proportions if he had 800 of these people in hand — that’s 16% of the alleged total enemy force! — and then just…gave them up. Without even trying to determine where the next attack was coming.
Where are the sleeper cells? Who else is joining sheet-metal unions and starting families to conceal their true aims? Which town will follow Aurora, CO, into the gang’s clutches?1
And the next “attack” on the U.S. wouldn’t be the only item on the law-enforcement or intel agenda.
These gang members included supposed hit men for an international drug cartel. Did the Drug Enforcement Administration get a crack at any of them? A chance for their own investigators to wheedle even a crumb of intel out of these hundreds and hundreds of hardcore cartel players and hit men?
What about the Maduro regime itself? Surely the CIA and NSA would’ve wanted to know what these hundreds of Maduro operatives knew. Who’s running things back in Caracas? How were orders transmitted? Is there a paper trail? Where’s the funding funneled from?
And then there would’ve been parallel efforts to make this motherlode of intel pay off. Justice Department prosecutors surely would’ve wanted to build cases not just against those in custody, but against those not in custody.
Wouldn’t prosecutors and investigators have wanted a chance to develop relationships with these possible sources? Maybe offer them a chance to stay here legally if they’d flip on their unknown compatriots here in the states, the money guys, the front companies, and the “legit” businesses laundering the cash from the drugs and for the invasion?
Finally, there would’ve been the public-relations campaign. Why wouldn’t the Trump administration want a face — hell, a dozen faces — willing to go on Fox or Newsmax and tell their gripping inside story as a reluctant warrior for the Maduro war on America?
They didn’t want to keep one of these hundreds of people around long enough to shoot for the insane propaganda victory that would’ve represented? Imagine what that would have done to the current political battle over Abrego Garcia, deportations, and immigration itself.
We’re supposed to believe Trump willingly passed on 800 chances to tell Democrats to suck it and mark them for a generation as unwitting dupes for a foreign dictator hellbent on covert attacks against Mom, baseball, and apple pie?
Literally, all they needed was one cooperating witness. But the Trump administration’s failure to stage even a Potemkin village of investigative efforts suggests we’re just supposed to assume that not a single one of these hardened criminals is willing to give up Maduro and take a life of material comfort in the U.S. over a life sentence in a prison hellhole.
Not one that we know of has flipped on the others. Because no one asked them to. Because everyone knows it’s a lie.
Luckily, some Democrats, like Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), are rejecting the craven centrist advice to ignore this arguably treasonous, definitely impeachable, inhumane power grab.
(Even some conservatives have begun to wonder whether maybe it’s wrong not to undo accidentally sending a man to prison. Christian radio host Eric Erickson hilariously warned that this obscene violation of due process is bad because it “will be used eventually by the Democrats in a way we can’t foresee.”)
Trump’s prosecution of his fictional war in pursuit of presidential power should be risible on its face. Instead of learning the lessons of Iraq, however, we’re still so traumatized by 9/11 that the instinctive American response to years of right-wing fear-mongering about immigrants has been to embrace the fear that Osama bin Laden bequeathed to us.
But polling suggests Trump’s horrors are opening eyes. Most Americans oppose depriving these detainees of due process. And it’s good to see Van Hollen and others reject fear and dare to treat even imprisoned accused “enemies” as human beings.
1 I am, of course, being facetious as Aurora, CO, police only know of a dozen Tren de Aragua members there.
Wow! So interesting and it makes so much sense. Thanks.
A great essay!
As a devout disciple of Jesus’, I assure you that “Christian”broadcaster Eric Erickson is one of too many Evangelical Nationalists who try to cover up their racist, white supremacist and fascist cult in a wrapper of supposed Christianity. What they espouse is as far from the teachings of Jesus as the east is from the west.