In a now infamous September raid on a 130-unit apartment building in Chicago, hundreds of agents reportedly rappelled in from helicopters, kicked in doors, ransacked rooms, deployed flashbangs, and zip-tied people—immigrants and native Chicagoans, adults and children—in the middle of the night.
Amid growing criticism of this heavy-handed blitz, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller defended the operation, calling it a “brilliantly executed raid against a Tren de Aragua complex filled with TdA terrorists.” (Tren de Aragua, or TdA, is a Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration, with characteristic alarmism, claims has “invaded the United States.”)
So, how many members of the Venezuelan gang did they catch in the controversial September raid? DHS says that, of the 37 individuals arrested that night, agents got ahold of “just one ‘verified’ Tren de Aragua member,” MSNBC reported this week.
It was previously reported that two of the 37 arrested were members of TdA, but even that disappointing figure was evidently overstating it. Further, DHS has yet to provide proof of the alleged gang member’s connection to TdA—a point worth noting, since the Trump administration has faced criticism for advancing weak claims of immigrants’ gang membership in service of its mass deportation campaign.
This new finding lends itself to the conclusions Illinois Governor JB Pritzker shared in his recent conversation with TNR’s Greg Sargent about the raid: “If this was Pinochet’s Chile, if this was Argentina under authoritarian rule, maybe you’d call it successful,” he said, adding later, “Whenever the [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and [Customs and Border Protection] agents say something, they put out a release or, you know, you’ve got Stephen Miller talking about it, they are lying.”
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