White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused Wednesday to reveal how the government had identified the hundreds of supposed gang members who were flown to El Salvador over the weekend.
Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act on Saturday, hoping to use the eighteenth-century law to suspend due process and deport scores of noncitizens who his administration claimed were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. But the government has yet to provide any information on who those individuals are, or exactly how they were determined to be members of the gang, now declared an invading force.
During a White House press briefing Wednesday, ABC News’s Rachel Scott asked Leavitt to reveal any actual information about the hundreds of people the government had deported.
“Can the administration provide any more details on how authorities determined that each of those men were in fact members of a gang?” asked Scott. “And if the White House can publish images, photos, videos of those men, why can’t the administration just release basic information like their identities and names?”
“We are not going to reveal operational details about a counterterrorism operation,” Leavitt said. “But what I can assure you, as I said on Monday, we have the highest degree of confidence in our ICE agents and our customs and border control agents who have committed their lives to targeting illegal criminals in our country, particularly foreign terrorists.”
Leavitt insisted that immigration authorities “had great evidence and indication” that those who were deported were foreign terrorists, or members of the Tren de Aragua gang.
Authorities “were 100 percent confident in the individuals that were sent home on these flights, and in the president’s executive authority to do that,” Leavitt said.
But there was cause for concern on the government’s judgment from the beginning. Judge James Boasberg’s original order Saturday was to prevent the deportation of five of the individuals, after two legal advocacy groups said that some individuals had been falsely labeled gang members. Boasberg later issued a second order for a total stay on any individual deported under the AEA—but by then, planes were already in the air.
Meanwhile, ICE has openly admitted that it has nothing on several of the noncitizens who were deported, and implied that the lack of evidence was the very thing that helped the government assume their guilt.
ICE Acting Field Office Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Robert Cerna argued that “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose,” and “demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile,” according to ABC News.
The family of one man, Francisco Javier Garcia, who was among the 261 individuals deported to prison in El Salvador, claimed that their loved one did not have a criminal record in the U.S. or in Venezuela, according to NBC Miami.
It appears that at least a few of the individuals rushed on the planes were marked as gang members simply because of their tattoos.
The White House said that of the 261 people who were deported, 101 were removed as part of “regular immigration proceedings.”
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