The allegation was chilling. An undocumented immigrant, the Department of Homeland Security said last week, had threatened in a letter to kill the president and then “self deport myself back to Mexico.”
“Thanks to our ICE officers, this illegal alien who threatened to assassinate President Trump is behind bars,” Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said in a news release that included photos of the immigrant and of the letter, handwritten in blue ink.
Not long after the announcement, the government’s story began to look shaky. Lawyers for the Mexican man, Ramon Morales Reyes, held a news conference proclaiming his innocence. And as detectives in Wisconsin, where Mr. Morales Reyes lived, began looking deeper, they came to believe he had been framed.
By this week, Milwaukee County prosecutors had filed identity theft and witness intimidation charges against another man, a lifelong Wisconsin resident. They said that man, Demetric D. Scott, had written several threatening letters that included Mr. Morales Reyes’s name in the return address. Prosecutors said it was an attempt to catch the attention of the Trump administration and weaponize the threat of deportation against Mr. Morales Reyes, who was scheduled to testify against Mr. Scott at a robbery trial next month.
On one level, the plan described by Wisconsin prosecutors worked. Top Trump administration officials took notice, and Mr. Morales Reyes, who worked as a dishwasher, was jailed. Even with Mr. Scott now facing charges, Mr. Morales Reyes remains in custody, awaiting a hearing before an immigration judge and facing the possibility of deportation. Federal officials said Mr. Morales Reyes had a history of entering the country illegally and an arrest record.
The Trump administration has taken an aggressive stance on deportation and immigration, claiming a mandate from voters on the issue. But advocates for immigrants warned that the administration’s approach had contributed to an atmosphere of fear and suspicion.
“This extreme anti-immigrant rhetoric that we’re hearing in the news constantly just emboldens hate in this way, and emboldens people to act in this way,” said Kime Abduli, a lawyer for Mr. Morales Reyes.
Homeland Security officials did not directly answer questions about whether they still believed their allegations that Mr. Morales Reyes had threatened the president. In an unsigned statement, the department said Monday night that “the investigation into the threat is ongoing” and that “over the course of the investigation, this individual was determined to be in the country illegally” and “had a criminal record,” though details of that record could not be immediately verified.
“He will remain in custody,” the department’s statement added.
A spokesman for the Secret Service, which investigates threats against the president, declined to comment when asked which version of events that agency believes.
For Mr. Scott’s part, rather than hastening his release from jail, the plot outlined by prosecutors seems to have upended his future, as well. Mr. Scott was already charged with robbery and accused of slashing Mr. Morales Reyes with a box cutter while taking a bicycle from him in 2023. He has pleaded not guilty in that case.
Now, Mr. Scott is facing the possibility of many more years in prison if convicted on the identity theft and witness intimidation charges. A lawyer who is representing Mr. Scott in the robbery case did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Scott told investigators that he had no intention of harming the president. But the letters’ threats against Mr. Trump, who was the target of two assassination attempts last year, proved jarring as the country deals with an uptick in political violence.
The letter writer said “we are tired of this president messing with us Mexicans,” and described plans to shoot him at a future rally. In a statement about Mr. Morales Reyes’s arrest, Ms. Noem said that “all politicians and members of the media should take notice of these repeated attempts on President Trump’s life and tone down their rhetoric.”
That letter was one of at least three sent last month to state, local and federal officials in Wisconsin that contained threats against Mr. Trump or Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, according to Milwaukee County prosecutors. Each of those letters, they said, was written in the same handwriting, and each was sent in an envelope listing Mr. Morales Reyes’s home as the return address.
The day after one of those letters arrived at the Milwaukee office of ICE, records show, immigration agents arrested Mr. Morales Reyes.
Ms. Abduli, the lawyer, said Mr. Morales Reyes had been in the early stages of applying for a U visa, which provides immigrants who have been victims of certain crimes and who have cooperated with law enforcement agencies a path to legal status. That application, she said, was based on his cooperation in the bicycle robbery case against Mr. Scott. Ms. Abduli described her client as a quiet, respectful family man who has lived in Milwaukee for years and has three children who were born in the United States. She said Mr. Morales Reyes is from rural Mexico and came to this country seeking better opportunities for his family.
The Department of Homeland Security said Mr. Morales Reyes, 54, had entered the United States illegally at least nine times in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and that he had been arrested several times. Federal officials said those arrests included accusations of being involved in a hit and run, criminal damage to property and disorderly conduct.
Homeland Security officials did not specify when or where those arrests had taken place or whether they had led to convictions. The department did not respond to messages seeking additional information about those cases, and attempts to locate court records verifying the department’s claims about Mr. Morales Reyes were not immediately successful. Ms. Abduli said she did not have enough information to know whether the governments’s descriptions of those cases were accurate.
After Mr. Morales Reyes’s arrest in May, doubts about his role in the threatening letters began to mount. Mr. Morales Reyes does not speak or write in English, records show, and his handwriting in Spanish did not seem to match the printed writing in English on the letters. When investigators asked through an interpreter if he could think of anyone who would want to frame him, he thought of Mr. Scott.
When Wisconsin detectives started listening to recorded phone calls Mr. Scott had made from jail, they heard him asking for the mailing address of the Wisconsin attorney general and sharing plans to send letters to people that he wanted them to mail from outside of jail.
“We can go into court and say, ‘Hey, he’s in custody now — um, there is no reason for us to even continue the July 15 jury date,’” Mr. Scott said in a May 16 phone call from jail, according to a criminal compliant. “And the judge will agree, ’cause if he gets picked up by ICE, there won’t be a jury trial, so they will probably dismiss it that day. That’s my plan.”
According to a detective’s account in court records, Mr. Scott admitted to writing the letters and to trying to frame Mr. Morales Reyes.
“The defendant stated that he knew that including a threat to President Trump in the letters would mean that Secret Service would have to get involved and law enforcement would definitely go to” Mr. Morales Reyes’s home, the detective wrote.
During a brief court appearance in Milwaukee on Tuesday, Mr. Scott said nothing as he sat in an orange jumpsuit with his hands cuffed. Barry Phillips, the court commissioner who presided over the hearing, set bail at $30,000 and said it was “the definition of ingenuity” to try “to get that person arrested and potentially deported so he could not testify against you.”
“But what was unintelligent,” Mr. Phillips said, “was the fact that everything you did was recorded by telephone.”
Ms. Abduli, a lawyer for Mr. Morales Reyes, said that it had “been a painful and terrifying past few days for Ramon and his family” and that she was “relieved that Ramon’s innocence in all of this has been made clear.”
“He was first a victim of someone else’s attempts to frame him,” she said in a statement, “and then a victim of the Department of Homeland Security, who chose to publish his name and face while perpetuating false accusations and a false narrative.”
She said federal officials should correct the record, or at least take down the announcement accusing Mr. Morales Reyes of making the threats.
As of Tuesday evening, the Department of Homeland Security’s news release about Mr. Morales Reyes remained online.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
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