Memo shows spy agencies do not think Venezuela sent crime gang to target US

A declassified memo released Monday revealed that US spy agencies do not believe that Venezuela sent the Tren de Aragua (TDA) gang to target America, contrary to President Donald Trump's reasoning for invoking the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to deport alleged gang members.

Trump opted to invoke the little-used wartime statute -- last implemented during World War II -- in March, deporting nearly 150 undocumented migrants who were believed to be members of Tren de Aragua to an El Salvador supermax prison without due process to attain a lawyer or schedule a court hearing.

The new memo states that the various intelligence agencies did not think that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro controlled Tren de Aragua, which contradicted Trump's assertion when he invoked the Alien Enemies Act, according to the New York Times.

"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," said the memo.

The document was released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The government "almost immediately declassified the same information in response to a FOIA request," said Lauren Harper, the chair on government secrecy for the foundation, in an interview with the New York Times.

"The declassification proves that the material should have been public from the start, not used as an excuse to suppress sharing information with the press," said Harper, adding that the memo was at odds with the Trump administration's portrayal of its contents as a dire threat to public safety.

Trump declared during his invocation of the AEA that Tren de Aragua had committed crimes to destabilize the US "at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela."

A New York Times investigation, however, reported that the US intelligence community had circulated findings on Feb. 26 that reached the opposite conclusion, assessing that the Venezuelan government and Tren De Aragua were adversaries.

The newly released memo revealed that the US spy community drew their conclusion based on several factors: Venezuelan security forces had arrested TDA gang members and had "periodically engaged in armed confrontations with TDA, resulting in the killing of some TDA members," exemplifying that the Venezuelan government treated the gang as a threat.

The memo also said that FBI analysts agreed with the other spy agencies' overall assessment that while "some Venezuelan government officials facilitate TDA members' migration from Venezuela to the United States," most of the intelligence community "judges that intelligence indicating that regime leaders are directing or enabling TDA migration to the United States is not credible."

The White House and Justice Department have not yet commented on the declassified intelligence memo.