Turns Out Trump Lied About Those Deportations to El Salvador
60 Minutes has looked into the records of the immigrants deported to El Salvador’s megaprison. They’re not who Trump claims.

60 Minutes’ Cecelia Vega on Sunday confirmed what anyone who’s been paying attention already suspected: An overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan men that Trump deported to a Salvadoran megaprison have no criminal record whatsoever. Yet the president continues to call them Tren de Aragua gang members and terrorists to legitimize his invoking of the Alien Enemies Act.
60 Minutes was able to get access to government records of the Venezuelans and compare them to domestic and international arrest records and court filings. The news program reported that they “could not find criminal records for 75 percent of the Venezuelans—179 men—now sitting in prison.” Less than a quarter have an arrest record in the U.S., and they are mostly for nonviolent offenses. This proves that the Trump administration is carrying out its cruelty campaign indiscriminately—if you’re a South American immigrant with tattoos, you could find yourself in Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s infamous megaprison with a shaved head and without a day in court.
The Trump administration told 60 Minutes that it were wrong and that the 179 men truly are “actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters, and more. They just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
“Could it be possible that there is something that perhaps the government knows that you don’t?’ Vega asked Lindsay Toczylowski, the lawyer representing Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist and theatre troupe member who was deported to the megaprison.
“I don’t think that that is possible,” Toczylowski replied. “But if it was possible that they had some information, they should follow the Constitution, present that information, give us the ability to reply to it.”
But the Trump administration is fighting tooth and nail to avoid doing that, even invoking the State Secrets Act to keep proof of its illegal disappearings in the shadows. There is no timeline for freedom for the many innocent Venezuelan men sitting in one of the world’s most brutal prisons.