Trump administration says deported migrants are gang members, but won’t name them or provide evidence

(CNN) — The Trump administration has deported hundreds of migrants while refusing to reveal their identities or the evidence against them, prompting complaints from the migrants’ families and from critics who say the administration is trampling on civil liberties.

The administration says its invocation of a rarely used wartime authority to speed up deportations serves to protect Americans from the “extraordinary threat” posed by suspected gang members who the president has designated as foreign terrorists.

But administration officials have provided little information that could allow outsiders to independently assess its claims that scores of immigrants who were deported from the country last weekend are affiliated with violent gangs or have extensive criminal records.

Some relatives of the presumed deported migrants, meanwhile, have described a murky and ham-fisted process that disappeared people they say have no ties to organized crime, leaving them isolated from loved ones and legal advocates.

Asked Wednesday by a reporter why the administration wouldn’t share basic information about the detainees, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration would not “reveal operational details about a counter-terrorism operation,” but added it has “the highest degree of confidence in our ICE agents.”

Yet earlier in that same briefing, Leavitt touted the capture in Mexico of Francisco Javier Román-Bardales, an alleged senior member of MS-13 who is expected to be delivered to the United States to face charges that include conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists.

The weekend deportations were roundly criticized by Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups who accused the administration of acting outside its authority.

Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said Trump’s administration was “deporting immigrants without due process, based solely on their nationality.”

“Courts determine whether people have broken the law,” the senator said on X. “Not a President acting solo… and not immigration agents cherry-picking who gets imprisoned or deported.”

In a declaration filed in federal court earlier this week, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said agents “carefully vetted” the gang affiliations of each of the 261 deportees and provided broad descriptions of crimes that several of them have been arrested for or convicted of in the United States and abroad.

But in that same declaration, ICE Acting Field Office Director Robert L. Cerna acknowledged that many of the deportees “do not have criminal records in the United States.” He added, “That is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time.”

“The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat,” Cerna wrote in the declaration, saying the dearth of information about them instead “actually highlights the risk they pose. … It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”

ICE did not immediately respond to a request asking them to provide identifying information about some of the migrants described in that declaration. But the governments of both the United States and El Salvador have released videos that depict some of them. The mother of one of the presumed deportees told CNN en Español that she recognized her son in media released by the Salvadoran government and denied he belonged to any gang.

In what it described as an effort at transparency, the Trump administration provided a breakdown of the 261 immigrants who were deported to a prison in El Salvador under an agreement with the country’s president, Nayib Bukele. The administration said 137 of those immigrants were deported pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law which grants the president broad authority to detain or deport the citizens of an enemy nation during wartime.

The invocation of that law set up an ongoing showdown between the executive and judicial branches that could plunge the United States into a constitutional crisis if the Trump administration decides to openly defy a court order. Trump has said in recent interviews that he wouldn’t do so.

A judge over the weekend temporarily blocked the administration’s ability to invoke that law to quickly deport migrants, causing Trump to suggest that judge should be impeached. Trump’s statements about the judge in turn caused Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to issue a rare rebuke of the president.

Another 101 of the immigrants were Venezuelans who were being expelled under regular immigration laws, officials said. And the other 23 were members of MS-13, another gang.

Trump has suggested that the United States is being invaded by foreign criminal organizations including Tren de Aragua, whose members he has designated as foreign terrorists.

The administration has faced other questions about whether it has overstated the risks posed by some deportees. Senior Trump administration officials previously said that the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay would be reserved for the “worst of the worst,” but court declarations from administration officials would later reveal dozens of people held at the base were considered low-to-medium risk.

CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez contributed to this report.

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