On March 15, the Trump administration sent more than 230 Venezuelan immigrants to CECOT, a maximum security prison in El Salvador.
The administration claimed that the men being deported were dangerous criminals. In White House briefings, the administration has provided narratives to back up the claim for some – but far from all – of those deported to El Salvador. The deportations sparked considerable public outcry, including important questions about due process.
Two weeks ago, the men were released as suddenly as they had been whisked away. ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have been working on collecting their stories and have published many of them in a database.
Perla Trevizo, a reporter with the ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigative unit, said the process started with the list of 238 names published by CBS News.
“We started working with a group of Venezuelan journalists who were doing similar work,” she said. “We work with our researchers, who did fantastic work getting all the background information, scouring courts across the country. We scoured records in Latin America — Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Colombia.
“On top of that, we work with our data journalists to analyze not only the internal data that we have obtained, but also analyze immigration court data.”
In addition to individual stories, the database includes some aggregate information about the group as a whole. Trevizo said not only did the vast majority of the deportees not have any violent criminal charges or convictions, the internal data that ProPublica obtained shows that the administration knew this fact as well.
“Based on the immigration court data, a lot of them, nearly half of them, had been in the middle of their immigration cases, which normally should have protected them from deportation,” she said. “There were others who had things such as temporary protective status, others that had entered the country with CBP One appointments, which was [the system] under Biden.”
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Another big finding was that at least 166 of the deported men had tattoos.
“This is important just because the government has claimed that it does not base its assessment on tattoos,” Trevizo said. “But what we found is that a lot of the men told us, or their families told us through interviews, and through documents we found that the images that they had on their bodies played a big role in how they were tied to the Venezuelan prison gang, Tren de Aragua.”
Trevizo said her team wanted to build this database to have a record available to the public about a high-profile and sometimes confusing news event.
“Whenever something is reported, the administration comes back and says, ‘well, you don’t have the whole story’ or ‘they committed crimes abroad’ or ‘here’s this other piece of information that you just don’t know about,’’” she said. “And we thought it was important for the public and officials and everyone involved in this to do this one by one. Read it for yourself and make your own decision.”
The goal of the database is the provide as much verifiable information as possible for each case, Trevizo said. ProPublica shared each of the profiles they created with the Trump administration to give them an opportunity to fill in missing information, but didn’t get a response, she said.
“[We have] the government’s own data of how they had labeled them,” she said. “There are cases where we did find someone with violent crimes, and that’s included there. We try to reach out to each of the family members or lawyers that we can find for every individual where we mention a potential criminal record to get their side of the story and their response. …We’re simply providing the facts that we could find.”
This includes following cases all the way through to the end result, Trevizo said.
“There were, for example, a group of guys who had been arrested in Tennessee, and there had been press releases about them talking about human trafficking and prostitution,” she said. “When we looked and actually pulled the records, it turns out that the charges had been dismissed later that month. We’re not omitting when there had been those accusations, but we try to follow it till the end as much as possible.”
