Amid repeated assertions by administration figures that President Donald Trump’s deadly anti-immigrant blitz is “targeting the worst of the worst” among “criminal illegal aliens,” critics of the crackdown this week pointed to official data supporting those claims.
Take last month’s invasion by federal forces of a Chicago apartment complex, during which witnesses said agents broke down doors, terrorized residents including children, smashed furniture and belongings, and dragged away dozens of zip-tied people including US citizens and minors. US citizen children were separated from their undocumented parents after the raid.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a statement calling the raid a “targeted enforcement operation” in an area “frequented” by Tren de Aragua (TDA), a transnational criminal organization from Venezuela that Trump has designated a terrorist group and targeted in a series of extrajudicial high-seas assassinations of people critics contending did not belong to the gang.
The Trump administration initially said that two people arrested during the raid were suspected of being TDA members but then quietly held that figure to just one, without providing evidence to support even that claim.
This, after Stephen Miller, Trump’s white nationalist deputy chief of staff who reportedly advocated once advocated drone strikes on unarmed migrants, painted a picture of a neighborhood overrun by TDA gangsters. “The official DHS count of Tren de Aragua members arrested in the Chicago apartment raid has now dropped down to just ONE,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the advocacy group American Immigration Council, said on social media Tuesday. “A few days ago, Stephen Miller was claiming the entire building was ‘full of Tren de Aragua terrorists.’”
