So given that everything else about the Trump regime's plot to traffic over 250 migrants to a forever torture prison in El Salvador without due process under the guise of fighting an "invasion" by a "narco-terrorist" gang turned out to be a lie, illegal, or straight up fascist fuckery, would it surprise you at all to learn that US intelligence agencies do *not* think Tren de Aragua is working with the government of Venezuela to invade the United States? Yeah, me neither; but the fact that the Trump regime knowingly just made up the so-called "invasion" fundamentally undercuts their entire argument for invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which in turn means they have no legal basis whatsoever for all the fascist repression and unconstitutional criminality they've engaged in here.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-venezuelan-gangs

'They Just Made Sh*t Up': Declassified Spy Memo Undercuts Trump Pretext for Deportations to El Salvador

"A memo released Monday by the Trump administration in response to a Freedom of Information Act request confirmed that U.S. intelligence agencies never agreed with President Donald Trump's claim in March that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro controls the criminal gang Tren de Aragua—an assertion that was used to justify sending hundreds of migrants to a notorious Salvadoran prison.

The document said that "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."

As in several previous cases it's important to understand that the regime's lies and illegal manipulations of US law are being exposed by their own internal memos; this isn't a political attack or about motivated reasoning because the Trump administration itself wrote down that they knew Trump was lying, or at least that US intelligence didn't agree with his assessment of Tren de Aragua as an arm of the Venezuelan government. The regime tries to cover that up with vague nonsense about FBI intelligence but one of these groups is paid to monitor the activities of foreign governments the US is actively sanctioning, and one of them gets paid to convince unstable people they're secretly in ISIS to justify an ongoing counterterrorism program that's worth billions of dollars in funding; so I'll let you decide for yourself which of these two groups is more likely to know what they're talking about here. In other words, folks arguing that Trump was governing by fascist conspiracy theory and the regime literally made up a fake war to do white nationalist mass deportations, were completely, and totally correct; full stop.

"So you mean kidnapping folks off the streets and sending them to a foreign gulag was not justified by our own intelligence?" said the Arkansas Justice Project. "They just made shit up to dog whistle their base. The AEA argument was never legitimate and they knew it all along."

Frankly I do understand the temptation to scoff "so, what; we already knew that" in response to this news. But I need folks to realize that while it may have been obvious to anyone paying attention that the regime literally made up a whole invasion to justify their fascist mass deportation theater operation, the entire US establishment has more or less been pretending that it's somehow *possible* Trump is right about Tren de Aragua working for Venezuela to undermine American national security. As the article notes, until very recently not one judge has questioned the underlying logic of Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act or its debunked claims that Tren de Argua is an arm of the Venezuelan government. While the regime has received a modicum more pushback in the media, without direct confirmation that Trump is definitely (instead of just obviously) lying, news outlets have been reluctant to push back when the regime claims they're fighting a narco-terrorist invasion to justify their fascist repression and criminality. Will that change now that we've caught the regime lying through their own memos? Who knows, but it probably won't hurt.

The big picture analysis here is that Trump hacked the imperial presidency and an American war machine already in largely bipartisan agreement that Venezuela represents an "enemy" of the United States, to do his fascist mass depuration schemes. The machine couldn't, or didn't want to see that Trump was obviously lying, because lying about Venezuela and portraying Nicolás Maduro as a international supervillain is already such a normalized part of American foreign policy that pushing back on Trump would undermine the American imperial project. With the declassification of this memo however, the fig leaf has been shredded and the US establishment is going to have choose between imperialism and preventing a fascist takeover in America.