President Trump’s assertion that a gang is committing crimes in the United States at the direction of Venezuela’s government was critical to his invocation of a wartime law last week to summarily deport people whom officials suspected of belonging to that group.
But American intelligence agencies circulated findings last month that stand starkly at odds with Mr. Trump’s claims, according to officials familiar with the matter. The document, dated Feb. 26, summarized the shared judgment of the nation’s spy agencies that the gang was not controlled by the Venezuelan government.
The disclosure calls into question the credibility of Mr. Trump’s basis for invoking a rarely used wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to transfer a group of Venezuelans to a high-security prison in El Salvador last weekend, with no due process.
The intelligence community assessment concluded that the gang, Tren de Aragua, was not directed by Venezuela’s government or committing crimes in the United States on its orders, according to the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Analysts put that conclusion at a “moderate” confidence level, the officials said, because of a limited volume of available reporting about the gang. Most of the intelligence community, including the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, agreed with that assessment.
Only one agency, the F.B.I., partly dissented. It maintained the gang has a connection to the administration of Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, based on information the other agencies did not find credible.
“Multiple intelligence assessments are prepared on issues for a variety of reasons,” the White House said in a statement. “The president was well within his legal and constitutional authority to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to expel illegal foreign terrorists from our country.”
A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.
Mr. Trump’s extraordinary use of wartime powers to advance his immigration crackdown has edged the administration closer to a constitutional clash with the judiciary. A judge in Washington is considering whether the administration violated his order blocking, for now, the expulsion of migrants under the law. The Justice Department denounced the order as infringing on Mr. Trump’s national security powers and asked an appeals court to overturn it.
The Alien Enemies Act empowers the executive branch to summarily remove foreign citizens whose government is in a declared war with the United States or is otherwise invading or engaged in a “predatory incursion” into American territory. The government last used the law in the internment and repatriation of Japanese, Italian and German citizens during and after World War II.
On its face, the law appears to require not just an invasion or incursion, but a link to the actions of a foreign government.
In his proclamation, Mr. Trump effectively summoned such a link into legal existence by saying that he had determined that Tren de Aragua was a proxy for the Venezuelan government and committing crimes in the United States at its direction because Mr. Maduro sought to destabilize the country.
“I make these findings using the full extent of my authority to conduct the nation’s foreign affairs under the Constitution,” Mr. Trump said.
But Mr. Trump’s key factual assertions contradicted the earlier intelligence assessment, the officials said. It concluded that the gang was not acting at the direction of the Maduro administration and that the two are instead hostile to each other, citing incidents in which Venezuelan security forces exchanged gunfire with gang members.
Because available information in the world of intelligence is often imperfect or incomplete, analysts assign levels of confidence to factual assertions and conclusions. Such caveats indicate that even if most or all the currently available evidence points in one direction, it remains possible that something else might turn up that would change their minds.
The overall conclusion was put at “moderate” confidence, and some supporting points put at “low” confidence, the officials said, because there was not as much reporting as analysts typically want to have “high” confidence. The United States has long scrutinized the government of Venezuela, but only recently has it begun to focus on Tren de Aragua, they said.
The assessment, according to one official, also portrayed the gang as lacking the resources and being too disorganized — with little in the way of any centralized command-and-control — to be able to carry out any government orders. And, the official said, the assessment says that while a handful of corrupt Venezuelan officials have ties to gang members, that does not amount to the gang being under the sway of the government as a whole.
The assessment, this official also said, asserts that when the State Department designated the gang as a foreign terrorist organization last month at Mr. Trump’s direction, a minister in the Maduro administration publicly praised the action. (The administration’s move broke with the practice of limiting “terrorism” designations to organizations that are clearly ideologically motivated.)
Federal courts typically defer to the executive branch’s factual declarations about what is happening and why, rather than probing for what may actually be going on. That is particularly the case in matters of national security and foreign policy.
But such deference is premised on the idea that officials are making determinations in good faith and drawing on executive branch resources like intelligence agencies to evaluate fast-moving and sometimes dangerous situations. Mr. Trump’s pattern of distorting the truth is testing that practice.
The administration’s insistence that all the men it sent to El Salvador are members of Tren de Aragua has also been challenged. In one court filing, an official acknowledged that many have no criminal records but said the dearth of details only underscored that “they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”
Lawyers for some of the migrants have collected statements from family members and others denying involvement in the gang. A lawyer for one detainee, for example, identified her client as a soccer player who had been tortured for participating in anti-Maduro protests and so fled to the United States to request asylum.
The lawyer said U.S. officials accused him of being a Tren de Aragua member based on a tattoo and on a hand gesture he made in a picture on social media. But, she said, the tattoo was a version of a soccer team logo, and the hand gesture was a common “rock ’n’ roll” symbol.
Mr. Trump’s proclamation cited scant evidence for his core finding that Tren de Aragua as an organization has been committing crimes to destabilize the United States “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”
Its most concrete detail was that the gang had expanded from 2012 to 2017, when Tareck El Aissami served as governor of the region of Aragua, and in 2017 Mr. Maduro appointed him as vice president. But the proclamation omitted that Mr. Aissami is no longer part of the Maduro administration, which is prosecuting him on corruption charges.
On Saturday, as planeloads of Venezuelan migrants were being flown to El Salvador, Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief judge for the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, temporarily barred the administration from summarily removing people based on the Alien Enemies Act.
A former prosecutor, he was first appointed to the bench by a Republican president and elevated to his current role by a Democratic one. His decision to block the Trump administration’s deportations under the law has outraged the president and his allies, prompting Mr. Trump to call for his impeachment.
The administration has appealed to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The case is now before Judges Karen Henderson and Justin Walker, both Republican appointees, and Patricia Millett, a Democratic appointee.
Appeals courts typically reject challenges to temporary restraining orders. But the panel has ordered expedited briefings and scheduled arguments, suggesting it is considering deciding on the legal merits of Mr. Trump’s invocation of Alien Enemies Act powers.
Any ruling could turn in part on whether the judges accept Mr. Trump’s assertions about Tren de Aragua and its supposed ties to the Venezuelan government, as the administration has insisted.
The Justice Department wrote that “the determination of whether there has been an ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory incursion,’ whether an organization is sufficiently linked to a foreign nation or government, or whether national security interests have otherwise been engaged so as to implicate the A.E.A., is fundamentally a political question to be answered by the president.”
