How the ‘Maduro Emptied His Prisons to Invade the U.S.’ Rumor Reached the White House
This is the story of how a Twitterzuela conspiracy theory became the cornerstone of U.S. immigration policy
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made Venezuelan migration one of the main themes of his platform. Several times he claimed—without providing any evidence—that Nicolás Maduro had sent criminals released from Venezuelan prisons to the United States
“Crime is down in Venezuela by 67% because they’re taking their gangs and their criminals and depositing them very nicely into the United States,” declared Trump at a rally on April 2, 2024, thus presenting any Venezuelan man as a potential threat to national security.
Almost a year later, with Trump back in the White House, that accusation turned into public policy. In March 2025, his administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to order the swift detention and express deportation of Venezuelans accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua, a gang that originated in Venezuela’s Tocorón prison.
Among the thousands deported to various countries, a group of over 250 detainees was transferred to CECOT, a massive maximum-security prison in El Salvador. They remained there until July 18, when a swap negotiated between Washington and Caracas led to their release, along with that of several U.S. citizens and imprisoned Venezuelan opposition members.
An investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, the Alianza Rebelde Investiga (with the outlets Runrunes, Tal Cual, and El Pitazo), and Cazadores de Fake News found that more than half of the deported Venezuelans had not committed any crimes in the United States, had entered the country legally, and had ongoing immigration proceedings.
As the rumor about the supposed prisoner “invasion”—and later about the alleged order from Maduro to “empty” prisons and deliver Tren de Aragua members to the U.S.—began to dominate headlines in Venezuela and the U.S., fact-checkers, NGOs, and Venezuelan media had already traced its origins and were explaining how it was becoming more viral through new hoaxes and manipulated content. Eventually, in 2025, per a declassified memorandum by the National Intelligence Council it was known that there was no evidence that the Venezuelan government led Tren de Aragua or that sending criminals to the United States was part of a state policy.
Tracking the path of that rumor—from its first viral appearance in 2022, through its repetition in speeches and headlines, to its adoption in Trump’s campaign and its implementation as government policy—can help explain how a narrative has endured for years, eventually influencing both the foreign policy and internal order of one of the world’s major powers.
The Prison Panic That Crossed the Venezuelan Border
Venezuelan and international media documented for years the state’s lack of control over Venezuelan prisons and the collaboration between chavista officials and criminal organizations. Some accounts have asserted that some colectivos loyal to chavismo and criminal gangs like Tren de Aragua acting as shock troops to break up opposition protests. Over time, all this information fed into comments made by Venezuelan users on social media—sometimes based on tangible facts and investigations, and other times on mere rumors—about the use of gangs by actors within the Venezuelan regime.
In 2022, things began to change. After several years of reports about crimes attributed to alleged members of the Tren de Aragua in Colombia, Peru, and Chile, the flow of Venezuelans heading north through the Darien Gap intensified. This turn in the migratory flow, combined with reports and coverage of crimes attributed to Venezuelans in various countries, sparked multiple disinformation campaigns that fueled discrimination and xenophobia against migrants. The association Venezuelans/Tren de Aragua,and the myth that Maduro sent gang members to destabilize the continent, followed the migrants from South America to the U.S.
On February 3, 2022, a tweet accused a group of Venezuelans at the Lobito shelter (near Iquique, northern Chilean border) of blocking the highway with fire and debris. “(Maduro) released them from prison and sent them to destroy Chile,” claimed the author, who shared the post along with a video showing several migrants speaking with Venezuelan accents, apparently blocking a stretch of road near the shelter.
An investigation by the Venezuelan digital research organization Cazadores de Fake News showed that this was disinformation. The migrants shown in the video, who were living in the shelter, had not initiated the blockade: they were removing debris and extinguishing the fire to prevent the smoke from affecting others at the site, especially children.
One of the refugees stated that the manipulation of the video criminalized migrants and refugees in Lobito and that there was no balanced media coverage of the migrant phenomenon by local outlets. “They have silenced us, but we are not criminals,” he said.
Migrants singing the National Anthem, not criminals
On September 7, Bogotá Mayor Claudia López called on Maduro’s government to isolate the leaders of the Tren de Aragua, claiming that crimes in Colombia were being coordinated from the Tocorón prison. In that context, the first significant piece of disinformation emerged, accusing the Venezuelan government of using the Tren de Aragua as a tool for regional destabilization.
The following day, a Venezuelan Twitter user, @NelsoredG, posted a tweet claiming—without citing sources or offering any evidence—that “prisoners from Venezuelan jails” were being sent to the U.S. along with the waves of migrants crossing the Darién Gap. His tweet was reposted over 3,000 times and quickly went viral among Venezuelan users.
Tweet posted by @NelsoredG on September 8, 2022.
@NelsoredG had been regularly tweeting hoaxes since at least 2019. According to monitoring by Cazadores de Fake News, he was the source of more than a dozen viral posts, shared through multiple different accounts, which the platform routinely suspended under its moderation policies (before Elon Musk purchased and rebranded Twitter).
Some influential Venezuelans believed the September 8 hoax, as it aligned with a narrative that—although widely debunked by experts—gave it greater credibility.
“Castro already pulled that trick in Mariel. He emptied the prisons and sent the thugs to the U.S.,” wrote Enrique Aristeguieta, quoting @NelsoredG’s tweet.
Aristeguieta—a lawyer and a well-known Venezuelan Twitter user, member of the 1958 Patriotic Junta, and with over 820,000 followers on Twitter—was referring to the Mariel exodus (1980), when Fidel Castro’s government allowed around 120,000 Cubans to leave the country, labeling them “antisocials” and “scum,” fueling the rumor that many of them were common criminals.
On September 13, @NelsoredG made a second post on the same topic. This time, the text was accompanied by a video that made it go even more viral, amassing 5,000 reposts. Although it seemed to provide more specific information—claiming that “more than 300 convicts in this group of hitmen, robbers, drug dealers were released to be sent to the U.S. from Venezuela”—none of the claims were verifiable.
The video showed a group of Venezuelan men, apparently in a precarious state, most of them shirtless, singing the Venezuelan national anthem. The caption suggested that the footage was recorded inside a Venezuelan prison and that those singing were inmates being released from Tocorón prison, the Tren de Aragua’s base of operations.
The video, however, had not been recorded in a Venezuelan prison, but at the San Vicente Migrant Reception Station (ERM) in Panama, where migrants arrive after crossing the Darién jungle. And those singing were not “criminals,” but migrants in transit.
When the Digital Noise Echoed on the Radio
The arguments presented in the debunking of the video recorded in Panama were not enough to stop its spread.
Soon after, Ernesto Paraqueima, then mayor of El Tigre (Anzoátegui state, eastern Venezuela), commented during his radio show the video shared by @NelsoredG and said that he agreed with the idea of criminals leaving the country, also comparing the situation to the Cuban Mariel exodus.
@NelsoredG claimed that the mayor had “confessed” that the Venezuelan government was sending criminals to the U.S. and that, therefore, the information was confirmed.
The manipulation of Paraqueima’s remarks also went viral, even if he denied the “confession” on two separate occasions.
On September 16, 2022, Cazadores de Fake News debunked the video showing migrants singing Venezuela’s national anthem at the San Vicente Migrant Reception Station in Panama. On September 21, it debunked the hoax about Paraqueima’s alleged confession.
By that time, the rumor had already grown so large that it had begun to be discussed by U.S. officials and media outlets.
Venezuelan Disinformation Moves North
“This week it was reported that Border Patrol agents have received an intelligence bulletin stating that Venezuelan dictator Maduro is opening up all of his prisons and sending vicious convicts (…) Our beautiful USA is being poisoned.” Trump spoke those words at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, on September 22, 2022, while campaigning for several Republican candidates in the midterm Congress elections and just weeks before announcing his second presidential run. He was referring to a September 18 article published by the U.S. website Breitbart, the main outlet of the alt-right movement that helped to elect Trump in 2016 and has a long story of disinformation.
The article’s headline suggested that Venezuela had “emptied” its prisons, released violent criminals, and deliberately sent them—as part of an organized group—toward the U.S. border, all allegedly supported by a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report cited by an anonymous source.
However, the body of the article did not support the headline. It did not include any image of the supposed DHS report, nor did it specify how many inmates had been released in Venezuela. In fact, the article admitted it could not confirm whether the alleged criminals were traveling as a coordinated group and noted that the DHS report did not state whether the measure was part of any official directive from the Venezuelan government.
The story just matched the rumor that had already been circulating among Venezuelans for ten days, and made the myth to crossover from Twitterzuela to be quickly amplified in the U.S. and picked up by several media outlets.
That same day, the republican Congressman Troy E. Nehls tweeted: “Breaking: DHS confirms that Venezuela empties prisons and sends violent criminals to our southern border. President Trump warned us about this years ago.” The post went viral, with over 17,000 reposts and 43,000 likes.
Eleven days later, various fact-checking initiatives began pointing out the inconsistencies in the Breitbart article.
PolitiFact stated that DHS had not confirmed the existence of the alleged report and that the article itself was the only source. After reviewing official websites, it also found no trace of the document or any evidence to support the claim. When asked for proof, Congressman Nehls’s communications director replied: “Prove him wrong.”
Factchequeado not only received a response from DHS—the agency stated that “those claims are unverified”—but also consulted the NGOs Observatorio Venezolano de Prisiones and Una Ventana a la Libertad. All sources agreed that there was no evidence of any Venezuelan government plan to release prisoners and deliberately send them to the United States.
On September 22, several U.S. congressmen published a letter addressed to Alejandro Mayorkas, the Biden administration’s Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), saying that “it has been widely reported that the murderous and narco-terrorist regime of Maduro in Venezuela is deliberately releasing violent prisoners early—including inmates convicted of ‘murder, rape, and extortion’—and pushing them to join caravans headed to the United States.” Its only source: the Breitbart article from September 18.
An Accusation Repeated More Than 140 Times
A declassified memo from the National Intelligence Council, published on May 29, 2025, concluded that the Maduro regime likely does not have a policy of cooperating with the Tren de Aragua, nor does it direct its movements within the U.S.
But the memo’s impact was not as great as the rumor, which had already been repeatedly echoed throughout Trump’s political race.
Meanwhile, between September 2022, when the rumor began gaining traction on Twitter, and March 15 2025, the date in which the Venezuelan migrants were sent to CECOT, Trump repeated the narrative at least 140 times.
But the mention of Venezuela was part of a wider narrative. The Marshall Project—an investigative journalism organization focused on criminal justice—analyzed hundreds of Trump’s statements and found that over a ten-year span, he repeated the accusation that various governments, including Maduro’s, were “emptying their prisons” and sending inmates to the U.S. at least 560 times.
One of the first times he mentioned the narrative was on January 28, 2017—just eight days after taking office for the first time—during a tense call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull about the resettlement agreement for up to 1,250 refugees held on the Australian islands of Manus and Nauru. To oppose the deal, Trump invoked the Mariel exodus: “Do you remember the Mariel boatlift, where Castro emptied all the prisons and Jimmy Carter welcomed them with open arms? They were brutal people.”
Eight years later, the accusation that the Venezuelan government deliberately released criminals to send them in an organized way to the United States remains unproven. But the rumor, by contrast, spread with the diaspora across the continent and embedded itself into U.S. politics at a pace that fact-checking efforts could not keep up with.
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