Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Monday accused the United States of committing an international crime. The Venezuelan president made the accusation after a two-year-old girl was separated from her migrant parents. The child’s parents were deported from the United States, but the child was not sent back to the country.
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that the child was removed from her parents and placed with a foster family. The US claims that the child’s parents are members of Venezuela’s notorious drug cartel ‘Tren de Aragua’.
Maduro said on his weekly television program, ‘This incident is a crime from any perspective. Taking a mother’s two-year-old child away from her simply because she is an immigrant and Venezuelan is inhumane,” he added. “Accusing them of being members of a criminal gang without proof and using this accusation as an excuse to take her child away is a crime under international law.”
On Monday morning, Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement, “US authorities have kidnapped two-year-old Michaelis Antonella Espinosa Bernal. We demand the immediate return of the child to her parents.”
DHS has cracked down on illegal immigrants under the Trump administration. Thousands of Latin American immigrants have been deported and many have had their legal status revoked. They claim that many of them are members of criminal gangs. However, authorities have released little evidence to support those allegations. Many lawyers and families say the allegations are baseless.
DHS did not say where the child’s parents were sent, but Venezuela believes the child’s father was with a group of 250 men who were sent to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison.
The child’s father was “a lieutenant in the Tren de Aragua, who was involved in a variety of crimes, including murder, drug trafficking, kidnapping, and extortion,” the DHS said in a statement on Saturday. The child’s mother was accused of drug trafficking and recruiting young women for prostitution, the DHS said.
The child was removed from the deportation list “for his safety and well-being,” and is currently being cared for by a foster family under the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The Trump administration has designated Tren de Aragua a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Source: Khaleej Times