Venezuela denounces ‘abduction’ of toddler whose parents were deported by US

• Venezuela has accused the US of “abduction” after a two-year-old girl was separated from her deported parents.
• The US Department of Homeland Security claims the parents are members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang.
• The girl is in foster care for her safety, while Venezuela demands her immediate return.

Venezuela has accused Washington of “abduction” in the case of a 2-year-old girl separated from her migrant parents, who were deported from the United States without her.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said the girl was placed in foster care to protect her from her parents, Maiker Espinoza-Escalona and Yorely Escarleth Bernal Inciarte, who it claimed were members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua drug gang.

In a statement today, the foreign ministry in Caracas denounced “the abduction by US authorities of the young Venezuelan Maikelys Antonella Espinoza Bernal, aged 2”, and called for her “immediate” return to her parents.

Under US President Donald Trump, the DHS has carried out a crackdown on immigration, deporting thousands of primarily Latin American migrants it says are undocumented and cancelling the legal status of others.

The administration has said many of those deported are members of criminal gangs, including Tren de Aragua, but has provided limited evidence to back that claim. Lawyers and family members of many deportees deny the allegations.

The DHS did not say where it deported the girl’s parents to, but Venezuela believes her father was among about 250 men sent to El Salvador’s notorious Cecot prison for the country’s most violent criminals.

Maikelys Antonella Espinoza Bernal with her parents.

Espinoza-Escalona’s mother-in-law said the family saw him at Cecot in an online video.

“They were shaving his head,” she told ABC. “They had him dressed in all white, and he was on his knees.”

His sister said he was just a barber with a clean criminal record.

“There’s the American dream they talk about, but it’s the American horror.”

In a weekend statement, the DHS claimed the father, Espinoza-Escalona, was a Tren de Aragua lieutenant who “oversees homicides, drug sales, kidnappings, extortion, sex trafficking and operates a torture house”.

The girl’s mother “oversees recruitment of young women for drug smuggling and prostitution,” it said.

DHS said the girl was “taken off the deportation flight manifest for her safety and welfare”.

“The child remains in the care and custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement and is currently placed with a foster family”.

The department branded both parents “criminal illegal aliens” and said their expulsion had been approved by a judge.

Tren de Aragua has been designated a “foreign terrorist organisation” by the Trump administration, which has paid El Salvador millions of dollars to lock up nearly 300 deported migrants it claims are criminals and gang members.

At least one of them, Salvadoran Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was found to have been wrongly deported, but both Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele have washed their hands of his case.

Last week, Venezuelan prosecutors said they were investigating the “forced disappearance” of a citizen detained in the United States in January, but whose whereabouts are now “unknown”.

– Agence France-Presse, additional reporting NZ Herald