DeSantis repeats unfounded claim that Maduro sent freed Venezuelan prisoners to the US

After U.S. officials arrested Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis lauded the operation, saying the state’s large Venezuelan population knows firsthand how "destructive" Maduro’s policies were. 

DeSantis also said during a Jan. 5 press conference that Maduro was "releasing people from his prisons and sending them to our southern border under the Biden administration" and that he "deserves to be brought to justice."

DeSantis repeated the comments the following day, adding that Florida would consider bringing state drug charges against Maduro. 

PolitiFact has fact-checked similar statements by others. President Donald Trump made it a prominent campaign talking point ahead of the 2024 election. 

Then and now, we found no evidence, such as in academic or government reports, that Maduro purposely freed Venezuelan prisoners and sent them to infiltrate the U.S. before, during or after Joe Biden’s presidency. Groups that track Venezuelan prisons say they remain overcrowded. 

PolitiFact contacted DeSantis for comment but received no response.

Narrative rose to prominence in U.S. after anonymous source in 2022 article

In September 2022, as immigration at the southern U.S. border surged, 13 Republican Congress members sent a letter to then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, requesting information on an "intelligence report" they said his department sent to Border Patrol agents. 

According to the lawmakers, DHS had told agents to be on the lookout for violent criminals who Venezuela was deliberately releasing from prisons and encouraging to join caravans headed to the U.S. 

When we examined the claim at the time, we found its only source was a Sept. 18, 2022, article by conservative news website Breitbart, which credited an anonymous U.S. Customs and Border Protection source who it said was not authorized to speak to the media. 

The article vaguely described the DHS intelligence report and did not link to it. The lawmakers sent a second letter to Mayorkas in February 2024 letter, again referring to the intelligence report and asking him to investigate. 

We reached out again to DHS and CBP about the report’s existence and asked for a copy. We received no response. In 2022, the fact-checking organization Factchequeado reported that DHS responded to its inquiry about the Breitbart article and said the article’s claims "are not verified." 

Experts say there’s no evidence for the prison claim

Experts in Venezuelan politics said Maduro could have been capable of such actions, and the FBI says some Venezuelan criminals have come to the U.S. 

But immigration experts in the U.S. and Latin America and Venezuelan criminologists said the assertion that the government freed Venezuelan prisoners and sent them to the U.S. southern border is baseless. 

"There is no evidence that (Maduro’s) government is freeing prisons or sending prisoners to the United States," Universidad Central de Venezuela criminology professor Luis Izquiel told PolitiFact in 2024. 

Mike LaSusa, deputy director of content at InSight Crime, a think tank focused on crime and security in the Americas, previously told PolitiFact that Venezuela’s government "has no known policy of selecting particular migrants to send them to any specific country, including the United States." 

The Observatorio Venezolano de Prisiones, an independent nonprofit that tracks Venezuela’s prison population, hasn’t reported that prisons emptied out during the Biden administration. In its 2023 report, the group said 64% of Venezuela’s prisons were overcrowded, estimating there were more than 33,500 inmates imprisoned, compared with a 20,000-person capacity. 

The non-governmental organization A Window to Freedom, which has monitored Venezuela’s prison population and conditions for over 25 years, reported that overcrowding in the country's pretrial detention centers, known as police cells, in 2023 was 189% — a 13% increase from 2022. 

On May 5, 2025, the federal National Intelligence Council released a declassified memo that found no evidence that the Venezuelan government under Maduro directed the Tren de Aragua gang or sent its members to the U.S. The gang formed in a Venezuelan prison. 

The U.S. does not admit people with criminal convictions who it encounters at U.S. ports of entry unless there are extenuating circumstances. Part of the entry process involves Border Patrol checking immigrants’ backgrounds and taking their fingerprints and other biometric information. 

Crime has declined in Venezuela in recent years, but experts say that isn’t evidence Maduro sent freed prisoners to the U.S. It's because of a confluence of factors, including a humanitarian crisis and a declining economy, pushing close to 8 million people to flee Venezuela since 2014. Most have migrated to Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Chile. 

Many of the people who lived in poor and rural areas — who were often victims of crime — have left the country, experts said. 

"The opportunities for crime were lost," Roberto Briceño León, founder and director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, which monitors crime in Venezuela, told PolitiFact in 2024. "Generalized poverty in the country, the absence of money circulating, the bankruptcy of companies and commerce all made the opportunities for crime in the country drop." 

Our ruling

DeSantis said Maduro "was releasing people from his prisons and sending them to our southern border under the Biden administration." 

We found no evidence, such as academic or government reports, that Maduro freed prisoners and sent them to the U.S. 

Immigration experts said Venezuela has no known policy or practice of sending prisoners to any specific country, including the U.S. And groups that track Venezuelan prisons said they remain overcrowded. 

We rate the statement False. 

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PolitiFact Staff Writer Maria Ramirez Uribe contributed to this report.