Category: Fact Checking

A viral photograph purportedly shows a real formation of humans replicating the Olympic torch during the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, in what was then the Soviet Union. The photograph shows an impressive feat in which dozens of acrobats stood on top of each other (relying on mounted platforms) to create a human tower in the likeness of the torch. 

The photograph has been viral on Reddit over several years.  

The above image is real and accurately depicts the opening ceremony celebration of the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow. 

We found a copy of the photograph on Getty Images with the caption: “19 JULY – 03 AUG 1980: Opening ceremony celebration shows a formation of people replicating the Olympic torch during the Olympic Games in Moscow, Soviet Union.” 

(Rich Clarkson/Getty Images)

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty published a black and white photograph of the rehearsals involved in the creating such towers, seen here. 

Many clips of the Moscow opening ceremony are available on YouTube from unverified sources, but they correspond with authenticated media photographs of the event. Based on this old recording of the ceremony, there were numerous so-called “human towers” in the grand arena of the Lenin Stadium. Wide shots followed by a close up of one such tower can be seen after the 1:27:49 mark:

In 1980, the U.S. Olympic Committee had voted to boycott the games after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. More than 60 other nations joined them in the boycott.

Sources

Neither U.S. President Joe Biden nor former President Donald Trump, both of whom are running for a second shot at the presidency in the November 2024 election, served in the military, a circumstance some voters see as a shortcoming, others not. In any case, the U.S. Constitution does not require it. 

Both Trump and Biden came of age during the Vietnam War era, when males 18 and older were eligible to be drafted into military service, but both obtained multiple draft deferments that kept them out of the war. As we have reported elsewhere, Biden received five student deferments because he was attending college, and was ultimately disqualified from military service except in a time of war or national emergency for medical reasons (he suffered from asthma). 

Similarly, Trump received four student deferments, then was disqualified from serving except in a time of war or national emergency after a medical examination found he had bone spurs in both heels. We confirmed Trump’s deferment history via Selective Service records obtained from the U.S. National Archives by The Smoking Gun in 2011.

1964: Donald Trump became eligible for the draft on his 18th birthday (June 14, 1964) and registered with the Selective Service System 10 days later. He received the first of his four 2-S (college) deferments on July 28 of that year.

1965: Trump received his second college deferment on Dec. 14, 1965.

1966: Trump’s 1965 student deferment expired and he was reclassified 1-A (available for military service) on Nov. 22, 1966. However, his 2-S deferment was renewed the following month.

1967: No record found.

1968: Trump obtained his fourth and final college deferment on Jan. 16, 1968. After graduating from Wharton the following July, he was once again reclassified 1-A. Trump underwent an armed forces physical examination with a result of “DISQ” (disqualified) on Sept. 19. On that basis, he was reclassified 1-Y (qualified for service only in time of war or national emergency) on Oct. 15.

According to a statement from Trump’s 2016 campaign, the disqualification stemmed from his having bone spurs in both heels:

While attending the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton School of Finance, Mr. Trump received a minor medical deferment for bone spurs on both heels of his feet. The medical deferment was expected to be short-term and he was therefore entered in the military draft lottery, where he received an extremely high number, 356 out of 365.

However, the precise details of that 1968 medical exemption remain unclear and controversial, and most draft-related government medical records from the Vietnam War era were not preserved.

1972: Despite the supposedly “short-term” nature of Trump’s disqualifying physical condition, on Feb. 17, 1972, he was reclassified 4-F (not qualified for military service), presumably due to the fact that the 1-Y classification had been abolished the previous year.

In June 2024, posts in multiple Facebook groups claimed to show an image of a microscopic creature identified as a Demodex mite, a tiny arthropod that lives, mates, and lays eggs on human facial skin. 

The wording of the nearly identical posts first appeared in a post made in a Neil deGrasse Tyson fan group on May 30, 2023. As of this writing, that original post had received around 1,500 comments and around 2,900 shares. The image accompanied by the same caption has also appeared on other social media sites including X, Instagram, and LinkedIn. 

But the viral posts were incorrect. Reverse-image searches on TinEye and Google Images led us to the stock image agency Alamy, which licenses the original image and identifies it as a colored scanning electron micrograph of the head of a silkworm moth caterpillar.

To verify this identification, Snopes reached out to entomologists Kyle Koch, an educator and diagnostician at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and Lynn Kimsey, an emeritus professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis. Both Koch and Kimsey confirmed via email that the creature in the image is a caterpillar and not a Demodex mite.

For these reasons, we have rated the claim as “Miscaptioned,” meaning that it is a genuine, unaltered image that has been accompanied by a misleading caption.

Although the viral image does not depict one, the Demodex genus of mites are very real. Two species in the genus, Demodex folliculorum and Demodex brevis, do live on human faces and are collectively referred to as facial mites. According to a paper published in the scientific journal Dermatology Reports in 2022, mites of both species are common human parasites that, according to some studies, have been found on the skin of up to 100% of adults and 70% of children.

To the untrained eye, the lumpy bodies and stubby legs of Demodex mites, which are arthropods, and silkworm moth caterpillars, which are insects, share some similarities. The most glaring difference between the animals is their size: while adult Demodex mites reach a maximum length of around 0.4 millimeters, silkworm moth caterpillars measure around 2 millimeters just after hatching and grow to a maximum length of around 75 millimeters before they build cocoons and begin the process of pupation into an adult silkworm moth, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

This difference in scale, however, is not immediately obvious when dealing with a close-up image like the one in question.

For entomologists like Koch, other features of the specimen that appears in the viral image make it easy to determine that the animal is not a mite from the Demodex genus even when size cannot be taken into account.

One feature that stood out to Koch was the morphology of the specimen’s mouth, which he explained does not resemble the needle-like chelicerae or beak-like rostrum found across the many Demodex species. Another clue was the hairlike bristles visible all over the creature in the viral images. Known to entomologists as setae, these bristles are never found on Demodex mites, which are instead covered in tiny, semi-transparent scales.

A real Demodex mite can be seen crawling up a human eyelash in the video below, which the biotechnology company BioTissue posted to YouTube in 2014.

Information from reverse-image searches shows that the image from the viral posts has circulated on social media sites since at least 2014, when a Reddit user posted it to the r/WTF subreddit. Notably, this 2014 post correctly identified the creature as a silkworm. 

The Demodex misidentification appears to have emerged in June 2018, when X user @AntonioParis posted the image with a caption reading, “An alien from another world? This is a microscopic image of Demodex. These mites live on your face.” Similar posts sharing the misidentified image soon appeared in posts on Reddit, Facebook, and other social media sites, and have periodically circulated ever since. 

In a post dated May 26, 2024, the Facebook account Philosophical Rhythms shared an image featuring a quote attributed to Lewis Carroll, the author best known for the 1865 book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” The quote allegedly written by Carroll read:

Why is it that people with the narrowest of minds seem to have the widest of mouths?

The post had received more than 3,600 shares and 6,900 reactions at the time of this writing, and the image featuring the quote had popped up in posts on other social media sites, including X.

However, the quote does not appear in any of Carroll’s published works, and we have rated this claim “Misattributed.”

The earliest online appearance of the exact quote from the Facebook post appears to have been a Feb. 28, 2011, post on X by the quote-sharing account @TweetyQuote, which did not attribute the saying to any author. 

The first securely dated attribution of the quote to Carroll emerged around two years later, in a 2013 X post.

Since 2013, the quote including the Carroll attribution has appeared on a number of popular quotation meme websites, such as AZquotes, Minimalist Quotes and Quotefancy, as well as in posts on social media outlets like Instagram and Reddit. 

A search on the Google Books database found no instances of the exact quote in any published book, whether by Carroll or another author.

A number of very similar quotes have circulated in print since the mid-20th century. Searches for the phrase “a narrow mind and a wide mouth” using Google Books and the Internet Archive’s full-text search feature turned up dozens of instances of slight variations on the quote in magazines, joke books and quote anthologies. In all of these examples, the quote is either unattributed or attributed to “Anonymous.” 

A possible clue to the origin of the adage appeared in a 1958 issue of The International Mailer, a magazine formerly published by the International Mailer’s Union. For the issue’s “Thought for the Month,” the editors chose the following unattributed quote:

A narrow mind and a wide mouth go together; narrow souled people are like narrow-necked bottles; the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out.

Although the first section of the quote, “A narrow mind and a wide mouth go together,” cannot be attributed to any individual author, the rest is a paraphrase of a quote by the English poet Alexander Pope.

The original version of Pope’s witticism was included in his “Thoughts on Various Subjects,” which was originally published in 1727. Pope’s wording reads as follows:

It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles; the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out.

Ultimately, there is no evidence linking any variation of these quotes about narrow minds to Carroll, despite the many social media posts incorrectly crediting the “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” author.

We’ve fact-checked other quotes attributed to famous figures, including whether Abraham Lincoln said, “It’s not the years in your life that count; it’s the life in your years.”

Sources

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Quick Take

Russian warships conducted simulated military exercises on their way to Cuba in June. But social media posts share clips from a 2018 Russian video of missile tests in the White Sea to claim the warships fired live missiles “off the coast of Florida” before arriving in Havana. A Department of Defense spokesperson said the claim is “not true.”

Full Story

A four-ship Russian convoy, including a military frigate and a nuclear-powered submarine, the Kazan, arrived in Cuba on June 12 for a five-day visit, CNN reported. Russian state media said that on the way to Cuba, the warships conducted military exercises “using computer simulation for naval targets, designating ship groupings of a simulated enemy,” CNN also reported.

But posts on social media shared clips of a years-old video to falsely claim the Russian ships fired live missiles “off the coast of Florida” on their way to Cuba.

A June 12 Instagram post by an account called packingpatriot.2 bears a caption that claims, “Russia is showing off its naval firepower right off the coast of Florida today thanks to Joe Biden and his useful idiots.”

The narrator on the post claims the Biden administration is “pushing us to the brink of World War III with their support of Ukraine.” He then shows a video of four missiles apparently launching from a ship through roiling smoke and into the sky. Those images are followed by a submarine on the surface of the water, then submerging, as Russian-speaking crew members are seen operating inside the ship. The text overlaid on the video says, “Russians showing off their firepower right off the coast of Florida.”

The post had received more than 6,800 likes as of June 14.

A similar Instagram post also shared on June 12 has text that claims, “Breaking[:] Russia conducting marine exercises with nuclear submarines just 66 miles off the coast of Florida…” That post also shows the video of the missiles blasting off and the Russian crew inside the submarine.

But a Google search of images from the Instagram posts shows that a longer version of the video was shared six years ago on YouTube with the title, “Russia’s Nuclear Submarine Successfully Test-Fires 4 Bulava intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.”

An image from that video also appeared in an article on the Indian news site The Week on May 24, 2018. That article reported, “As a warning to the western nations, and in particular the US, Russia test-fired four Bulava intercontinental ballistic missiles from the nuclear submarine Yuri Dolgoruky on May 22. Fired from the submarine in a submerged position from the White Sea, the missiles successfully hit targets on the Kura range in the Kamchatka Peninsula.”

An Associated Press story that appeared in the Navy Times on Oct. 14, 2019, also shows the image used on the Indian news site, and the caption reads: “In this photo made from the footage taken from Russian Defense Ministry official web site on Thursday, May 24, 2018, the Russian nuclear submarine Yuri Dolgoruky test-fires the Bulava missiles from the White Sea.”

So the video in the Instagram posts does not show Russian missiles being fired “off the coast of Florida” in June 2024. Rather, the video — provided by the Russian Ministry of Defense — shows missiles being fired by a different submarine in the White Sea toward Kamchatka in eastern Russia in 2018.

We asked the U.S. Department of Defense for a response to the social media claim that a Russian ship fired missiles near the Florida coast while en route to Cuba, and a spokesperson emailed a one-line reply: “That is not true.”

The Russian frigate Admiral Gorshkov did fire a 21-gun salute as it arrived in Havana harbor, CNN reported.

U.S. officials told the New York Times that the Russian warships posed no threat and were not carrying nuclear weapons. The Department of Defense has been monitoring the movement of the ships through the Atlantic Ocean, a spokesperson told the Times. The Russian Ministry of Defense said the warships practiced locating targets and used precision missiles to simulate destroying those targets at distances of more than 350 miles, according to the Times.

CNN reported that U.S. officials said Russian ships traveled to Cuba every year between 2013 and 2020.

The Russian-Cuban alliance goes back further. In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane captured images of nuclear missile sites being built by the then-Soviet Union in Cuba. Then-President John F. Kennedy placed a naval blockade around Cuba to prevent more Soviet supplies from arriving and demanded that the missiles be removed. The Americans and Soviets reached a deal in which the missiles were dismantled and the U.S. promised not to invade the island, ending the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here. Facebook has no control over our editorial content.

Sources

Associated Press. “Russia slates drills for nuclear forces.” 14 Oct 2019.

CNN. “Russian frigate receives 21 gun salute as it enters Havana harbor.” 12 Jun 2024.

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. “Cuban Missile Crisis.” Accessed 13 Jun 2024.

Oppmann, Patrick, et al. “Russian ships arrive in Cuba as Cold War allies strengthen their ties.” CNN. 12 Jun 2024.

Sampson, Eve. “Russian Warships Enter Havana Harbor as Part of Planned Exercises.” New York Times. 12 Jun 2024.

The Week. “Russia’s nuclear submarine test fires four Bulava missiles.” 24 May 2018.

U.S. Department of Defense. Spokesperson. Email to FactCheck.org. 13 Jun 2024.

YouTube. “Russia’s Nuclear Submarine Successfully Test-Fires 4 Bulava intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.” 2018.

On June 12, 2024, the X account @HalfwayPost claimed a “MAGA fan” — referring to supporters of former President Donald Trump who use the slogan “Make America Great Again” — in Iowa accidentally burned down his house that day while trying to set fire to a Pride flag.

The post had amassed more than 11.7 million views at the time of this writing.

Other X users replying to the post appeared to believe the story was true, with one writing: “Karma doesn’t miss.”

Another said: “Please say this is real.”

Similar posts appeared elsewhere on X, on Facebook and in multiple Reddit posts.

One Facebook user wrote: “Could’ve avoided that one by being a good person.”

However, this item was not a factual recounting of real-life events. The claim originated from the The Halfway Post X account, which described its output as satirical in nature, as follows:

Halfway true comedy and satire by @DashMacIntyre. I don’t report the facts, I improve them.

On his X account, Dash Macintyre described himself as a comedian who published “satirical Dada news.”

A follow-up X post by The Halfway Post said: “The MAGA fan in Iowa who accidentally burned down his house yesterday trying to burn a gay pride flag today set his truck on fire trying to burn a DVD of Brokeback Mountain.”

For background, here is why we sometimes write about satire/humor.

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Anyone who has heard a speech by former President Donald Trump in the last few years has certainly heard his unsubstantiated claim that countries around the world are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending those people to the U.S.

Trump has offered scant support for this claim, but in virtually all of his recent speeches, he has been citing a reported drop in crime in Venezuela as evidence that the economically and politically beleaguered country is sending its criminals to the U.S.

Experts in and out of Venezuela told us there is no evidence to back up Trump’s claim. Reported crime is trending down in Venezuela — though not nearly as dramatically as Trump claims — but crime experts in the country say there are numerous reasons for that and they have nothing to do with sending criminals to the U.S.

Nonetheless, it’s hard to prove a negative, and those who follow Venezuelan politics say such a tactic is not beyond Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who has been in power since 2013 and is seeking another six-year term. The FBI acknowledges some Venezuelan criminals have migrated to the U.S., but there’s no indication they were purposefully released from prison to come to this country.

When Trump makes such an explosive and sweeping claim — and makes it a hallmark of his case to return to office — the onus is on him to provide evidence. He hasn’t. (His press office did not respond to our inquires about it.) And the argument that Venezuelan crime is down is not the proof Trump suggests it is.

Trump’s Claim

In recent speeches, Trump has sometimes said that crime is down “a staggering 67%” in Venezuela, while at other times he has put the drop in crime at “72% in a year.”

But in each case, as he did in a video posted to social media on June 4, he cited the statistics to support his claim, “They’re taking their drug dealers and their people in jail, lots of people in jail, they’re taking their murderers, their killers, they’re taking them all and they’re sending them into the United States.”

“Venezuela was crime ridden,” Trump said in remarks on May 31 after his conviction in the hush money case. “Caracas, their cities, crime ridden two years ago, three years ago. They just reported a 72% drop in crime in the last year because all of their criminals, most of them, and the rest are coming in now, the ones that didn’t come in. In Venezuela, their prisons have been emptied into the United States. Their criminals and drug dealers have been taken out of the cities and brought into the United States, and that’s true with many other countries.”

In this report, we’ll focus on Venezuela because that’s the country most often cited by Trump.

Carlos Nieto of the Venezuelan nongovernmental organization A Window to Freedom is, of course, well aware of Trump’s relentless insistence that Venezuelan officials have been systematically emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending those people to the U.S.

Nieto, whose group has been monitoring the prison situation in Venezuela for more than 25 years, told us he has observed no evidence that supports Trump’s claim. He added that there definitely is no official state policy to that effect.

Some criminals have emigrated from Venezuela, he told us in Spanish, and some have made their way to the U.S. But, he said, “there is nothing that can be affirmed that establishes that there is an agreement, or that the Venezuelan government is helping criminals leave Venezuela to go to the United States.”

But neither can he rule out that it could be happening “under the hood.”

“I do not doubt that it could be happening, nor do I doubt that it can be done,” Nieto said. “I mean, these people, I’m talking about Maduro and his clique, are capable of that and many more things.”

But that’s pure speculation. And again, Nieto and other experts say they have seen no evidence of it.

Venezuelan Crime Stats

Reliable crime statistics in Venezuela are notoriously difficult to obtain. The government hasn’t provided dependable crime reports in many years, Mike LaSusa, deputy director of content at InSight Crime, a think tank focused on crime and security in the Americas, told us via email.

Although Venezuelan security officials in May reported a 25% drop in crime this year compared with the same period in 2023, “the absence of official reports makes it impossible to verify the data,” LaSusa said in a May 28 report.

In the absence of reliable government reporting, media and nongovernmental organizations have become the most trusted sources for documenting and tracking crime, LaSusa said.

One such NGO, the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, in December reported a 25% decrease in violent deaths between 2022 and 2023. (Violent deaths include homicides, deaths by police intervention and suspected violent deaths under investigation.) That drop was widely reported in U.S. media. If Trump is citing the murder tally as a proxy for overall crime, he is vastly overstating the one-year drop.

But the number of violent deaths has been declining for years in Venezuela, according to the group’s tallies, and is nearly 70% lower than it was in 2018, according to Roberto Briceño-León, the founder and director of the OVV (the acronym for Venezuelan Observatory of Violence in Spanish). That corresponds with Trump’s figure, but, of course, that is a much longer time frame that predates the Biden administration.

LaSusa said the OVV’s murder rate estimates track with InSight’s observation about “a reduction in the intensity of criminal violence in certain areas of the country.” But, he said, InSight has not seen a reduction in crime of 67% in a year, as Trump claimed.

“Additionally, the reductions that we have observed seem to respond largely to changes in criminal dynamics, rather than the effectiveness of the government’s security policies,” LaSusa said. “Basically, criminal groups seem to be seeking new opportunities outside of Venezuela due to the lack of opportunities in the country.”   

What’s Driving the Crime Drop?

In its Annual Report on Violence 2023, OVV documented 6,973 violent deaths in 2023, about 14% of which resulted from police enforcement. That’s down from 9,447 and 9,367 in 2021 and 2022, respectively. That’s a decline of 26% in the reported number of violent deaths between 2021 and 2023.

While the violent death rate may have dropped, a national survey conducted by OVV in mid-2023 found that about 78% of residents believed crime had stayed the same or gotten worse.

Briceño-León shared with us via email in Spanish some of the causes OVV identified for the drop in murders — none of which includes a government program to ship convicts to the U.S.

“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying the prisons or mental hospitals to send them out of the country, whether to the USA or any other country,” Briceño-León said.

Rather, he said, the drop in crime is due to worsening economic and living conditions in the country, which has led to a massive out-migration of nearly 8 million people since 2014.

“Crime is reduced in Venezuela due to a reduction in crime opportunities: bank robberies disappear because there is no money to steal; kidnappings are reduced because there is no cash to pay ransoms; robberies on public transportation cease because travelers have no money in their pockets and old, worthless cell phones; and assaults on bank money dispensers disappear because the cash they can give to their clients has not exceeded twenty U.S. dollars,” Briceño-León said.

There has also been a consolidation of gang activity, which has led to a reduction in crime. In its report, OVV wrote that the drop in crime “can be attributed to the reduction of disorganized criminal activities and the growing concentration and monopolization of violence by powerful criminal organizations. These criminal organizations are now focusing on specific niches of criminal opportunities, which has led to a decreased overall level of violence in the country.”

“The decrease in ‘disorganized’ violence, which causes high lethality, has been reduced by the notable emigration of young people and the loss of opportunities for crime,” the report stated. “In recent years, there has been a reduction in the lethality of violence in certain parts of the country. This trend has been attributed to agreements made between criminal gangs regarding the distribution of tasks during business operations, as well as the demarcation of areas of operation, which has allowed for their expansion and consolidation. However, in municipalities where there are no such agreements or where criminal control has not been fully established, violent events continue to occur.”

The consolidation of organized crime has led to “a kind of mafia peace” in areas they control, Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan investigative journalist, told us in Spanish.

The “humanitarian emergency” in Venezuela has also had implications for criminals as well. Venezuela, she said, “stopped being attractive for crime, because it no longer made sense to kidnap. … It made no sense to steal, because everyone was poor. In Venezuela … no one had money, people were starving and then for crime, for criminals, it was no longer profitable to have criminal activities.”

Rísquez said another reason for the decrease in crime is that Venezuelan authorities, sometime between 2015 and 2021, began “a large number of alleged extrajudicial executions” of people accused of belonging to criminal groups.

The OVV report notes that some criminals have also left Venezuela “seeking to continue their criminal life in other places where they find greater opportunities for profit,” Briceño-León said. But, he said, the vast majority of emigrants from Venezuela are “honest workers fleeing the country’s poverty, looking for a job and a better future.”

The vast majority of those fleeing Venezuela have settled in nearby South American countries. But more and more are making their way to the U.S. Prior to President Joe Biden taking office, relatively few Venezuelan emigrants were intercepted by U.S. Border Patrol. For most of the 2010s, less than 100 Venezuelans a year were caught trying to cross the southwest border illegally. The number grew to more than 2,000 in fiscal year 2019. But beginning in 2021 the numbers began to swell, and topped 187,000 and 200,000 in the 2022 and 2023 fiscal years, respectively.

As of January, the U.S. had the third-largest number of Venezuelan emigrants in the world (545,000) — though Colombia remained by far the largest destination (2.9 million), followed by Peru (1.5 million). Brazil, Ecuador, Chile and Spain each had roughly the same number as the U.S.

Criminal groups with origins in Venezuela have quickly spread to neighboring South American countries where most Venezuelans have settled. According to a U.S. State Department trafficking report for Colombia released in 2023, “El Tren de Aragua – Venezuela’s most powerful criminal gang – and the National Liberation Army (ELN) operate sex trafficking networks in the border town of Villa del Rosario in the Norte de Santander department. These groups exploit Venezuelan migrants and internally displaced Colombians in sex trafficking and take advantage of economic vulnerabilities and subject them to debt bondage.”

And some criminals from Venezuela have come to the U.S.

Nieto, of the Venezuelan nongovernmental organization A Window to Freedom, attributed the decrease in crimes to the mass emigration from the country in recent years, a number, he said, that “undoubtedly does not exclude criminals.”

There is some evidence Tren de Aragua gang members have also made their way to the U.S. The U.S. Border Patrol told CNN en Español that 38 potential members of Tren de Aragua were arrested at the border between October 2022 and October 2023.

On April 5, U.S. Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens posted on social media to “[w]atch out for this gang. It is the most powerful in Venezuela, known for murder, drug trafficking, sex crimes, extortion, & other violent acts.”

And suspected members of the Venezuelan gang have been linked to a number of crimes in the U.S., including the murder of a former Venezuelan police officer in Miami in November, and a spate of cell phone robberies in New York City.

In March, Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. María Elvira Salazar led a group of 23 federal legislators petitioning Biden to formally designate Tren de Aragua as a transnational criminal organization, which would allow the U.S. to freeze assets its members have in the U.S. In a Senate subcommittee hearing on April 11, Chris Landberg, deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, told Rubio that “we’re closely tracking Tren De Aragua and have similar concerns to you,” though he declined to discuss internal deliberations about its designation.

Rísquez, author of “The Aragua Train: The gang that revolutionized organized crime in Latin America,” said that while some criminals are inevitably among those who have emigrated from Venezuela to the U.S., “There is no element, no evidence, nothing that indicates that in Venezuela prisoners are being released to leave or to be sent to the United States to commit crimes. There is no plan from the Venezuelan government that points toward that.”

Prison Releases

Complicating the issue is that Venezuela has, in fact, been actively trying to reduce its prison population.

Venezuela has been seeking to address severe overcrowding in its preventive detention centers, which were only designed to hold inmates for 48 hours but have become the de facto prisons of the country, Nieto said.

In March, the Presidential Commission for Judicial Revolution announced the release of 100 inmates from such a facility as part of a directive issued by Maduro to evaluate the preventive detention facilities and address overcrowding.

Preventive detention centers were designed to be temporary holding cells for people awaiting a court date. But that’s not what they became, Nieto said.

“The Ministry for the Penitentiary Service many years ago gave the order not to allow the entry of new people [to the traditional prisons] if they did not authorize it,” Nieto said. “This ministry prohibited the entry of new inmates into Venezuelan prisons, which is where they should be. This caused the preventive care centers to collapse and the preventive care centers to become, as they are today, the new prisons of Venezuela.”

Nieto estimates there are as many as 70,000 people held in these preventive care centers, far greater than they were designed to house.

In response, the government created two commissions to review the cases of prisoners and to determine if they should be “granted freedom,” Nieto said. “In fact, there are many who have been released.”

While some in the U.S. have claimed the Venezuelan government is releasing its most violent criminals, the Venezuelan government doesn’t disclose the charges against those released, so there’s no way of knowing, he said.

“Look, people are released, first, in many cases because they have been detained there for several years and a trial has not even been initiated against them,” Nieto said. “Also because in many cases they are minor crimes that do not merit such heavy penalties. So, well, that frees people. There are cases [of those] that have even already served the sentence established at that time.”

In addition, the Venezuelan government under Maduro has attempted recently to militarily regain control of traditional prisons, whose operation had previously been ceded to criminal groups. The leader of the Tren de Aragua gang, Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, and hundreds of others escaped from the prison where the gang originated shortly before the prison was raided by government authorities in September, CNN en Español reported. He remains at large, and InSight reported that it is believed he is being protected by criminal associates in a mining town in Venezuela near the border with Guyana.

According to the World Prison Brief website maintained by Helen Fair of the Institute for Crime and Justice Police Research, Venezuela’s prison population (not including pre-trial detainees) declined from 37,543 in 2020 to 32,200 in 2022 (and had been declining for the four years before that as well).

The government’s efforts to retake control of the prisons “has involved relocating some prisoners from one prison to another, and there are some prisoners who are unaccounted for,” LaSusa, of InSight, said. “However, the Venezuelan government has no known policy of selecting particular inmates to send them outside the country.”

Speculation

Again, Trump has provided no evidence to back up his claim that the Venezuelan government is emptying its prisons and sending inmates to the U.S.

Some supporters of Trump’s immigration policy say that, while perhaps speculative, there is good reason to believe Trump may be right.

Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates lower immigration, wrote a column noting that Cuba did something like that in the 1980s, and he argued that since there are ideological and political ties between Cuba and Venezuela, “the idea may not be as specious as some have claimed.”

In 1980, Cuban leader Fidel Castro allowed the mass migration of some 125,000 Cubans to the U.S. in what was known as the Mariel boatlift.

“Most were true refugees, many had families here, and the great majority has settled into American communities without mishap,” the Washington Post wrote in 1983. “But the Cuban dictator played a cruel joke. He opened his jails and mental hospitals and put their inmates on the boats too.”

According to the Post, about 22,000 of the new arrivals “freely admitted that they were convicts.” Some were political prisoners, but others were convicts who had committed serious felonies, including violent crimes.

Arthur pointed to a drop in Venezuelan crime, the close alignment between the Cuban and Venezuelan governments, and anecdotal evidence of Venezuelans committing crimes in the U.S.

“None of this is evidence of anything,” Arthur told us, but “all of this does raise some questions.”

But the bar is higher than that for such a definitive and repeated claim by Trump, and numerous officials say they have seen no evidence to support Trump’s claim. (Not to mention the fact that Trump claims the emptying of prisons and mental institutions is happening “with many other countries.”) 

“This claim has come up repeatedly about various countries, Venezuela is just the latest example,” Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, told us. “While the actions of institutions in Venezuela is not our specialty, we are unaware of any action by Venezuelan authorities (or those of any other country) to empty its jails and prisons or its mental-health institutions to send criminals or people with mental-health issues to the U.S.”

“They are neither emptying the prisons nor the mental shelters to send people to the United States, nor is the reduction in crime associated with [Trump’s claim],” Rísquez, the Venezuelan investigative journalist, told us. “Those statements by former President Trump, it seems to me that they have no basis, that they are political, that they have to do with, well, some intention to criminalize migration or the processes that are occurring in the United States with migrants.”

In an interview with CBS News in March, Owens, the U.S. Border Patrol chief, was asked if it was accurate — as Trump has said — that “we have millions and millions of people coming from jails and prisons.”

“I don’t know,” Owens said. “I don’t know if other countries are releasing people from jails and those folks that got released are making their way up, or not, I don’t know what the numbers would be. It’s the unknown that scares us. I can tell you that there are at least 140,000 that we know about that have gotten away [since October], that we have detected but have not been able to apprehend. And I know there’s a good likelihood that there’s plenty more that we have not detected that also got away. Is it possible that at least a portion of them come from violent criminal backgrounds or served time in prison in other countries? Absolutely.”

But among the large number of Venezuelan migrants who are crossing illegally into the U.S. and then seeking asylum status, “I think they absolutely are by and large good people,” Owens said.

Nonetheless, he said, there is “a very small amount” among those apprehended that have criminal backgrounds, including “convicted sexual predators” and “convicted gang members.” Owens said it is only logical that there is a “higher incidence” of criminals among the so-called gotaways, because they are afraid to turn themselves in for CBP scrutiny.

“Most of the folks who we’re encountering that are turning themselves in, they’re coming across because they’re either fleeing terrible conditions or they’re economic migrants looking for a better way of life,” Owens said. “It doesn’t make them bad people. It’s just that they’re not being respectful of the laws that we’ve established as a country and they’re actually putting people in this country in harm’s way because they’re pulling the border security apparatus off of task.”

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We often encounter history repeated as folklore and vice versa. Firsthand encounters are retold so often, details get lost or rewritten in the process. One particular claim made its way from oral and literary retellings to the internet: that Black people living in Jim Crow South couldn’t have vanilla ice cream except on the Fourth of July. 

Why Vanilla Ice Cream?

The claim has gone viral on TikTok, and numerous articles have circulated versions of it for several years. As to why Black people were denied this flavor specifically, social media users presented numerous theories. A viral 2023 TikTok post with more than 2 million views said vanilla ice cream was “a privilege that some white Southerners didn’t believe Black people deserved to have.” 

Another post on TikTok claimed, “It was seen as pure and for white people only during slavery and after through the Jim Crow segregation era.” The same post connected Black people’s love of butter pecan ice cream as having grown out of necessity and accessibility — pecans were reportedly native to the South and in the absence of being able to get other flavors, Black communities gravitated toward it. 

Other TikTok posts highlighted the irony of the development of vanilla ice cream — it became possible due to the ingenuity of an enslaved Black boy named Edmond Albius from the French island of Réunion. In 1841, he discovered a method to hand pollinate the vanilla bean that became used worldwide. 

Historical and Oral Accounts 

Many examples of Black people being denied vanilla ice cream emerged from family lore and memoir. 

Maya Angelou’s 1969 memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” detailing her life as a child in Stamps, Arkansas, documented one such instance of discrimination through secondhand accounts. She wrote: “People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days he had to be satisfied with chocolate.” 

Writer Audre Lorde discussed her childhood summer trip to Washington, D.C., in her autobiography “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.” In a passage titled “The Fourth of July,” she described being denied vanilla ice cream at a white establishment: 

Two blocks away from our hotel, the family stopped for a dish of vanilla ice cream at a Breyer’s ice cream and soda fountain. Indoors, the soda fountain was dim and fan-cooled, deliciously relieving to my scorched eyes. 

Corded and crisp and pinafored, the five of us seated ourselves one by one at the counter. There was I, between my mother and father, and my two sisters on the other side of my mother. We settled ourselves along the white mottled marble counter, and when the waitress spoke at first no one understood what she was saying, and so the five of us just sat there. 

The waitress moved along the line of us closer to my father and spoke again. “I said I kin give you to take out, but you can’t eat here. Sorry.” Then she dropped her eyes looking very embarrassed, and suddenly we heard what it was she was saying all at the same time, loud and clear. 

Straight-backed and indignant, one by one, my family and I got down from the counter stools and turned around and marched out of the store, quiet and outraged, as if we had never been black before. […]

The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice-cream I never ate in Washington, D.C., that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip and it wasn’t much of a graduation present after all. 

Culinary historian Michael Twitty wrote about his father’s experience being denied vanilla ice cream in a 2014 article for The Guardian. In the article, titled “Black People Were Denied Vanilla Ice Cream in the Jim Crow South – except on Independence Day,” he wrote about how this practice was “custom” rather than “law.” He also argued for its truthfulness because of the way it communicated to Black children about the rules of living in that time period. He wrote:

My father, for instance, first learned the rules when he first visited South Carolina with my grandfather in the 1940s. In our family’s home county of Lancaster, Daddy asked the general store owner if he could buy some candy and ice cream, referring to the white man as “Sir”. The store owner promptly grabbed my father by the collar, and yelled at him in the presence of my grandfather. Then he informed the elder man, “You’d better teach this little [N-word] to say ‘Yassuh’, boy! ‘Sir’ ain’t good enough!” My grandfather grabbed his son and sped off.

At the end of the article, however, he wrote, “Perhaps the memory of being denied vanilla ice cream is not a literal memory for most: maybe it is just commentary. […] The racism of the time period was not just about dignity and self-esteem – it was embodied and mythologized in physical terms.” 

We searched for first-hand historical accounts that corroborated the above custom of denying Black people vanilla ice cream (and permitting it on July 4). We reached out to numerous historians of Jim Crow and food culture, and will update this story as we learn more. 

We also found a photograph on Getty Images of writer James Baldwin standing outside an ice cream parlor in 1963 in Durham, North Carolina. The door behind him said, “Colored entrance only,” and a white man can be seen looking out the parlor window. It seems that the parlor was accepting Black customers while enforcing segregation, but whether they actually served them ice cream (or vanilla flavor) is up for debate and would require firsthand accounts from Black people in that parlor. 

A 1939 Library of Congress photograph also shows a group of Black people eating ice cream in a public space, though the exact flavors are unknown. 

(Russell Lee/Library of Congress)

Given that we could find no direct accounts that proved a connection between stories of discrimination from the Jim Crow era and the practice of denying vanilla ice cream except on July 4, it is likely they may fit into a wider pattern of white establishments generally denying services to Black patrons. In other words, the stories may have had little to do with the exact ice cream flavor, or the decision to only serve vanilla ice cream on July 4. 

What Really Happened? 

Did the above instances of discrimination never take place? Twitty’s father’s memory, along with Lorde’s firsthand account of being denied ice cream of any flavor, certainly may have occurred (along with numerous stories of Black people being denied other services at establishments).

Were they connected to an unspoken rule of specifically denying vanilla ice cream except on July 4 to Black people? Even Twitty admitted to us that this may not have been the case, but it doesn’t make the experiences of racism in general any less impactful. 

When we asked Twitty for details around his vanilla ice cream claim, he expressed regret that his article had been taken literally. “I have some regrets about the story,” he said, “But I forgive myself because I ask better questions now.”

“With my father, I didn’t hear the July 4 part [of the social media claim], but did hear about him being denied vanilla ice cream in South Carolina,” he said. 

He added that such histories are “colloquial and discretionary.” He said, “Jim Crow wasn’t logical, Jim Crow wasn’t nice. It was about lynching children and putting men in their place. […] Custom was worse than written law, and Jim Crow was about customs, where a Black man could not look a white woman in the eye [for example].” 

He also brought up Angelou’s reference to the lore in Arkansas. “That’s where we get ideas of this apocryphal folklore that comes from real trauma in people’s lives. This passes from person to person and turns into a commentary on American jingoism [referencing July 4].” 

He also thought elements of the claim about Black people turning to butter pecan as an alternative as somewhat illogical. “When I wrote my commentary [in The Guardian], other readers connected it to butter pecan, while forgetting that [Black families] could make vanilla ice cream at home. It was the favorite ice cream in my household. Both my grandmothers had ice cream makers, there was no reason why they couldn’t have made their own vanilla ice cream.”

Darryl Goodner, co-owner of Louisville Cream in Kentucky and creator of the Butter Pecan Podcast, found that the vanilla ice cream story proliferated as folklore but remained unverified. “We don’t have a definitive answer from the research, but it seems to be Black people chose whatever was the other things around,” Goodner told the Louisville Courier Journal. “Looking at the South particularly, the flavor butter pecan makes sense. So many pecans are grown in Georgia.” We reached out to Goodner to learn more. 

Jennifer Wallach, professor of history at the University of North Texas, told us internet stories of Black people being denied vanilla ice cream were drawn from oral histories in Black families, but she had never run across any evidence showing this to be a widespread practice. 

“I certainly would not want to refute those family histories, and I would guess that this kind of thing may have happened before. In this case, the core truth about inequality and discrimination, even over very trivial matters, is, of course, unambiguously true,” she said.

However, she added, it was not a widespread practice simply because of economics:

I don’t think the practice of denying vanilla ice cream was widespread for the fundamental reason that white business owners typically seemed content, or perhaps to put it more plainly, eager, to take Black money. In the drugstores, for instance, where many of the sit-ins took place in the 1960s, Black people could shop. They could spend money. They just couldn’t sit at the lunch counter on equal terms with white customers. Restaurants, of course, often had separate seating areas or take-out windows for Black customers. These practices were designed to be humiliating and discriminatory but not to deny Black customers an opportunity to spend their money on goods. (There were exceptions, of course, like, famously, the Pickrick in Atlanta that would not serve Black customers at all.)

In general, Black and white southerners ate similar foods, and white supremacists relied on spatial cues to signal racial difference and Black inferiority, rather than refusing to eat the same foods or policing what could be eaten. There is, of course, an argument to be made about “white foods” as symbols of purity, etc. that could map onto white supremacy, but why would vanilla ice cream be singled out? Were Black people supposedly denied other white foods like historically coveted white bread or milk?

Many Black southerners were impoverished due to white supremacy, Wallach added, and did not have expendable income for luxuries like ice cream. “Focusing on the vanilla ice cream story could be a distraction from fundamentally more brutal truths about the impact of white supremacy on Black southerners,” she continued.

But the story still proliferated because it struck a chord among Black people on social media. 

“It’s about sugar, dessert and pleasure. […] It’s about the denial of pleasure unless you have a certain skin color and privilege. [This discrimination] sounds diabolical because you are also denying a child. It does a good job of articulating what we can’t otherwise say,” Twitty said. 

We have encountered such folklore emerging from historic moments of trauma before. In 2022, we reported on the internet claim that Black slaves would create maps in cornrows to help others escape slavery in the South. We could not definitively address the veracity of the claim but found that such stories mattered to the Black community as rich and varied tales surrounding their movement towards emancipation. 

Over the course of our reporting on that story, Patricia Turner, folklorist and professor of African American studies at University of California Los Angeles, told us, “I am reticent to say anything too concrete, because I want lay people to want to know more about what life was like for enslaved people. There is no real value added to harshly saying “no” to a story.”

She continued, “You can couch your language [and say] ‘Well, no slave narrative covers it.’ Others will say, ‘Well that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.'”  

The same tension between history and folklore applies to this story as well. Whether Black people were denied a specific ice cream flavor over its symbolism is besides the point — the fact that they were denied similar services consistently and systematically is the underlying message of such lore that has persisted for generations.