Caracas (AFP) โ Venezuela's president Nicolas Maduro accused Washington Monday of committing a crime in the case of a two-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, who it claimed were members of Venezuela's Tren de Aragua drug gang.
"This is a crime whichever way you see it, taking a two-year-old girl away from a migrant mother just because she is a migrant and a Venezuelan," Maduro said Monday during his weekly television program.
"And accusing her without evidence of being a member of a criminal gang, and using it as an excuse to steal her child, is a crime under any international law," the president added.
In a statement earlier Monday, the foreign ministry in Caracas denounced "the abduction by US authorities of the young Venezuelan Maikelys Antonella Espinoza Bernal, aged two" 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 that it says are undocumented and cancelling the legal status of others.
The administration has said that many of those it has 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.
In a statement Saturday, the DHS claimed the father, Maiker 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, Yorely Escarleth Bernal Inciarte, "oversees recruitment of young women for drug smuggling and prostitution," the DHS said.
It 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 organization" 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.