Famed Epstein reporter claims escape from US thwarted by Trump admin

Veteran journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, whose reporting has exposed a number of previously unknown revelations about Jeffrey Epstein, had her attempt to flee the United States thwarted by the Trump administration, she claimed on Saturday.

In May, Valdes-Rodriguez claimed that her home was targeted in “attacks” by those she believed were “unhappy” about her reporting on Epstein, which included a report suggesting the disgraced financier may have had ties to the CIA. The attacks, she alleged, were potentially “direct energy weapon attacks,” which she claimed had left her "permanently injured.”

After announcing her intention to flee the country, however, she hit a snag that she blamed directly on the Trump administration – namely, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative that was established, in part, to reduce wasteful government spending.

“My departure from the US has been delayed by shocking and unexpected legal matters, including but not limited to the fact that DOGE managed to erase my father's naturalized citizenship status and records from the Social Security database,” Valdes-Rodriguez wrote in a recent statement published on Substack.

“My dad has been a United States citizen since the 1960s. The Trump administration doesn't care about the law. They are illegally erasing people's citizenship. My father is unable to fight this himself due to his Alzheimer's disease.”

Valdes-Rodriguez also argued that her father’s alleged citizenship status challenge was likely systemic, a claim supported by a whistleblower’s allegation that DOGE put millions of Americans’ Social Security data at risk.

“The Trump administration quietly erased the legal United States citizenship of an 81-year-old retired professor emeritus in memory care, who was born in Cuba but came to the US as a child, in an attempt to deny his Social Security benefits and perhaps do worse to him,” she wrote.

“I knew the issues facing us as a family would likely escalate into lawfare, but this is not the route I expected they would take, to try to make my father stateless.”