Bulwark Takes - Trump Is Sending Innocent People to El Salvador For Soccer Tattoos

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

ICE is doing these deportations all wrong. They're deporting people with no gang affiliations, just because they have tattoos ICE is mis-identifying as gang tattoos, or do they even care they're wrong? Trump’s Deportations Rely on Tattoos—It’s Bullsh*t. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-deportations-tattoos-bullshit-anuel-aa-dhs-ice  Administration: ‘Many’ Venezuelans sent to El Salvador prison had no U.S. criminal record https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article302299534.html

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Take me the quickest way home. The 66 Express outside the Beltway was expressly built to save you time. Visit Ride66Express.com to plan your trip. Hi, this is Andrew Egger with The Bulwark. We keep learning more and more about Donald Trump's rolling plan to deport Venezuelan migrants and perhaps others, who knows, under an obscure old law, the Alien Enemies Act, sort of bypassing due process, bypassing any kind of judicial review, not really telling their families, not really telling lawyers, all on the administration's say-so that these people are members of a gang and therefore,

according to the administration, terrorists. Does any of that hold water? Does any of that make sense? Not so much. I'm joined today to talk about some of this, talk through some of this with our immigration reporter, Adrian Carasquillo. Adrian, thanks for coming on. Thank you, Andrew. So you just had the latest edition of your newsletter, Huddled Masses, go up online and you really focused on the specific mechanisms that the government is using to, you know, make at least a very thin case that some of these people that they are deporting are members of a Venezuelan gang. Can you just talk us through, you know, the case the administration's making and how they're identifying these people? I mean, let's just start real basic. People hear gang members, they want them out of the country. That's 100% all Americans agree. I think where what needs to be looked at here, what I tried to do in the newsletter is in

2017, we had a similar thing. MS-13 was this big, scary gang. And Donald Trump said that they were taking over cities and that we needed to liberate those cities. So when you look at MS-13, they actually were a gang that used tattoos as like a marker of membership, a signifier that you were in the gang. I mean, literally, there were giant MS, you know, on people's chests and things like that. Okay, so now we understand that. But now the government is trying, you know, Donald Trump, he has like the same three things

that he goes back to. And one of them is definitely fear mongering of the other and if you're brown. So they're basically like Tren de Aragua from Venezuela. So scary. Even though at one point they were like over 10,000 MS-13 members in the U.S. But from what I've seen from Washington Post reporting, there's like 800 or hundreds of Tren de Aragua members in the U.S. But again, they want you know, they'll send 170 guys to Guantanamo Bay or 238 Venezuelan men to an El Salvador prison. And you need basically two markers of being in a gang. This is what ICE uses. This is what the government uses. So one could be tattoos that they say you have. And the other one could be we saw a social social media post of you making gang signs, or we saw you wearing gang related clothing. So, which gets into a whole other thing on how you can be associated with a gang. So if they find a dude who has a tattoo and you know him, now you're, now you're associated with someone with a gang. So this is how lawyers told me at Cascades, that suddenly the whole neighborhood is part of Tren de Aragua. So anyway, so what I found pretty insane is that like there was one guy in Guantanamo Bay.

He had an Air Jordan tattoo. That's a pretty popular brand. People in Latin America like Michael Jordan. OK, there's another guy. There's there's crowns. There's roses. Texas Department of Public Safety put out a PowerPoint where they showed like stars, crowns, roses, trains, grenades, predatory felines, including tigers and jaguars. So, you know, this is how we get down this road where suddenly it's like they're putting into government documents that it's the government filing when they sent everybody to El Salvador. It's not just tattoos, they're saying, but that seems to be one of the driving reasons that they're saying these guys are all gang members. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what's been so striking to me about some of these filings is you'll have Trump administration officials, you talk about

this in your newsletter, about how they're essentially saying, well, look, of course, we're not relying on tattoos alone or social media posts alone or, you know, pictures of them, you know, doing supposed gang signs alone. But then when you look at some of these individual cases, essentially what's being alleged is that the government took two of those things, right? That there's a guy who was among the 230 that was sent to El Salvador, to this prison just in the last week. His immigration attorney, his name's Herce Reyes Barrios. He was flagged as a gang member. His attorney says that the two things

that were used to identify him were a soccer ball and crown tattoo, which he's a professional soccer player. According to his attorney, it was a nod to the fact that he really likes Real Madrid. It's similar to the Real Madrid logo. That's one of the two things. And then there's a social media picture of him.

Rock on, you know, like, and that's supposedly a gang, a gang sign. And those two things, you know, well, now you have your two gang, gang related kind of boxes to check. Off he goes to, off he goes to prison in El Salvador. I mean, like it's, you sort of struggle to communicate like how almost comical, uh, that is like kind of when

you, when you put it out that way. Um, and, and, and look, these are the sort of things that, that like essentially are like first hunch law enforcement sorts of things, right? Like maybe these are kinds of things where like, okay, you could understand it if like, this is what makes a cop, uh, uh, like want to take a closer look at a person if they pull them over to a traffic stop or something. Not everybody agrees with that, but it's not the first order of professional judgment here. It's the whole thing. It's, it's if law enforcement, you know, flags these two things and it's like, well, actually we have a pretty good reason to think you're part of a gang now on you get to a plane and off you go to a prison camp in El Salvador. i mean like like we're it's so far through the looking glass on on so much of this stuff can

you just like talk through a few more like like more of the history of this stuff because because that was what i found so striking in what you wrote like ice and dhs have been tripping over these tattoos wrongly for years now yeah and let's use the example you use so somebody gets stopped by a police officer and they and it's basically let's just say some racial profiling or maybe some of those first hunches that cop does. Then you get due process. Then you get to prove, hey, listen, man, that's not what you thought it was. You get a dangerous, which is that one guy, he had Gustavo Adolfo Aguilera Aguero. He was, Miami Herald wrote about this guy. He was a roofer. He was working here, living in Dallas with his family. Goes out to take out garbage, ice picks him up.

And so he has a crown tattoo, like with his mom's name. He has a star tattoo with, I think, him and his son's name. And then he has a Real Hasta La Muerte tattoo. So that means real until death. And when I saw that, I was like, wait, this is weird. Because the authorities described this tattoo as saying until death, because again, we go back to MS-13, some of these older gangs, they used to have maybe tattoos or that was part of their phrasing because you're in the gang until death. But I'm like, this is not the same. They're missing where I know that phrase from is it's a popular motto of a popular reggaeton artist named Manuel, who has 38 million followers on Instagram

and actually endorsed Trump last fall. So they are saying that a popular, again, we go back to a Chicago Bull or a Michael Jordan or a Kobe Bryant tattoo. I bet gang members have those tattoos. I bet also regular dudes have those tattoos. So you have a guy who has 38 million followers who has a largely male, Latino male fan base and a Latin American fan base. And so even when they showed the tattoo in the documents, I'm like, that looks like I think a tattoo that he has. And I looked it up and he has a similar tattoo on his arm. So now you are expanding because there are clearly not enough gang members in this country for you to terrify all Americans. You're expanding

ways to get them. And one of them is these tattoos, which again, it's just so ridiculous. And lawyers say, you know, the reason we care, like, why should we care about these dudes? These guys are being disappeared into Venezuela. One apparently, at least one, was a professional soccer player who was protesting against Maduro's regime and was tortured. He was electrified and suffocated. So he's here claiming asylum because he goes back to Venezuela. He might be killed, he thinks. And that's what our country has always been. Asylum has always been part of legal immigration. Now you're disappearing people until El Salvador. The government clearly has no problem getting people with green cards too.

So it's like, where does this end? And the beginning, I think, is that not just erosion of due process, but complete elimination of due process. It was striking to me. You have a few examples in here of times when ICE and DHS have tried to make these same arguments before immigration judges, but they've been slapped down at times in the past, right? Yeah, they were slapped down. There was one instance with Daniel Ramirez Medina. He was a DACA recipient at the beginning of 2017. And ICE said that he was an MS-13 member. And they were

pointing to his tattoo, which was basically, you know, it said La Paz in Baja, California, El Sur, but it was the initial. So that's where he's from. That's his birthplace. And so ICE is acting like he's a gang member, you know, and what ended up happening in that case is actually really fascinating. ICE was apparently doctoring his statement, his sworn statement that he gave, where he was saying that he was chased by gangs. So that's where he ended up where he ended up. And they were making it seem like he was a gang member. And so the judge not only said, you did not prove what you said, that he's a gang member, but you lied. And so again, we're not saying all of ICE is lying. That's how you get into these issues. We've been a country

where you can do legal immigration. We've been a country where you can claim asylum. Oftentimes, we discuss things in our politics on a left-right spectrum. This is not even on the left-right spectrum. Immigration lawyers told me, the Alien Enemies Act, so you're invoking this 18th century law made for wartime. Under what part of the law do you think it's okay to then send people to El Salvador? What they're basically saying is you're allowed to expel people from the country. Under what legal basis are you taking them, throwing them into one of the most notorious prisons in the Western Hemisphere so they can do like hard labor? And by the way, they paid El Salvador to take these people. So we're just in a new area.

We're not, you know, in normal sort of reasonable people can disagree on immigration left and right. This is like never been done before. The legal basis does not exist for sending these people and disappearing these people. And just to really drill down for one more minute on the whole due process thing, like you say, like, yeah, there are times when ICE cuts corners or doesn't do its homework or even is like, you know, potentially lying about one of these people. And the solution to that is, I mean, part of the solution to that might be, you know, some reforms at that body. But the whole reason for the processes that we have set up is you don't

count on any single institution to be like batting a thousand and perfectly virtuous and perfectly honest. You have this adversarial process where you have prosecutors who make a case against a person. They have an attorney who makes the best defense that you can give for that person. And that all goes before an independent judge to get to the bottom of it. And that's the thing that's being totally skipped over and totally short-circuited as prelude to, as you say, shipping these people off to be imprisoned in vile conditions in a totally different third country under a dictator of its own. So it's a very grotesque thing. I think we can I think we can leave it there. Thanks, Adrian, for coming on to talk through all this stuff. Thanks so much.

All right. And thank you all for for listening. Thank you all for watching. We'll be sticking on this issue as well with so much that's going on in the Trump White House right now. Hit all the buttons, subscribe, like the thing. We'll see you back here soon.