In its sweeping deportation marketing campaign in opposition to Venezuelan immigrants, the Trump administration has repeatedly relied on tattoos to find out whether or not somebody is a member of the scary prison syndicate Tren de Aragua.
However The Impartial has discovered that the U.S. authorities’s examples of TDA tattoos, created underneath the Biden administration, embody artwork by artists within the UK and India, who say the tattoos they etched had innocent meanings. One honored the beginning of a kid, whereas one other seems to commemorate the Aussie rock band AC/DC.
“It’s mind-blowing that that is getting used for instance of gang tattoos. It is senseless in any respect,” the British artist whose clock tattoo seems in a 2024 Division of Homeland Safety briefing on “detecting and figuring out” TDA members informed The Impartial. “I’ve no relationship to Venezuelan gangs, and my artwork has nothing to do with them.”
Different examples utilized by DHS might be present in on-line posts relationship again as much as 11 years, suggesting that they had been acquired just by looking out the web for tattoos of assorted subjects, together with crowns, trains, stars, clocks, and the phrases “Hijos de Dios” (which means “sons of God”), or “HJ” for brief.
“Sure, this tattoo was accomplished by me,” mentioned Vipul Chaudhary, a tattooist in Gujarat, India whose picture posted on Pinterest in 2021 seems to be the unique model of DHS’s “HJ” instance.
“The one who received this tattoo is my good friend, and he lives in Gujarat.”
The briefing is one among eight U.S. authorities paperwork, obtained by the transparency group Property of the People through public information requests and shared with The Impartial, which reference tattoos as a method for regulation enforcement officers to identify potential members or associates of TDA.
Largely compiled underneath Biden, these paperwork have now taken on new weight due to Trump’s use of 18th-century wartime powers to deport hundreds of alleged TDA members with little to no due course of — following a take care of El Salvador’s president to carry them in a notoriously harsh mega-prison.
Amongst these deported to this point are Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, a homosexual make-up artist who has repeatedly denied any affiliation with TDA, and Neri Alvarado Borges, who has an autism consciousness tattoo in honor of his brother.
“Nicely, you’re right here due to your tattoos,” an ICE agent allegedly told Borges. “We’re discovering and questioning everybody who has tattoos.”
Court papers shared by the ACLU recommend that DHS is utilizing an “Alien Enemies Act Validation Information” to resolve who might be deported, assigning totally different level values to numerous traits together with tattoos.
It’s unclear whether or not these paperwork performed any position within the present deportations. However they’re a few of the solely public proof obtainable of what sort of tattoos DHS considers “indicative” of somebody “presumably being a member or affiliate of TDA”.
“I am unable to say whether or not these explicit paperwork had been within the arms of explicit brokers at explicit moments. What I can say is these paperwork have been circulated broadly amongst regulation enforcement, and that the clear, meant function of those paperwork is to be educational for regulation enforcement in figuring out supposed TDA members,” mentioned Ryan Shapiro, government director of Property of the Individuals.
Experts say that TDA, like most Venezuelan gangs, doesn’t use tattoos to sign membership, and several other paperwork seen by The Impartial clearly warn officers to not rely solely on tattoos.
“It’s an concept that has been taken from Central America… and has been incorrectly utilized to Tren de Aragua,” Rebecca Hanson, a College of Florida professor who research violence and policing in Venezuela, informed The Impartial.
And whereas a few of the instance images of tattoos function precise Venezuelan nationals detained on the U.S. border, others have extra obscure origins.
‘It appears like they’ve simply pulled random pictures off Google’
Take the elaborately detailed arm tattoo of a pocket watch and dove, which comes from the Instagram web page of a tattoo artist in Nottingham, England. In DHS’s model, somebody has manually eliminated the artist’s watermark.
“The tattoo was accomplished in England on somebody that’s of caucasian ethnicity,” mentioned the artist, who requested to stay nameless. “It was to signify the beginning of his baby and love.”
In DHS’s briefing the tattoo is blurred, however on the artist’s Instagram web page it clearly features a date throughout the clock face.
The artist known as the DHS doc linking it to TDA membership as a “complete misrepresentation” of the tattoo’s which means, saying: “To me it truthfully appears like they’ve simply pulled random pictures off Google or Pinterest… I’m not completely happy that it’s been used inside some doc about this challenge.”
The Impartial has confirmed that the person who received the tattoo lives within the UK, however is withholding his identification out of respect for his privateness.
Or take the “HJ” tattoo inked in India by Vipul Chaudhary, which seems cropped and stretched within the DHS briefing.
Chaudhary mentioned he has identified the tattoo’s proprietor for about two or three years, and that reasonably than which means “Hijos de Dios”, the letters are merely household initials. “My good friend’s identify’s first letter and his spouse’s names’ first letter. That is all,” he informed The Impartial.
In the meantime, one of many examples of a prepare tattoo DHS offers was really inked in 2019 by Revival Tattoos within the historic English seaside resort of Blackpool, according to a post on Pinterest.
Revival didn’t reply to requests for remark, however the picture provides a transparent clue to the tattoo’s true which means: the brand of Australian rock band AC/DC, who carried out in entrance of a giant model train throughout their 2008-10 world tour.
The opposite three prepare examples included within the paperwork had been all featured in a 2015 article on the boys’s life-style web site Subsequent Luxurious, entitled ‘70 Prepare Tattoo Concepts for Males’.
DHS’s instance of a crown tattoo seems to have come from a Spanish-language tattoo concepts weblog, whereas one among its “Actual hasta la muerta” examples got here from the TikTok web page of a Colombian tattoo artist — who indicated that it was really quoting the debut album of widely popular Puerto Rican reggaeton artist Anuel AA.
The photographs’ provenance was first noticed by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigrant non-profit, UK-based political advisor Arieh Kovler, and Bluesky person @itsTyGrey. The paperwork themselves had been first reported by USA Today.
A spokesperson for DHS didn’t reply to questions from The Impartial.
Lots of deported with minimal due course of
The paperwork seen by The Impartial predate Trump’s current declaration of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, spanning July 2023 to January 2025. They bear the marks of assorted authorities businesses akin to DHS, the FBI, and the Texas Division of Public Security.
Though some paperwork are based mostly purely on photographs and particulars of named Venezuelan nationals whom brokers suspected of TDA hyperlinks, a number of incorporate web materials with no obvious connection to the gang.
In a single briefing from the Homeland Safety Investigations’s Chicago Discipline Division, whose serial quantity suggests it was created in 2024, eight out of the 9 reference photographs seem to have come from innocuous on-line posts.
“Open supply materials has depicted TDA members with a mix of the under tattoos,” it reads (see Exhibit 2 here), underneath the heading “DETECTING AND IDENTIFYING”.
Many of the paperwork provide little element about how brokers determined sure designs had been linked to TDA. The exception is a DHS abstract of an interview with Venezuelan asylum seeker who claimed to have been a high-ranking police officer in his dwelling nation, and who described tattoos as “the simplest however least efficient method” to identify TDA members.
“The paperwork make plain what ought to have already been apparent: The usage of tattoos to justify these deportations is a ploy to disguise nativism and cruelty as a nationwide safety crucial,” mentioned Shapiro from Property of the Individuals.
On DHS’s “Alien Enemies” scorecard, tattoos linked to gang membership is value 4 factors, whereas clothes akin to “high-end streetwear” or Michael Jordan gear counts for an additional 4. That’s regardless of a few of the paperwork explicitly warning that these alone should not proof of TDA membership.
ICE solely wants eight factors, in line with the information, to find out whether or not a suspect is a “validated member” of Tren de Aragua and might be summarily deported.
The ACLU has accused DHS of wrongly deporting individuals with no alternative to problem the claims in opposition to them, and multiple judges have ordered such deportations be halted. Officers have admitted that no less than one of many prisoners was deported in error.
“That they’re putting a lot weight on frequent tattoos and hand gestures is inconsistent with what specialists say are dependable strategies of figuring out TDA membership,” ACLU’s lead counsel on the case Lee Gelernt informed The Impartial.
When The Impartial questioned White Home press secretary Karoline Leavitt about these standards on Monday, she didn’t dispute the doc however mentioned DHS considers a “litany of standards that they use to make sure that these people qualify as overseas terrorists.”
Then she turned her fire on our reporter. “Disgrace on you and disgrace on the mainstream media for attempting to cowl [for] these people,” she mentioned.
Extra reporting by Alex Woodward.
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