Trump Deported Immigrants Over Tattoos. Here’s What They Really Mean.
Donald Trump has accused more than 200 recently deported Venezuelans of being “gang members.” Here are their stories.

Some of the men that Trump illegally deported to a mega prison in El Salvador are regular civilians and not murderous Tren de Aragua gang members as Trump continues to insist.
On Saturday, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport over 200 Venezuelans on the grounds that they were Tren de Aragua gang members. A federal judge ordered the planes to turn around and return to the United States, but the Trump administration claimed that the judge’s written order came too late, wrongly suggesting that a verbal and written federal order hold different weight.
“These are criminals, many many criminals … murderers, drug dealers at the highest level, drug lords. People from mental institutions. That’s an invasion,” Trump said in reference to the deportees.
In reality, immigration officials appear to be simply detaining any Latino men with tattoos.
“The men sent to do hard labor in a Salvadoran prison with no due process include: A tattoo artist seeking asylum who entered legally, a teen who got a tattoo in Dallas because he thought it looked cool, a 26-year-old whose tattoos his wife says are unrelated to a gang,” the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote on X.
“Our [Immigrant Defenders Law Center] client fled Venezuela last year & came to US to seek asylum. He has a strong claim. He was detained upon entry because ICE alleged his tattoos are gang related. They are absolutely not,” immigration lawyer Lindsay Toczylowski wrote on Bluesky. “Our client worked in the arts in Venezuela. He is LGBTQ. His tattoos are benign. But ICE submitted photos of his tattoos as evidence he is Tren de Aragua. His @ImmDef attorney planned to present evidence he is not. But never got the chance because our client has been disappeared.”
Aguilera Agüero, one of the people detained and deported, has a tattoo that reads “Real until death” in Spanish, a line from Puerto Rican reggaeton star and Trump supporter Anuel AA. Agüero’s family denies all ties to Tren de Aragua.
“People have started identifying some of the 238 Venezuelan migrants deported to Bukele’s torture dungeons by the U.S. fascist regime. The brother of one of them posted that his relative is a barber with no criminal record and no links to any criminal organisations,” another account wrote on X.
We’re at the point where Trump is proudly ignoring the checks and balance systems to carry out these racist and indiscriminate deportations, forcing innocent men into absolute danger in Bukele’s Salvadoran prison system.