Trump Makes His Most Unhinged Claim Yet About Kilmar Abrego Garcia

Donald Trump has taken his tirade against immigrants with tattoos to new heights, baselessly claiming that Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s knuckle tattoos clearly associate him with MS-13.

“This is the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, that the Courts are trying to save from being deported?” the president wrote on Truth Social Monday night. “He was supposed to be, according to the Judge and the Democrats, a wonderful father from Maryland, but then they noticed he had ‘MS-13’ tattooed onto his knuckles (and lots of really bad stories about his past!).”

The post includes a photo of Trump holding up a photo of a hand, supposedly Abrego Garcia’s, with a marijuana leaf, smiley face, cross, and skull tattooed across the knuckles. On top of each individual tattoo is written M-S-1-3, the president’s way of explaining each tattoo clearly translates to an individual letter or number, which all together spell … MS-13?

“This is the gang that is, perhaps, the worst of them all. What is wrong with our Country?” Trump’s post concluded, leaving out any explanation for how he broke the tattoo code.

Abrego Garcia was unlawfully deported to El Salvador last month due to an admitted “administrative error” by the Trump administration, though officials have since doubled down on unfounded claims that Abrego Garcia is part of MS-13. Now the president is resorting to one of his favorite, but most outrageous, justifications for deporting Latino men without due process: They have tattoos.

After he ignored court orders and deported 200 Venezuelan immigrants to a megaprison in El Salvador, Trump cited photos of their tattoos as proof that they were part of Tren de Aragua. One man had a tattoo of a rose and a skull; another had a tattoo of a soccer ball. Even if gang-affiliated tattoos were sufficient evidence to deport someone (they’re not), none of those are associated with Tren de Aragua. In fact, experts on the gang have revealed that Tren de Aragua does not have affiliation tattoos.

“The truth is that a tattoo identifying Tren de Aragua does not exist,” Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan journalist who published the definitive book on TdA, told The New Yorker at the start of the month. “Tren de Aragua does not use any tattoos as a form of gang identification; no Venezuelan gang does.”

Last week, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return, but all the administration has done is continue to push lies about the 29-year-old’s identity. A growing number of Democrats are traveling to El Salvador to push for his release.

“While Donald Trump continues to defy the Supreme Court, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being held illegally in El Salvador after being wrongfully deported,” California Representative Robert Garcia said in a statement Monday. “That is why we’re here—to remind the American people that kidnapping immigrants and deporting them without due process is not how we do things in America.”

It’s a pretty bad sign when people start making comparisons to the Great Depression, right? 

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that after the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed nearly 1,000 points, it was “headed for its worst April performance since 1932.” But that wasn’t the only historically significant market drop. 

The S&P 500, which has dropped 9 percent since Donald Trump announced his destabilizing “reciprocal tariff” policy earlier this month, has seen the worst performance since Inauguration Day for any president going back to 1928, according to Bespoke Investment Group.

Also on Monday, the yield on a 10-year Treasury note rose to 4.89 percent, and the ICE U.S. dollar index—which measures the dollar against foreign currencies—sank more than 1 percent to its lowest level since March 2022. Typically when the market sinks, as it did during the Covid-19 pandemic, the dollar goes up and Treasury yields drop. Now the opposite is true—meaning that the costs of imported goods will be even higher than the boosted prices caused by Trump’s tariffs on nearly every country in the world. This also leaves investors with few safe spots to wait out the volatility caused by Trump’s tariffs. 

“It’s the hallmark of the ‘no confidence’ trade,” Scott Ladner, chief investment officer at Horizon Investments, told the Journal. “It’s impossible to commit capital to an economy that is unstable and unknowable because of policy structure.” 

The market seemed to recover slightly Tuesday from the significant sell-off during the previous session. But still, there was trouble on the horizon.

The International Monetary Fund said Tuesday that Trump’s tariffs would slow growth, not only for the U.S. but globally.  The IMF’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, told reporters that the odds of a recession in the U.S. had increased from 25 percent in October 2024 to 40 percent. 

A Venezuelan man ordered to be deported has vanished into the “black hole” created by the Trump administration’s illegal denial of due process for immigrants.  

Ricardo Prada Vásquez was marked for deportation among a group of detainees sent to El Salvador last month as part of Donald Trump’s mass deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. But now his name does not appear in the government’s records of immigrants to be detained and deported, Venezuelan authorities can’t find him, and his family hasn’t heard from him in more than a month, according to a Tuesday report from The New York Times.

The 32-year-old father was detained by immigration authorities on January 15 after accidentally driving over the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Michigan to Ontario, while he was working as a food delivery driver. He had immigrated to the U.S. in November 2024 using the CBP One app, and was permitted to remain in the country while his case was considered. 

Prada was initially able to stay in touch with his friend in Chicago, Javier, who spoke to the Times under the condition that he only be referred to by his middle name, for fear of becoming a target of immigration authorities. On March 15, Prada called Javier and told him he was being deported, and expected to return to Venezuela. Javier was the last known person to have contact with Prada. 

“He has simply disappeared,” Javier told the Times. 

Prada’s name was not included in the list of immigrants removed to El Salvador. 

Prada’s family waited to hear from him but heard nothing. “He fell off the face of the earth,” said Prada’s mother, Maria Alejandra Vega. “It was sheer agony.”

Prada was among the group of Venezuelan immigrants who were moved south toward Texas, ahead of the Trump administration’s staging of a massive deportation under the AEA of detainees it alleged were gang members. Many of these individuals had no criminal record, and evidence of their gang affiliation was thin.

Prada’s family told the Times that he was not a member of a gang. He did have tattoos, which is one of the characteristics ICE authorities have used to determine alleged gang affiliation. He was initially moved to an ICE facility in Ohio before being sent to the El Valle Detention Facility in south Texas, where, after failing to secure a lawyer, he was ordered to be deported.

“This case represents a black hole where due process no longer exists,” Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School, told the Times. 

“This case shocks the conscience,” he said. “I have not heard of a disappearance like this in my 40-plus years of practicing and teaching immigration law.”

Over the weekend, the Supreme Court ordered that the Trump administration pause all deportations under the AEA after reports spread that the government was planning to remove another group of Venezuelan immigrants, in violation of the high court’s prior ruling that detainees be given the opportunity to “actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”

The court’s ruling sent Donald Trump into a rage Monday, as the administration has continued to ramp up its rhetoric against due process. In reality, there are no “activist” judges stymying the president’s wishes, but judges requiring that power to be administered according to the rule of law. And the right of due process is exactly what might ensure that the government does not lose a human being. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is using private medical records to create a registry of people with autism in the United States.

The National Institutes of Health is helping to collect private medical records from government and commercial databases to give to the secretary of health and human services, NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said Monday. The records include prescription records from pharmacies, lab testing, and genomics records from the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, private insurance claims, and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers.

The NIH is also working on an agreement to secure Medicare and Medicaid data, according to Bhattacharya, who said that select outside researchers will be able to access and study, but not download, the collected data from the registry.

Kennedy, a longtime critic of vaccination, has made the study of autism one of HHS’s primary goals under his tenure. The department’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a study to examine links between autism and vaccines, even though medical experts have long debunked any such connection.

The news that HHS is putting together a registry and accessing Americans’ private medical records raises all kinds of privacy concerns. HHS and its departments, including the NIH and CDC, have laid off thousands of employees in the past few months, possibly giving Kennedy and Bhattacharya, also an anti-vaxxer, more compliant employees to push their agenda.

Kennedy has drawn criticism from mainstream medical researchers by calling autism “preventable” and made the outlandish claim that he can find a cure for the condition by September. On top of that, his vaccination stance has led to a haphazard effort to combat a growing measles outbreak across the country, as he gives conflicting recommendations on vaccinations versus quack treatments. What kind of conclusion will such an approach yield in his autism crusade?

House Republicans are trying to drastically cut Medicaid coverage and blame it all on the states.

When Democrats expanded Medicaid coverage under President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act to include adults with incomes of up to 138 percent of the poverty level, states that implemented the expansion received a 90 percent federal medical assistance percentage, or FMAP, from the federal government. That means the federal government covers 90 percent of the costs for those enrolled in the ACA expansion, and the state covers 10 percent.

The GOP wants to drastically decrease the federal match rate for the ACA expansion and shift more financial responsibility to states, Republican Representative Austin Scott told Fox Business Tuesday.

“What we have talked about is moving that 90 percent level of the expansion back towards the more traditional levels of 50 to approximately 80 percent instead of the 90/10,” Scott said.

“Nobody would be kicked off of Medicaid as long as the governors decided that they wanted to continue to fund the program. And so we are going to ask the states to pick up and pay,” Scott said.

The cut would be devastating to the 20 million Americans who currently rely on the expansion for health insurance coverage—many of whom reside in red states—and would leave some 40 states that have adopted the ACA expansion to fend for themselves with their limited budgets. Research shows that states with the expansion have lower uninsured rates and those covered by the program have gotten healthier and more financially stable.

According to an analysis from the health nonprofit KFF, if states had to pay a higher match-rate percentage, many would likely abandon the ACA program altogether, resulting in millions of lost coverage for low-income Americans. Twelve states currently have laws in place that would end the expansion immediately or require immediate changes if the federal match rate were to drop, KFF pointed out.

“Eliminating the enhanced FMAP for adults in the Medicaid expansion could reduce Medicaid spending by nearly one-fifth ($1.9 trillion) over a 10-year period and up to nearly a quarter of all Medicaid enrollees (20 million people) could lose coverage,” the analysis found.

Led by House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republicans have long tried to slash the ACA expansion to help pay for Donald Trump’s tax cuts. Now the GOP is doing everything it can to avoid taking responsibility for putting the health of millions of Americans at risk.