The Trump administration seemingly labeled hundreds of Venezuelan people in the U.S. as gang members simply because they had tattoos, defying court orders earlier this month in order to send them to a torture center in El Salvador.
Mother Jones reports in an article published Wednesday that numerous families of deported Venezuelan men say that their loved ones were targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and sent abroad despite never having been involved in gangs.
One Dallas man who ICE abducted in February, Neri Alvarado Borges, has three tattoos — one of them with his 15-year-old brother’s name on a ribbon for autism awareness. The 25-year-old is “deeply devoted” to his brother, and at one point taught swimming lessons for children with developmental disabilities.
Alvarado’s boss, Juan Enrique Hernández, said that he talked to Alvarado after he was detained and found out that ICE had not given Alvarado a reason for his arrest. Rather, the ICE agent said he was being abducted because of his tattoos, Alvarado apparently told Hernández.
“Well, you’re here because of your tattoos,” the ICE agent said, per Mother Jones. “We’re finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos.”
The Trump administration has denied that they are relying solely on tattoos or things like social media posts — and officials have also claimed that the lack of evidence tying the deported men to gang activity somehow “highlights the risks that they pose.”
“It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile,” a top ICE official said in a court filing earlier this month.
Alvarado was reportedly cleared of gang suspicion after he explained the meaning of his tattoos to an ICE officer, his sister and Hernández said, but he was kept in detention anyway. He said that there were 90 people like him there, all of them tattooed, and all of them given similar reasons for their detention.
When Alvarado was deported, Hernández only found out that he had been sent to El Salvador — rather than Venezuela — from a list of names obtained by CBS last week.
Others interviewed by Mother Jones have similar stories of ICE agents scrutinizing their loved ones for their tattoos and accusing them, without evidence, of ties to Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Many of the people interviewed found out that their relatives had been sent to El Salvador from images circulating online or the CBS article, with no word from the U.S. government.
In the El Salvador prison, known as CECOT or the Center for Terrorism Confinement, the 261 men recently disappeared by ICE face horrific conditions.
There, men are confined in cells holding 80 people at a time, and are only allowed to leave the cell for half an hour a day, CNN reported in a recent visit. They are never allowed outside, and the lights are on at all times — though, in solitary confinement cells, there is no light at all. Prisoners have said that they are especially singled out for beatings by guards because they are Venezuelan.
Those sent to CECOT are never allowed to leave, even if they were sent there without being afforded due process.
Aspiring musician Arturo Suárez Trejo was sent to CECOT without the knowledge of his wife. Because he was deported, he was never able to meet their child, a three-month-old baby girl, Mother Jones reports. His wife says that his tattoos don’t have anything to do with a gang; one of his tattoos, on his neck, is of a hummingbird meant to symbolize “harmony.”
Suárez’s wife only found out that he was sent to CECOT through a propaganda video released by the government of El Salvador.
“As Venezuelans, we can’t be in our own country so we came to a country where there is supposedly freedom of expression, where there are human rights, where there’s the strongest and most robust democracy,” said Nelson Suárez, his older brother. “Yet the government is treating us like criminals based only on our tattoos, or because we’re Venezuelan, without a proper investigation or a prosecutor offering any evidence.”
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