The United States expelled 238 Venezuelan men on three flights to El Salvador on March 15, 2025, saying that they were members of the Aragua gang from Venezuela.
Immigration officials said tattoos were not the only criteria used to decide who to expel; However, a government document has shown that civil servants relied on tattoos and clothing to determine gang membership.
A lawyer by Jerce Reyes Barrios, a professional football player who is one of the Venezuelans expelled in Salvador, says that the government has held and expelled its client because it has the tattoo of a football ball with a crown at the top, which resembles the logo of his favorite football team, Real Madrid. The tattoo and a photograph of Barrios making a sign of the hand which means “I love you” in sign language are the only two elements of evidence that the government has presented its gang ties, according to the lawyer.
Meanwhile, the Venezuelan makeup deported Andry José Hernández Romero has a crown tattoo at each wrist, one with “dad” and one with “mom” written next to each crown. The immigration authorities indicated in his file that these tattoos “determined factors to conclude reasonable suspicions” of his membership in the Gang Tren in Aragua. Some government sources listed crowns as a tattoo common to the members of Tren of Aragua, but other government sources have questioned this assertion.
David Aloven / X
Whether or not the Trump administration has used tattoos as the only expulsion criteria, I found in my own research that the use of tattoos like any type of criteria can allow police forces.
In 2023, I analyzed the reliability of tattoos as markers of gang membership at the Washington Law Review.
In the end: while many people in gangs have tattoos that demonstrate their membership, many people who have absolutely no gang have also got similar tattoos.
Based on them to determine gang membership has led to poorly identified people as gang members – especially since tattoos have become more popular.
There are certain types of tattoos that can be particularly misleading.
Geographic origins
In 2017, American immigration and customs application arrested Daniel Ramirez Medina, who was legally in the United States as part of the Defined Action program for childhood arrivals, or DACA. The government has tried to suppress its status and expel it, saying that it was a member of a gang due to a tattoo that said “La Paz BCS”. The PAZ is the capital of the Mexican state Baja California on, which is abbreviated “BCS”. The only proof of gang membership presented by ice agents at the immigration court was this tattoo.
But they ignored the fact that tattoos representing the names or regional codes of the native cities or countries of origin are a common way for people to honor where they came from.
This is particularly the case for people who migrate or move away from their country of origin. For example, tattoos of “503” and “504” – the codes of countries used to compose Salvador and Honduras, respectively – were invoked to lighten the gang membership, even as many people who have these tattoos reject gang tattoos and do not have a criminal record. The police were also based on tattoos of the words “Mexican”, “chicano” or “brown pride” as proof of belonging to a gang.
Some gangs, such as the Mexican mafia, include a reference to nationality in the name of the gang. And in the United States, street gangs are often based in specific neighborhoods, with many gangs incorporating the city or the street where they are based on gang names and associated tattoos. For this reason, tattoos celebrating a city or a country can only lead to confusion.
Mayan or Aztec image tattoos have also been used to designate people as gang members, even if these tattoos are clear expressions of cultural identity and do not necessarily have a link between gang membership. Although some gangs use specific Aztec symbols to identify members, it is practically impossible to distinguish a tattoo of cultural or geographic meaning from a tattoo indicating an association of gangs.
In the case of Medina, the American district judge Ricardo S. Martinez, named by George W. Bush, ordered that his DACA status remains in place and that he is protected from the expulsion because the “conclusive conclusions” of the ICE according to which he was a member of a gang was “contradicted by experts and other evidence”. In addition, an immigration judge who examined all the evidence had already concluded that he was not in a gang.
Martinez was clearly disturbed by ICE’s assertions, writing: “The most disturbing for the court is the continuous assertion that Mr. Ramirez is affiliated with the gangs, although he has provided no specific evidence to Mr. Ramirez to the Immigration Court in the context of his administrative procedure, and offering no evidence to this court to support her assertions four months later.”
Religious imaging and pop culture
The tattoos of popular Catholic religious images, such as the virgin of Guadalupe, hands and rosaries praying, were also used to label people as gang members, a decision that seems to be clearly excessive.
Although some gang members can be Catholic, no one would even try to allege that all Catholics are gang members. At least one of the deported Venezuelanian men had a rosary tattoo, as well as tattoos of a clock and the names of his mother and his niece with crowns at the top of the text.
Tattoos have also become an important way for people to celebrate popular culture. A woman’s lip tattoos, for example, have become popular among gang members and non-gangs. A number of professional athletes, including the football phenomenon Lionel Messi, have lip tattoos from their partner. However, this is also a tattoo that the police use to classify people as gang members.
According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, the tattoos of the stars on the shoulders, the crowns, the firearms, the grenades, the trains, the dice, the roses, the tigers and the jaguars are common among the members of Tren of Aragua.
The problem, of course, is that these symbols are also popular among people unrelated to the gang.
Imprecise methodology
Understanding the problem really comes down to mathematics. If it may be true that many gang members have tattoos of the images listed above, it is also true that many non-gang members have similar tattoos.
The Bayesian mathematical approach involves making inferences on the probabilities based on available information. The probability that a gang member has a certain tattoo is not the same thing as the probability that an individual who has a certain tattoo is a member of a gang.
The American government seems to be wrongly assimilating both.
By writing on the broader problems of membership of a demanding gang in 2009, the sociologist David Kennedy argued that the inability of the law to conceive rules “which clearly distinguishes a gang and a football team, or a member of a gang and his mother” suggests that “legal measures, based on an imprecise language (is) something of a problem”.
This problem becomes amplified when there is no regular procedure for the accused – that is exactly what happened to the Venezuelan men taken to the Salvador.
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