THE NEW ADMINISTRATION SWEPT into office pledging to hunt down and deport members of a dangerous Latin American criminal gang terrorizing Americans. President Donald Trump said the gang had “infested” the country, with towns pleading to be “liberated.”

The president’s hard-nosed immigration adviser, Tom Homan, said Trump had “taken the handcuffs off of law-enforcement officers,” who were now free to use all powers at their disposal to eliminate the gang.

But it wasn’t 2025. It was 2017. And the gang wasn’t Tren de Aragua, it was MS-13.

Revisiting the immigration crackdown of eight years ago can help illuminate a lot of what is happening now—chiefly, how a deportation regime can be launched on a flimsy legal basis yet on an explosive scale, resulting in hundreds of men being accused of being gang members with little or no proof.

It all starts with tattoos—specifically, how the U.S. government is using them as evidence of criminality. It’s not the first time the government has condemned people for their ink—and it hasn’t worked well in the past, either.

Daniel Ramirez Medina, a DACA recipient legally in the United States, was detained in February 2017. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents came looking for his father, they swept him up, too. The ICE agents claimed he represented an “egregious public safety concern” because he was “gang-affiliated.” They based their case on a tattoo on his forearm that they said “proved” he was a gang member because it resembled a known gang tattoo. But as Slate reported, the tattoo was a nautical star with the words “La Paz—BCS,” referring to Medina’s birthplace, La Paz in Baja California Sur. Medina’s lawyers introduced evidence showing ICE had doctored his statement to make it appear as if he had confessed to being a gang member. The judge overseeing Medina’s case didn’t just rule against ICE; he accused the agency of lying.

The Medina case was not an isolated incident. A 2018 report by the New York Immigration Coalition and CUNY Law found that agents were relying too much on specious aspects of appearance as a basis for gang allegations, including clothing, hand signals, and tattoos. “The emphasis on physical appearance dangerously results in stereotyping Latinx communities and inherently encourages race-based policing,” the report said.

Four months after Medina’s case, ICE agents showed up at the home of a 19-year-old named Alex (his last name was not disclosed) who had fled Honduras seeking asylum because of gang persecution and was living in Long Island. They took him away.

Alex’s crime? Not a tattoo, but he had doodled his hometown area code in class and a devil with horns—the school mascot—which the school flagged to authorities.

IN 2025, TATTOOS CONTINUE to play a role in whom the government chooses to deport. This past week, the Trump administration, using the Aliens Enemies Act, deported 238 men to one of the worst prisons in the Western Hemisphere without a hearing, claiming they were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. In a government filing, Robert Cerna, the acting field office director of enforcement and removal operations for ICE, claimed that the agency’s identification of the men as gang members “did not simply rely on social media posts, photographs of the alien displaying gang-related hand gestures, or tattoos alone.” But on one of the more controversial deportations, a top Homeland Security spokesperson has referenced tattoos specifically.

And when the government previously sent 170 men to Guantánamo Bay claiming they were members of the same gang, the justification included an Air Jordan tattoo on 23-year-old Luis Alberto Castillo, whom the New York Times reported did not have a criminal record.

The men sent to prison in El Salvador had their heads shaved and were shackled and manhandled by a foreign dictator’s masked thugs—all of it shared in a slick propaganda video.

Linette Tobin, a lawyer representing Jerce Reyes Barrios, one of the deported men, swore under oath that Barrios was a professional soccer player who marched against Venezuela’s Maduro regime, for which he was tortured with electric shocks and suffocation. He was in the United States seeking asylum, but his tattoo of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary was part of the justification for him being labeled a Tren de Aragua member. In fact, his lawyer writes, he chose it because it is similar to the Real Madrid logo.

Not that it should matter—the tattoo justification is flimsy at best, experts say, and certainly abused.

“Tren de Aragua is not a gang like MS-13 that mandates members get tattoos,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council told The Bulwark. “Many tattoos associated with Tren are also very normal for a person to get, and that’s important to highlight because it increases the chances of getting this wrong.”

GUSTAVO ADOLFO AGUILERA AGÜERO, 27, was working as a roofer in Dallas when he was taken away by authorities while carrying out the trash. He has a son who is a U.S. citizen. But the government claims he’s a Tren de Aragua member because of three tattoos: a crown with the name of his son, a star with his own name and his mother’s name, and the inscription “Real Hasta La Muerte” (“Real Until Death”) across his arm, the Miami Herald reported.

The Texas Department of Public Safety listed tattoos of crowns and the phrase “Real Hasta La Muerte” as gang symbols last fall—along with “roses and predatory felines.”

The department mistranslated the phrase that appears on Aguilera Agüero’s arm—they missed the word “real.”

It was not wrong in asserting that, at least once upon a time, members of MS-13 were supposed to be gang members “hasta la muerte”—“until death.” A 2007 Montana Department of Corrections gang guide included “hasta la muerte” as a phrase used by Mexican gangs. (MS-13 is Salvadoran and Tren de Aragua is Venezuelan.) But what the Texan and federal authorities are missing is that “Real Hasta La Muerte” is a lyric and slogan by Anuel AA, a reggaeton artist with 38 million followers on Instagram—who, it so happens, endorsed Trump last fall.

Thomas Ward, a USC professor who spent sixteen years studying MS-13 and wrote Gangsters Without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang, said it’s likely that ICE agents are confusing pop-culture tattoos for gang insignia. He said wardens in California prisons were known for throwing anyone with an Aztec sundial tattoo into solitary confinement, suspecting them of being prison gang soldiers in the Mexican mafia. The sun dial image is from Mesoamerica and popular among Latin Americans.

It’s almost a certainty that there’s at least one gang member with a “Real Hasta La Muerte” tattoo. In fact, the image the Texas DPS publicized is remarkably similar to a tattoo Anuel AA has on his arm, which he showed GQ Spain in 2020. But finding a Latino male with such a tattoo would be like finding a white American woman with Taylor Swift–inspired ink. I became an Anuel AA fan after his debut 2018 album, written from jail, which hit number one on the top Latin Albums chart, number 42 on the Billboard Top 200, and went platinum six times. The album was titled Real Hasta La Muerte. (I’ve become less of a fan in recent years.)

At least some Democrats are aware of the absurdity of the Trump administration’s tattoo policy.

“One thing is clear,” Democratic consultant Kristian Ramos said. “Donald Trump doesn’t know who Anuel is, and if he saw him, he would probably think he was a member of Tren de Aragua and try to send him to El Salvador.”

The irony here is that Anuel backed Trump’s campaign. The then-candidate infamously told the singer and fellow performer J. Quiles to get on stage quickly when they showed up to endorse him, claiming the Pennsylvania crowd didn’t know the reggaeton artists. “Do you know who the hell they are? Come up here fast, fellas, come on, because I don’t think these people know who the hell you are,” Trump said.

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told The Bulwark, that the department “is confident in its intelligence assessments which goes beyond tattoos.” But DHS did not respond to questions on whether authorities are confusing Anuel’s popular motto with a signifier of gang membership. Anuel’s publicist said the artist would respond to emailed questions about his fans getting Real Hasta La Muerte tattoos and the government using it as justification to ship Latino men to a notorious El Salvador prison. But they did not send answers.

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Adding to the inanity, the government argued in court that the fact that many of these men don’t have criminal records is precisely why they’re dangerous. “The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose.” I’m not a lawyer, but I think referring to “their association with TdA” as “facts not in evidence” is the kind of logic known as “circular.”

“The ultimate piece of hubris is ‘We don’t know anything about them, that’s why we have to get rid of them,’” said Charles Kuck, an Atlanta-based immigration lawyer. “George Washington and John Adams are rolling over in their graves right now.”

Here is a great piece in The Bulwark from Jessica Pishko on how your sheriff might be planning to help ICE conduct mass deportations. It gets into what’s described as the “constitutional sheriffs” movement—dudes who think they have the power to decide which laws are constitutional. So there’s that!

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