Venezuelan deportees: Locked up for tattoos?

Close-up of a person's clasped hands showing intricate tattoo designs on the forearms

“Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act”

(Image credit: LB Studios / Getty Images)

published 31 March 2025

As details emerge about the 238 Venezuelans deported to a brutal El Salvador prison, it’s become clear why the Trump administration gave these accused gang members no “semblance of due process,” said Shirin Ali and Mark Joseph Stern in Slate: Evidence of their criminality “is weak to the point of nonexistence.” The administration called the men members of the gang Tren de Aragua and thus subject to immediate deportation under the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act. But stories are emerging like that of Jerce Reyes Barrios, a former pro soccer player who was “living peacefully” in the U.S. with no criminal record. Barrios, 36, says he sought asylum in the U.S. after being arrested, electrocuted, and suffocated in a protest against the Venezuelan regime. Now U.S. authorities claim that his tattoo of a crown atop a soccer ball inspired by the logo of his favorite team, Real Madrid, proves he belonged to Tren de Aragua. Many others seem to have been locked up due to “benign tattoos,” like one man’s crown of thorns, a “tribute to his grandmother” stamped with her death date.

Terrified family members say loved ones with no gang ties are imprisoned, said Trevor Hughes in USA Today. They include Franco José Caraballo, 26, who fled Venezuela with his wife and applied for asylum after they were “roughed up” for opposing President Nicolás Maduro. The longtime barber was cutting hair in Sherman, Texas, before a razor tattoo on his neck “caught the eye of authorities.” He and the others “could face long or indefinite detention” in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, a prison “rife with human rights abuses,” said Daniella Silva in NBCNews.com. Inmates have spoken of extreme crowding and torture, but the Venezuelans’ attorneys say they have no path to recourse and can’t even contact their clients.

What happens now is uncertain, said Marcos Alemán in the Associated Press. This week, lawyers hired by the Venezuelan government petitioned for the prisoners’ release, but “the lack of judicial independence” in El Salvador makes it “unlikely” the country’s courts will help. In the U.S., two judges ripped the deportees’ lack of due process, said Jan Wolfe and Sadie Gurman in The Wall Street Journal. “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act,” said Patricia Millett, a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which will rule on whether the Trump administration can resume deportations under the act. No president has ever used the 1798 statute as Trump has, said Millett, putting the nation “in unprecedented territory.”