1 day Ago
It’s not correct to call the expulsion of Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador “deportation.” When America “deports” someone, it means we send them back to their country of origin. But we aren’t sending these men to Venezuela.
We’re sending them to a third country, where they have no citizenship, no family connections and where they aren’t wanted for a crime committed in that country (this is not an extradition situation). Technically, the word for sending foreign nationals to prison camps is called “trafficking.” You can make an argument that it’s also ethnic cleansing.
It would be illegal and immoral to do this even to convicted felons, but CBS News recently found that of the 238 Venezuelans we sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador, only 75% had any criminal records. Of the 22% of prisoners who had any criminal record, here or abroad, the vast majority are for nonviolent offenses like theft, shoplifting and trespassing. About a dozen are accused of actual violent crimes: murder, rape, assault and kidnapping.
But we have a criminal justice system here in the USA to process such cases, as does their home country of Venezuela. So, what criteria is our government using to send men to a foreign prison camp? It turns out, in many cases, it’s tattoos. Investigations by CBS News and Mother Jones indicate that ICE and other government agencies are claiming that various tattoos indicate membership in a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.
Now, actual experts on gangs say that this gang does not actually mark membership with tattoos, which makes sense. If you were trying to get away with crimes, why would you put a permanent crime-related sigil on your body. Some of the tattoo designs they have used as an excuse to send these men to what is essentially a black site? Roses, nautical stars, the word “Mom” with a little crown over it and, in the case of a young man named Neri Alvarado Borges, an autism awareness tattoo; his baby brother has autism.
It’s pretty clear that what our government is doing in our names and with our tax dollars is rounding up a bunch of young Latino men with tattoos and calling them criminals. They are banking that their physical appearance is scary enough to racist white people (Dark skin! Tattoos! Foreign language! Oh no!) that they won’t complain about the illegality, the human rights violations, the constitutional rights violations or the parallels with Nazi Germany. I’ve been thinking about which of my own tattoos the government would use an excuse to mark me as a threat and throw me into prison.
Like about one-third of millennials , I have more than one; I have six. I get a new tattoo every year to celebrate my anniversary of sobriety. One of them is a leopard.
I’m going to guess the ICE agents reviewing the tattoos are probably not experts in big cat physiology and therefore wouldn’t know the difference between a leopard print and a jaguar print. For the two readers who might be interested: a leopard’s rosettes do not have little black spots inside them, a jaguar’s rosettes do. The cat on my leg actually has about half its coat with spotted rosettes and half without.
It is technically not a creature that exists anywhere in the wild. But an ICE agent looking for excuses might just mark it as a jaguar, which is a large South American predator, so obviously could be used as a gang symbol. I also have a big sword tattoo on my arm.
Technically, it is Anduril, Aragorn’s sword from “The Lord of the Rings.” Anyone with that nerdy of a tattoo choice is probably not going to be allowed in a gang, but it is a tattoo of a weapon, therefore possibly suspicious, don’t you think? I also have a Celtic knot design, which could be innocuous, but my mother has a matching one. Two people with identical tattoos? Must be a gang.
(Sorry to break it to you this way, Mom.) Above my scar from my kidney donation (or perhaps a scar from being stabbed in a gang fight, scribbles the ICE agent on his life-or-death notepad), I have a tattoo of fiddleheads blooming. The fiddleheads are done in the style of medieval illuminated manuscripts.
Think the Book of Kells. Medieval manuscripts were Catholic. You know what region of the world is predominantly Catholic? Central and South America.
QED, it’s a Catholic gang symbol. Also, maybe the plant symbolizes growing drugs! Finally, on my wrist, I have the Maine pine tree symbol with a blue North Star next to it. This one needs no explaining.
People have already been deported based on nautical stars. Mine’s not nautical, but I guess ICE could just say I had a lazy tattoo artist. (I didn’t.
) And of course, there is my Captain America shield tattoo. Captain America is a superhero who has, for generations, been anti-racist and anti-fascist. Yes, Captain America is literally antifa.
The shield was an anti-Nazi symbol in the 1940s; these days, it qualifies as an anti-American government symbol. This administration’s acts of cruelty, illegality and weapons-grade racism — carried out on absurd, baseless grounds — will go down in history books next to the internment of Japanese-American citizens in World War II. Assuming future generations have history textbooks.
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