Trump Is Sending Innocent People to El Salvador For Soccer Tattoos

Summary

Bulwark Takes: "Trump Is Sending Innocent People to El Salvador For Soccer Tattoos" – Detailed Summary

Release Date: March 21, 2025

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Introduction to the Issue

In the March 21, 2025 episode of Bulwark Takes, host Andrew Egger delves into a controversial immigration policy initiated by former President Donald Trump. The policy involves deporting Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador under the guise of targeting gang members, specifically utilizing the Alien Enemies Act. Egger introduces the topic by questioning the legality and rationale behind this unprecedented move.

Donald Trump's Deportation Strategy

Andrew Egger opens the discussion by outlining Trump’s "rolling plan" to deport Venezuelan migrants, potentially extending to other groups. He highlights the administration's reliance on the Alien Enemies Act, an obscure law that allows for the deportation of individuals deemed as enemies without standard due process. Egger expresses skepticism about the administration's claims, stating:

“Not really telling the families, not really telling lawyers, all on the administration say so that these people are members of a gang and therefore, according to the administration, terrorists.”
— Andrew Egger [01:00]

Mechanisms of Identification

Joined by immigration reporter Adrian Carrasquillo, Egger explores the methods the government employs to classify individuals as gang members. Carrasquillo breaks down the criteria used, emphasizing the problematic reliance on superficial markers such as tattoos and social media behavior:

“They'll send 170 guys to Guantanamo Bay or 238 Venezuelan men to an El Salvador prison. And you need basically two markers of being in a gang... tattoos and social media posts.”
— Adrian Carrasquillo [02:05]

Misuse of Gang Affiliations

Carrasquillo provides historical context by referencing the MS-13 gang, known for using tattoos as membership markers. He contrasts the past with the present administration's exaggerated claims about Trend Aragua, a purported Venezuelan gang, highlighting the minimal actual presence of gang members versus the administration’s portrayal:

“Now from what I've seen from Washington Post reporting, there's like 800 or hundreds of Trend members in the U.S. but... they're making this so scary that they have to invoke the Alien Enemies Act.”
— Adrian Carrasquillo [03:30]

Examples of Misidentification

The conversation turns to specific cases illustrating the absurdity of the deportation criteria. Carrasquillo cites the case of a professional soccer player wrongly identified as a gang member due to his tattoos and social media:

“His attorney says that the two things that were used to identify him were a soccer ball and crown tattoo... it's a nod to the fact that he really likes Real Madrid.”
— Adrian Carrasquillo [04:50]

He further highlights how common symbols, such as brand logos and popular culture references, are being misinterpreted as gang affiliations:

“Texas Department of Public Safety put out a PowerPoint where they showed like stars, crowns, roses, trains, grenades, predatory felines, including tigers and jaguars.”
— Adrian Carrasquillo [03:50]

Erosion of Due Process

Egger and Carrasquillo express deep concerns over the lack of due process in these deportations. Unlike standard legal procedures where individuals have the right to defend themselves, the current system bypasses judicial review, leading to wrongful deportations:

“They're not getting due process. They're getting shipped to El Salvador.”
— Adrian Carrasquillo [06:50]

Carrasquillo discusses the case of Gustavo Adolfo Aguilera Aguero, a roofer wrongly labeled as a gang member based on his tattoos, which were later proven to be personal and non-gang-related:

“He was a roofer... goes out to take out garbage, has a crown tattoo with his mom's name... authorities described this tattoo as saying 'until death.'”
— Adrian Carrasquillo [08:10]

Legal Challenges and Historical Context

The episode touches upon previous instances where ICE and DHS failed to substantiate their claims, leading to rejections in immigration courts. Carrasquillo references the case of Daniel Ramirez Medina, a DACA recipient whose gang affiliation claims were debunked:

“ICE was acting like he's a gang member... the judge not only said, you did not prove what you said, but you lied.”
— Adrian Carrasquillo [09:55]

He underscores the misuse of the Alien Enemies Act, a law originally intended for wartime scenarios, now being repurposed for immigration enforcement without clear legal justification:

“What part of the law do you think it's okay to then send people to El Salvador?... the legal basis does not exist for sending these people and disappearing these people.”
— Adrian Carrasquillo [10:30]

Consequences and Future Implications

The hosts deliberate on the broader implications of these actions, warning of a slippery slope where due process is entirely eliminated, and arbitrary deportations become normalized. They warn against the potential for abuse and the dangerous precedent it sets for immigration policy:

“This is like never been done before... the legal basis does not exist for sending these people and disappearing these people.”
— Adrian Carrasquillo [10:50]

Conclusion

Andrew Egger wraps up the discussion by reaffirming the gravity of the situation and the necessity for continued scrutiny of the Trump administration's immigration policies. He emphasizes the importance of upholding legal standards and protecting individuals' rights against arbitrary state actions.

“This is not even on the left right spectrum. Immigration lawyers told me the Alien Enemies Act... it's like never been done before.”
— Andrew Egger [11:20]

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Key Takeaways

• Misuse of Legal Frameworks: The Trump administration's use of the Alien Enemies Act for deporting migrants lacks solid legal grounding and circumvents standard legal protections.

• Flawed Identification Methods: Relying on superficial markers like tattoos and social media for gang affiliation is unreliable and leads to wrongful deportations.

• Erosion of Due Process: The current policy bypasses essential legal procedures, denying individuals the opportunity to defend themselves in court.

• Precedent for Future Policy: These actions set a dangerous precedent, potentially leading to further abuses in immigration enforcement.

Notable Quotes

• “Not really telling the families, not really telling lawyers... terrorists.” — Andrew Egger [01:00]
• “There's like... how almost comical that is... off he goes to prison in El Salvador.” — Adrian Carrasquillo [04:00]
• “This is like never been done before... sending these people and disappearing these people.” — Adrian Carrasquillo [10:50]

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This episode of Bulwark Takes critically examines the Trump administration's controversial immigration policies, highlighting significant legal and ethical concerns. Through expert analysis and real-world examples, Egger and Carrasquillo shed light on the complexities and dangers of bypassing due process in immigration enforcement.

Transcript

[Ritual Representative]

Hey there, Ritual. Here to give a big shout out to you for making it through the hectic holiday season. The magic of those family moments, that was you. And now there's new milestones to Prep for in 2025 this new year. Check clean quality pregnancy nutrient support off your to do list. With Ritual, we've done the research to create science backed pregnancy support like our prenatal multivitamin, natalcholine and fertility support. All designed to be taken alongside each other. But don't just take our word for it. They're also third party tested for microbes and heavy metals and clean label projects certified. So whether you're trying, thinking about trying, or already there, we don't have to tell you that prioritizing yourself can be the hardest part. That's why we're helping you get started today with 30% off a three month supply for a limited [e-mail] podcast. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

[Andrew Egger]

Hi, this is Andrew Egger with the Bulwark. We keep learning more and more about Donald Trump's rolling plan to deport Venezuelan migrants and perhaps others. Who knows? Under an obscure old law, the Alien Enemies act, sort of bypassing due process, bypassing any kind of judicial review. Not really telling the families, not really telling lawyers, all on the administration say so that these people are members of a gang and therefore, according to the administration, terrorists. Does any of that hold water? Does any of that make sense? Not so much. I'm joined today to talk about some of this, talk through some of this with our immigration reporter, Adrian Carrasquillo. Adrian, thanks for coming on.

[Adrian Carrasquillo]

Thank you, Andrew.

[Andrew Egger]

So you just had the latest edition of your newsletter, Huddled Masses go up online and you're really focused on the specific mechanisms that the government is using to, you know, make at least a very thin case that some of these people that they are deporting are members of a Venezuelan gang. Can you just talk us through, you know, the case the administration's making and, and how they're, how they're identifying these people?

[Adrian Carrasquillo]

I mean, let's just start real basic people here, gang members, they want them out of the country. That's 100%. All Americans agree. I think where, what needs to be looked at here, what I tried to do in the newsletter is In 2017, we had a similar thing. Ms. 13 was this big scary gang and Donald Trump said that they were taking over cities and that we needed to liberate those Cities. So when you look at MS.13, they actually were a gang that used tattoos as like a marker of membership, a signifier that you were in the gang. I mean, literally there were giant ms, you know, on people's chests and things like that. Okay, so now we understand that, but now the government is trying, you know, Donald Trump, he has like the same three things that he goes back to and one of them is definitely fear mongering of the other. And if you're brown. So they're basically like Trend Aragua from Venezuela. So scary. Even though at one point they were like over 10,000 Ms. 13 members in the US but from what I've seen from Washington Post reporting, there's like 800 or hundreds of trend members in the U.S. but again, they want to make this so scary that they have to invoke the Alien Enemies Act. So what they've been focusing in on is the tattoos. And that's where, you know, they'll send 170 guys to Guantanamo Bay or 238 Venezuelan men to an El Salvador prison. And you need basically two markers of being in a gang. This is what ICE uses, this is what the government uses. So one could be tattoos that they say you have and the other one could be we saw a social media post of you making gang signs or we saw you wearing gang related clothing. So which gets into a whole other thing on how you can be associated with a gang. So if they find a dude who has a tattoo and you know him, now you're, now you're associated some with a gang. So this is how lawyers told me it cascades, that suddenly the whole neighborhood is part of Trend Aragua. So anyway, so what I found pretty insane is that like there was one guy in Guantanamo Bay, he had an Air Jordan tattoo. That's a pretty popular brand. People in Latin America, like Michael Jordan, okay, there's another guy, there's crowns, there's roses. Texas Department of Public Safety put out a PowerPoint where they showed like stars, crowns, roses, trains, grenades, predatory felines, including tigers and jaguars. So, you know, this is how we get down this road where suddenly it's like they are, they are putting into government documents that it's the government filing. When they send everybody to El Salvador, it's not just tattoos they're saying. But that seems to be one of the driving reasons that they're saying these guys are all gang members.

[Andrew Egger]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's what's been so striking to me about some of these filings is you'll have Trump administration officials. You talk about this in your newsletter about how they're essentially saying, well, look, of course we're not relying on tattoos alone or social media posts alone or, you know, pictures of them, you know, doing supposed gang signs alone. But then when you look at some of these individual cases, essentially what's being alleged is that the government took two of those things, right? That there's a guy who was, who was among the 230 that was sent to, to El Salvador to this prison just in the last week. His immigration attorney, his name's Rayos Barrios, he was flagged as a gang member. His attorney says that the two things that were used to identify him were a soccer ball and crown tattoo, which he's a professional soccer player. According to his attorney. It was a nod to the fact that he really likes Real Madrid. It's similar to the Real Madrid logo. That's one of the two things. And then there's a social media picture of him. Rock on. You know, like, and that's supposedly a gang, a gang sign. And those two things, you know, well, now you have your two gang, gang related kind of boxes to check. Off he goes to, off he goes to prison in El Salvador. I mean, like, it's, you sort of struggle to communicate, like how almost comical that is like kind of when you, when you put it out that way. And look, these are the sort of things that, that like essentially are like first hunch, law enforcement sorts of things, right? Like maybe these are kinds of things where like, okay, you could understand it if like, this is what makes a cop, like, want to take a closer look at a person if they pull them over at a traffic stop or something. Not everybody agrees with that, but it's not the first order of professional judgment here. It's the whole thing. It's, it's if law enforcement, you know, flags these two things and is like, well, actually we have a pretty good reason to think you're part of a gang. Now. On you get to a plane and off you go to a prison camp in El Salvador. I mean, like, like it's so far through the looking glass on, on of this stuff. Can you just like talk through a few more like, like more of the history of this stuff? Because, because that was what I found so striking in what you wrote. Like ICE and DHS have been tripping over these tattoos wrongly for years now.

[Adrian Carrasquillo]

Yeah, and let's use the example you use. So somebody gets stopped by a police officer and they, and it's basically, let's just say Some racial profiling or maybe some of those first hunches that cop does. Then you get due process. Then you get to prove, hey, listen, man, that's not what you thought it was. You get a lawyer, things like that. So they're not getting due process. They're getting shipped to El Salvador. When you talked about the. How we start bordering on. This would be funny if it wasn't so insane and dangerous, which is that one guy he had, Gustavo Adolfo Aguilera Aguero. He was. Miami Herald wrote about this guy. He was a roofer. He was working here, living in Dallas with his family. Goes out to take out garbage, ice picks him up. And so he has a crown tattoo, like, with his mom's name. He has a star tattoo with, I think, him and his son's name. And then he has a real hasta la muerte tattoo. So that means real until death. And when I saw that, I was like, wait, this is weird, because the authorities described this tattoo as saying until death. Because again, we go back to MS.13. Some of these older gangs, they used to have maybe tattoos or that was part of their phrasing, because you're in the gang until death. But I'm like, this is not the same. They're missing. Where I know that phrase from is it's pop. It's a popular motto of a popular reggaeton artist named manuel who has 38 million followers on Instagram and actually endorsed Trump last fall. So they are saying that a popular. Again, we go back to a Chicago Bull or a Michael Jordan or a Kobe Bryant tattoo. I bet gang members have those tattoos. I. I bet also regular dudes have those tattoos. So you have a guy who has 38 million followers who has a largely male, Latino, male fan base and a Latin American fan base. And so when even when they showed the tattoo in the. In the documents, I'm like, that looks like, I think a tattoo that he has. And I looked it up, and he has a similar tattoo on his arm. So now you are expanding because there are clearly not enough gang members in this country for you to terrify all Americans. You're expanding ways to get them. And one of them is these tattoos, which, again, it's just so ridiculous. And lawyers say, you know, the reason we care, like, why should we care about these dudes? These guys are being disappeared into Venezuela. One, apparently, at least one was a professional soccer player who was protesting against Maduro's regime and was tortured. He was electrified and suffocated. So he's here claiming Asylum because he goes back to Venezuela, he might be killed, he thinks. And that's what our country has always been. Asylum has always been part of legal immigration. Now you're disappearing people until El Salvador. The government clearly has no problem getting people with green cards, too. So it's like, where does this end? And the beginning, I think, is that not just erosion of due process, but complete elimination of due process.

[Andrew Egger]

It was striking to me. You have a few examples in here of times when ICE and DHS have tried to make these same arguments before immigration judges, but they've been slapped down at times in the past, right?

[Adrian Carrasquillo]

Yeah, they were slapped down. There was one instance with Daniel Ramirez Medina. He was a DACA recipient at the beginning of 2017. And Ice said that he was an Ms. 13 member. And they were pointing to his tattoo, which was basically, you know, it said La Paz in Baja California, El Sur, but it was the initial. So that's where he's from. That's his birthplace. And so ICE is acting like he's a gang member, you know, and. And what. What ended up happening in that case is actually really fascinating. ICE was apparently doctoring his statement that his sworn statement that he gave where he was saying that he was chased by gangs. So that's where he ended up, where he ended up. And they were making it seem he was a gang member. And so the judge not only said, you did not prove what you said, that he's a gang member, but you lied. And so, again, you know, we're not saying all of ICE is lying. How you get into these. We've been a country where you can do legal immigration. We've been a country where you can claim asylum. Oftentimes we discuss things in our politics on a left right spectrum. This is not even on the left right spectrum. Immigration lawyers told me the Alien Enemies Act. So you're invoking this 18th century law made for wartime. Under what part of the law do you think it's okay to then send people to El Salvador? What they're basically saying is you're allowed to expel people from the country. Under what legal basis are you taking them, throwing them into one of the most notorious prisons in the Western hemisphere so they can do, like, hard labor. And by the way, they paid El Salvador to take these people. So we're just in a new area. We're not, you know, in normal, sort of reasonable people can disagree on immigration. Left and right. This is like never been done before. The legal basis does not exist for sending these people and disappearing these people.

[Andrew Egger]

And, and just to really drill down for one more minute on the whole due process thing. Like, like you say, like, yeah, there are times when ice cuts, corners or doesn't do its homework or even, even is like, you know, potentially lying about one of these people. And the solution to that is, I mean, part of the solution to that might be, you know, some reforms at that body. But, but the whole reason for the, for the, the processes that we have set up is you don't count on any single institution to be like batting a thousand and perfectly virtuous and perfectly honest. You have this adversarial process where you have prosecut who make a case against a person, they have an attorney who makes the best defense that you can give for that person and that all goes before an independent judge to get to the bottom of it. And that's the thing that's being totally skipped over and totally short circuited as prelude to, as you say, shipping these people off to be imprisoned in vile conditions in a totally different third country under a dictator of its own. So it's a very grotesque thing. I think we can leave it there. Thanks Adrienne for coming on to talk through all this stuff.

[Adrian Carrasquillo]

Thanks so much.

[Andrew Egger]

All right, and thank you all for listening. Thank you all for watching. We'll be sticking on this issue as well with so much that's going on in the Trump White House right now. Hit all the buttons, subscribe like the thing. We'll see you back here soon.

[Ritual Representative]

Hey there, Ritual. Here to give a big shout out to you for making it through the hectic holiday season. The magic of those family moments, that was you. And now there's new milestones to Prep for in 2025 this new year. Check clean quality pregnancy nutrient support off your to do list with Ritual, we've done the research to create science backed pregnancy support like our prenatal multivitamin, natalcholine and fertility support. All designed to be taken alongside each other. But don't just take our word for it. They're also third party tested for microbes and heavy metals and clean label projects certified. So whether you're trying, thinking about trying or already there, we don't have to tell you that prioritizing yourself can be the hardest part. That's why we're helping you get started today with 30% off a three month supply for a limited [e-mail] podcast. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.