AP Photo/Evan Vucci
On Friday, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to lift a lower court ruling blocking the mass deportation of thousands of detained Venezuelan migrants under the controversial Aliens Enemies Act of 1798, claiming in a filing that it has a “rigorous process” for identifying gang members.
However, Mother Jones‘ reporting suggests that the Trump administration is detaining people without due process on the flimsiest evidence, including their tattoos.
Since March, Donald Trump has been using the Alien Enemies Act to give himself the power to send migrants to El Salvador under the loosest of suspicion that they’re connected to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the president has designated as a “global terrorist group.” Despite claiming to have a strict vetting process of identifying alleged TdA members, the Trump administration has provided little to no evidence that this is the case. As my colleagues Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias reported,
When pressed on the criteria used for their identification, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pointed to unspecified “intelligence” deployed to arrest the Venezuelans she has referred to as “heinous monsters.” Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has insisted—without providing specific details—that the public should trust ICE to have correctly targeted the Venezuelans based on “criminal investigations,” social media posts, and surveillance.
The administration’s Supreme Court filing likewise does little to provide evidence of careful vetting, simply describing the process as “weeks of work by President Trump and his cabinet.”
Lanard and Dias spoke with the families, friends, and lawyers of 10 men detained in El Salvador by the Trump administration, all of them contesting that their loved ones were profiled based on their tattoos and have no connection with gang or terrorist activity. As Lanard and Dias report:
The families have substantiated those assertions to Mother Jones, including—in many cases—by providing official documents attesting to their relatives’ lack of criminal histories in Venezuela. Such evidence might have persuaded US judges that the men were not part of any criminal organization had the Trump administration not deliberately deprived them of due process.
One of these men is Frizgeralth de Jesus Cornejo, a baker who has a tattoo of an autism awareness ribbon dedicated to his 15-year-old brother.
“I never imagined being imprisoned just for getting a tattoo,” Cornejo wrote. “I never imagined being separated from my family. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, not even my worst enemy if I had one. It’s horrible, it’s mental torture every day.”
