» Abrego García’s tattoos do not prove MS-13 membership: Experts

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As the legal battle continues over the fate of Kilmar Abrego García, President Donald Trump has repeatedly cited tattoos on the mistakenly deported man’s knuckles as proof that he is an MS-13 gang member and should not be returned from El Salvador.

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But several law enforcement officials and researchers who study the transnational gang say the tattoos on Abrego García’s left hand – a marijuana leaf, a smiley face, a cross and a skull – do not show definitive evidence of any gang affiliation.

“A tattoo alone, with nothing more, cannot be the single basis to opine someone is a gang member,” said John Colello, who oversees the homicide division for the district attorney’s office in Los Angeles County, where MS-13 got its start during the 1980s.

In an interview with ABC News on Tuesday night, Trump again adamantly insisted that Abrego García is a gang member while referencing a photo circulated by his administration on social media that labels the tattoos on his four fingers with: “M – S – 1 – 3.”

“They looked, and on his knuckles he has ‘MS-13,’” the president said in the interview. “He had MS-13 on his knuckles, tattooed. … It says MS13. … Go look at his hand, he had MS13. … He had MS as clear as you can be.”

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A White House spokesperson did not respond to specific questions Wednesday about how the Trump administration determined Abrego García’s tattoos were evidence of gang activity.

Law enforcement officials interviewed by The Washington Post said that some of the figures on Abrego García’s hand have been seen on gang members before, particularly the marijuana leaf, though that symbol is also widely popular among those not affiliated with a gang. One official has seen some of those symbols in a similar configuration, but none have seen the exact same four symbols solely in that configuration spelling out “MS-13.”

Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, one of the lawyers representing the 29-year-old Abrego García, called the tattoos “irrelevant.” Before Trump’s social media posts, the government had never cited the tattoos as proof of gang affiliation, he said, and had never been found by any court to be a gang member.

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“If the government believes they can use his tattoos to justify deporting him, then they should do what the law requires. Bring evidence to a judge and give Kilmar his day in court,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said in a statement. “So far, that hasn’t happened.”

Steven Dudley, the co-founder and co-director of InSight Crime and author of the book “MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang,” said that the use of tattoos as displays of affinity and loyalty to the gang has dropped in recent decades after law enforcement officials seized on them to identify members.

“Younger members of the gang are far less likely to tattoo themselves, at least in any obvious manner,” Dudley said.

Raymond Tierney, the top prosecutor in Suffolk County, New York – where the MS-13 clique Abrego García was accused of belonging to also allegedly operated – said he recalls explicit tattoos from the gang’s members while prosecuting cases against them in the early 2010s. Gang leadership allowed and encouraged certain tattoos that were worn “like a badge,” with certain acts qualifying members for certain tattoos, Tierney said.

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But Tierney started to notice a shift in tattoos around 2018.

“The gang began to realize that law enforcement was using it as a means of identifying members,” he said. When President Nayib Bukele started his crackdown on MS-13 in El Salvador, “the tattoos sort of evolved and became more clandestine,” Tierney said.

Jeannette Aguilar, a psychologist and security researcher in El Salvador, said that a person’s neighbourhood – and a gang’s territorial control of that neighbourhood – remained a consistent factor in helping identify gang affiliation.

The neighbourhood in El Salvador where Abrego García lived as a child was under the influence of the Barrio 18 gang, a sworn enemy of MS-13.

Death threats from that gang after his mother – whose pupusa shop they attempted to extort – shielded him from being recruited into its ranks, prompted Abrego García’s family to send him to the United States when he was 16, according to testimony his attorney provided in an immigration court proceeding. He entered the country illegally around 2011.

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It would be “very improbable,” Aguilar said, that he would join a rival gang once he arrived in the United States.

But Abrego García did get tattoos on his hands and arms, which he said was only because he liked how they looked, according to his attorney, Lucia Curiel, who provided The Post notes from a conversation she conducted with her client in 2019 about the tattoos.

Abrego García told his attorney he got a star on his elbow, saying, “I like the Cowboys.”

A heartbeat near his wrist came in 2018, the product of a since-ended relationship with a girl who had a matching tattoo.

The tattoo artist behind those pieces also filled in his left knuckles: a marijuana leaf, a smiley face, a cross and a skull, he told Curiel.

“I got the skull because I like it,” he said, according to Curiel.

Curiel said he never described the tattoos as gang-related, nor did he suggest they carried any deeper meaning.

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In an interview with The Post, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Abrego García’s wife, put it simply: “He thought tattoos were cool.”

The tattoos did not factor at all in the gang affiliation allegation made by the Prince George’s County gang unit detective who was summoned to a Home Depot parking lot to question Abrego García and three other Latino men in their 20s after they were detained by another police officer. Abrego García has said he was at the parking lot frequented by day labourers in search of work and did not really know the other men.

Ivan Mendez, the Prince George’s police detective who made the allegation, cited Abrego García’s clothing, including a Chicago Bulls cap, and information from unnamed confidential informant in his allegation.

He did not check a box in his “Gang Interview Field Sheet” that was reserved for tattoos as proof of gang ties. Mendez was later charged with misconduct for providing information to a sex worker he had hired about an investigation into the brothel that she ran.

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Of eight law enforcement officials or gang culture researchers interviewed by The Post, some said it could be plausible the symbols photographed on Abrego García’s knuckle spell out MS-13.

Leandro Paulino, a former corrections officer at Rikers Island in New York and founder of the International Law Enforcement Officers Association said that “a tattoo alone cannot confirm gang affiliation. However, the specific positioning of the symbols and their meanings strongly suggest the MS-13 connection.”

Aguilar, the Salvadoran researcher and psychologist, also pointed to the facility where Abrego García was transferred after he was initially taken to the high-security Terrorism Confinement Center, which is reserved for El Salvador’s most hardened gang members.

The “semi-open” Santa Ana penitentiary center where Abrego García is currently being held is specifically designated for inmates who are not gang members, Aguilar said.

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“The government is contradicting itself by sending him to a place where no gang member would be admitted,” she said.

Dudley, who has conducted nearly two decades of research on MS-13, said he has never seen Abrego Garcia’s knuckle tattoos “as a representation of membership” in the gang. He said he has also never seen those symbols in different orders used to represent the letters or numbers of the gang.

But he warned that any discussion about the tattoos and their significance was missing the broader picture on Abrego García’s case, which is centered on his right to due process and the fact that the Trump administration has admitted that it mistakenly violated an immigration judge’s 2019 order that he not be deported to El Salvador.

“At the end of the day, we have fallen into their trap: You cannot determine gang affiliation by tattoos alone, but this is what we are left debating,” Dudley said about the Trump administration. Gang affiliation does not cancel out the need for due process, he said, “and we are not even talking about that.”

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