by Adrian Carrasquillo, The Bulwark, Mar 21, 2025 - THE NEW ADMINISTRATION SWEPT into office pledging to hunt down and deport members of a dangerous Latin American criminal gang terrorizing Americans. President Donald Trump said the gang had “infested” the country, with towns pleading to be “liberated.”
The president’s hard-nosed immigration adviser, Tom Homan, said Trump had “taken the handcuffs off of law-enforcement officers,” who were now free to use all powers at their disposal to eliminate the gang.
But it wasn’t 2025. It was 2017. And the gang wasn’t Tren de Aragua, it was MS-13.
Revisiting the immigration crackdown of eight years ago can help illuminate a lot of what is happening now—chiefly, how a deportation regime can be launched on a flimsy legal basis yet on an explosive scale, resulting in hundreds of men being accused of being gang members with little or no proof.
It all starts with tattoos—specifically, how the U.S. government is using them as evidence of criminality. It’s not the first time the government has condemned people for their ink—and it hasn’t worked well in the past, either.
Daniel Ramirez Medina, a DACA recipient legally in the United States, was detained in February 2017. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents came looking for his father, they swept him up, too. The ICE agents claimed he represented an “egregious public safety concern” because he was “gang-affiliated.” They based their case on a tattoo on his forearm that they said “proved” he was a gang member because it resembled a known gang tattoo. But as Slate reported, the tattoo was a nautical star with the words “La Paz—BCS,” referring to Medina’s birthplace, La Paz in Baja California Sur. (continue reading)
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