They were called gang members and deported. Families say their only crime was having tattoos

[hedgerow]

Wow you really are propagandized dude. What media do you watch I’m curious how this happened?

wow you're either retarded, willfully ignorant, a liar, or just a demonrat to say this

America was 89% white in 1964 before passage of the immigration act of 1965, now down to somewhere in the 60s%

 

[Sabu]

Goddamn. Christopher bitchens is truly retarded. That shitdick gives me a headache.

Edit - lol, he has that useless faggot @Paul Bacon on his side. No surprise.

 

[Paul Bacon]

This is my america not yours

 

[Alex Sickboy]

@Christopher Hitchens

 

[chewbok]

LA Times full article:

SAN SALVADOR — One is a former professional soccer player who, according to his lawyer, fled Venezuela after being tortured by the country’s authoritarian government.
View attachment 874252
The other, also from Venezuela, is a onetime shoe salesman and social media influencer who documented his journey from South America on TikTok.

Both were apparently among thousands of political asylum aspirants who entered the United States from Mexico legally via an immigration process scrapped by the Trump administration.

Both were detained, one in California, and deported. Now they are imprisoned in El Salvador, according to their families, who have been left in the dark about their fates in a penal system widely condemned for human rights abuses.

“This has been a torture for us, an injustice,” said Antonia Cristina Barrios de Reyes, mother of Jerce Egbunik Reyes Barrios, 36, the former professional goalkeeper. “My son is not a criminal.”

View attachment 874253

The social media influencer is Nolberto Rafael Aguilar Rodríguez, 32. He initially fled to Colombia, Venezuela’s western neighbor, out of desperation, said his sister, Jennifer Aguilar.



“We’re campesinos, we come from the fields,” she said. “We left Venezuela because we were starving.”



Reyes Barrios and Aguilar were among 261 people — the vast majority Venezuelans — expelled to El Salvador last week after the Trump administration alleged that most were affiliated the Venezuela-based Tren de Araguagang, which President Trump has declared a terrorist group.

The evidence of gang membership cited by the government is typically flimsy to nonexistent, defense lawyers allege, and largely based on tattoos and social media postings.

Experts say the administration’s outsourcing of detained migrants to a nation with an infamously repressive prison system has no precedent.

In El Salvador, “the United States now has a tropical gulag,” said Regina Bateson, a political scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “The notion that the U.S. government is paying millions of dollars to another government to violate these people’s rights is horrifying.”
View attachment 874254
The El Salvador operation is part of a deal between the Trump administration and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. Advocates have filed a federal lawsuit challenging Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act — a statute from 1798 previously only invoked during wartime — to expel most of the alleged Venezuelan gang members.

On Friday, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., vowed to “get to the bottom” of whether the Trump administration defied his order to hold off on the deportations while lawsuits challenging the expulsions played out in court.

Many relatives of the deportees deny their kin have gang ties or a criminal record, saying they were simply searching for better lives or escaping persecution in their turbulent homeland, part of the exodus that has seen millions flee Venezuela.

“We have no idea what’s going to happen to Jerce,” said Jair Barrios, uncle of the soccer player. “We understand and respect the laws of each country; but at the same time, we ask that, please, let justice be done and truly innocent people be released.”

Reyes Barrios was detained at the Otay Mesa border post in California in September, according to a statement from his attorney, Linette Tobin, when he appeared for his appointment under the Biden administration program known as CBP One, which facilitated U.S. entry for prospective asylum applicants and others.

According to Tobin, he was mistakenly accused of Tren de Aragua affiliation based on an arm tattoo and a social media post in which he made a hand gesture that U.S. authorities called a gang sign.

The tattoo — a crown atop a soccer ball, with a rosary and the word “Díos” — is actually a homage to his favorite team, Real Madrid, Tobin wrote. The hand gesture is a popular sign language rendering of “I Love You,” the lawyer added.

Reyes Barrios participated in antigovernment demonstrations in Venezuela in February and March 2024, Tobin wrote, and was subsequently arrested and tortured, enduring electric shocks and suffocation. After his release, he fled for the United States and registered for CBP One while in Mexico.

Tobin portrayed Reyes Barrios as a law-abiding person who had never been charged with a crime and wrote that he had “a steady employment record as a soccer player, as well as a soccer coach for children and youth.”

Once in custody in California, Tobin wrote, Reyes Barrios applied for political asylum and other relief. A hearing had been set for April 17 at immigration court in Otay Mesa.

Reyes Barrios was deported to El Salvador on March 15.

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, defended the government action.

Reyes Barrios was “not only in the United States illegally,” McLaughlin wrote on X, “but he has tattoos that are consistent with those indicating TdA [Tren de Aragua] membership. His own social media indicates he is a member of the vicious TdA gang.”

She added that “DHS intelligence assessments go beyond a single tattoo and we are confident in our findings.”

Reyes Barrios is a “respected person” in Venezuela, said his wife, Mariyen Araujo Sandoval, who has remained in Mexico with two of the couple’s four children.

“It’s unjust to criminalize someone because of a tattoo,” said Araujo, 32. She said she recognized her husband in the online videos of Venezuelans expelled to El Salvador.

Now dashed, she said, is her family’s dream of a reunion in the United States. She now hopes her for a reunion in Venezuela — if her husband can ever get out of El Salvador.

“I’m too scared to even try to go to the United States,” said Araujo, who noted that she also has a tattoo, of a rose. “I’d be afraid that they would separate me from my daughters and put me in jail.”



The Venezuelans dispatched to El Salvador have no legal recourse for appeal or release, attorneys say, and may face indefinite detention.

“There is, of course, no law, rule or judicial standard in El Salvador to outsource the prisons,” said José Marinero, a Salvadoran lawyer. “These people have ... no conviction, no debt to the Salvadoran justice system.”

Their predicament, activists say, highlights the erosion of democracy across the region, as well as the dramatic crackdown on migration pushed by Washington.

“There’s no real safe haven left,” said Michael Ahn Paarlberg, a political scientist who studies Latin America at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The Trump administration has acknowledged that many of those deported under the Alien Enemies Act have no criminal records in the United States. But the government says they may still pose a threat.

“We sent over 250 alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua, which El Salvador has agreed to hold in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who brokered the deal with Bukele, declared on X.

Critics say that Trump, like Bukele, invokes crime as an excuse for suspending civil liberties.

“They’re using these particularly vulnerable people as test cases,” said Paarlberg, who added that the message appears to be: “If we can deport people who don’t have criminal records, people who are fleeing a regime that pretty much everyone and the U.S. government agrees is authoritarian, then we can deport anyone.”

Bukele, a former advertising executive who labels himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” dispatched video crews to record the arrival of the Venezuelans, who were led off deportation planes in shackles and had their hair shorn.

“This is a performative act of cruelty ... to scare people into not coming, to scare people who are here without papers, to scare people away from protesting,” Paarlberg said.

News of the deportations has sent relatives of the expelled Venezuelans poring over videos and social media posts in an effort to determine if their loved ones were among those flown to El Salvador.

The names of the deported Venezuelans appeared on a list leaked to the media. Included was Aguilar, who garnered more than 40,000 followers as he documented his northbound trek from South America on TikTok. His feed included images from the treacherous Darien Gap, the dense jungle separating Colombia and Panama.

Jennifer Aguilar described her brother as a hard-working family man who fled Venezuela for Colombia in 2013. He has three children: an 11-year-old girl in Venezuela and a 4-year-old girl and boy, 2, in Colombia. Aguilar’s sister says he got his tattoo, of playing cards and dice, to cover up a scar on his forearm from an accident he had at age 16.
View attachment 874256
According to his sister, Aguilar made his way to Mexico and secured an appointment for U.S. entry via CBP One. On June 24, he posted a video of himself boarding a plane, apparently en route to the U.S.-Mexican border.

“Have faith in God,” he wrote in a caption. “Never put your head down. And trust yourself.”

Jennifer Aguilar said he got a job in a travel agency in the California border city of Calexico. For reasons that remain unclear, he was detained by U.S. immigration authorities late last year.

From Colombia, where she lives with her three daughters, Jennifer Aguilar has written about her brother’s plight on social media message and sent messages to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and to Bukele, the Salvadoran leader.
View attachment 874255
Aguilar “has never been to prison in Venezuela or in Colombia,” she wrote to Bukele. “Believe me, if he was guilty I’d say: ‘Leave him there.’ Because we were taught to be honest and do good.”

“I’ve tried by all means ... to be Rafael’s voice,” said the sister, adding that she doesn’t know anyone in El Salvador. “If I could be there, I would. I’m deeply sorry that I can’t.”

El Salvador has rounded up and imprisoned some 85,000 people — the equivalent of 1.5% of the nation’s population — since March 2022, when Bukele declared a state of emergency that effectively suspended constitutional due process rights. The Venezuelans were dispatched to the infamous Center for Terrorism Confinement, the centerpiece of Bukele’s mass incarceration agenda.



Link: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-03-23/deportation-trump-venezuelans-el-salvador

It’s not the tatts, it’s what they did to earn and keep them. They show their tattoos and make claims on FB/IG etc, knowing they would be killed if they lied about being in the gang, but now the posts were just claims they made?

Ok. I gotta bridge to sell ya. Welcome home senior

 

[rudy$$$]

Of course the family will say this, who the heck let's their son or sibling be in a gang like is some 9-5 job. Be gangster or die trying to be one.lol

 

[DickthecockJohnson]

They entered ILLEGALLY that is a crime my friend

 

[mrln]

maybe you should become a lawyer for the guy or his public advocate then,Ivan.
talk to el presidente of elsalvador and demand this guys release. because now,its out of the u.s' hands. even with the courts saying and the govt admitting they made an oops,Bukele wont release him. hes even saying this guy is a terrorist.
go talk to him...

 

[Christopher Hitchens]

Of course the family will say this, who the heck let's their son or sibling be in a gang like is some 9-5 job. Be gangster or die trying to be one.lol

Yes I do agree that the family of scumbags always covers for them so that is not proof of any kind.

 

[Christopher Hitchens]

maybe you should become a lawyer for the guy or his public advocate then,Ivan.
talk to el presidente of elsalvador and demand this guys release. because now,its out of the u.s' hands. even with the courts saying and the govt admitting they made an oops,Bukele wont release him. hes even saying this guy is a terrorist.
go talk to him...

I’m not lawyer and I’m just posting a news article, I don’t agree with everything the articles I post say, or even agree at all sometimes. I just posts stories I find intresting and if I do then maybe others will. Simple as that.

 

[Christopher Hitchens]

They entered ILLEGALLY that is a crime my friend

I know they did but there is something called due process. If all they did is they are here illegally, deport them to their home country. Dont send them to a prison that is a black hole.

 

[Christopher Hitchens]

wow you're either retarded, willfully ignorant, a liar, or just a demonrat to say this

America was 89% white in 1964 before passage of the immigration act of 1965, now down to somewhere in the 60s%

Who gives a fuck? First off, a lot of Hispanics are white. I am technically part Hispanic but I’m white. So that number is higher. Also more people are mixed race now.

But who gives a fuck if it was lower. They are still Americans. Or if they are immigrants they want to be Americans. What matters is the ideas in these people’s heads and their behavior not their skin color.

I don’t care if we become less white and if you do you’re racist idiot. Anyway WE NEED IMMIGRANTS. Also the same arguments you make were made about the Catholic Irish and Italian immigrants. Except the complaint was we would become Catholic and less Anglo Saxon. We turned out fine, in fact better than ever, and America would not be America without our Italians and Irish people. So calm the fuck down and stop watching whatever white nationalist or whatever media you watch.

What are you so afraid of hedge? Why is Americans being less white such a bad thing?

 

[mrln]

I’m not lawyer and I’m just posting a news article, I don’t agree with everything the articles I post say, or even agree at all sometimes. I just posts stories I find intresting and if I do then maybe others will. Simple as that.

its simple,yea. but you debate every response though. making it more than it needs to be.
simple as that.

 

[hedgerow]

Who gives a fuck? First off, a lot of Hispanics are white. I am technically part Hispanic but I’m white. So that number is higher. Also more people are mixed race now.

But who gives a fuck if it was lower. They are still Americans. Or if they are immigrants they want to be Americans. What matters is the ideas in these people’s heads and their behavior not their skin color.

I don’t care if we become less white and if you do you’re racist idiot. Anyway WE NEED IMMIGRANTS. Also the same arguments you make were made about the Catholic Irish and Italian immigrants. Except the complaint was we would become Catholic and less Anglo Saxon. We turned out fine, in fact better than ever, and America would not be America without our Italians and Irish people. So calm the fuck down and stop watching whatever white nationalist or whatever media you watch.

What are you so afraid of hedge? Why is Americans being less white such a bad thing?

hello CH. At this point it doesn't matter, that's why i'm so lackadaisical about that stuff now...years ago i was much more of a true believer.

You must understand, when i was born America was almost 90% White, and now it's down to the 60s percentage wise.

Huge change in a brief timescale. It really is like an un-armed invasion of foreigners. First the Mariel boatlift invasion, and now this.

With apologies to my Hispanic friends here, I hear Spanish being spoken almost everyday now when i leave my White hamlet of old-America.

America is an English-speaking nation. i don't want to hear foreign languages in my country...learn English, all you filthy immigrants.

Speaking of Irish and Italians, did you know the US only instituted immigration controls when the Irish Catholics started arriving? haha.

Another thing, we don't need immigrants anymore, the US is full, the free lodging is over, or should be!

I don't like change who knows why...you do you and i'll do me.

ps - "I am technically part Hispanic but I’m white." Okay, but if the lifeboat can fit only one more person, it's going to be me.

 

[Christopher Hitchens]

its simple,yea. but you debate every response though. making it more than it needs to be.
simple as that.

I don’t debate every response that’s a lie or exaggeration. Mrln, who are you to decide what is more or not?My threads are not more or less, they are exactly where they should be for me. If for you debating and arguing is too hard or too much then stay away or at least don’t reply to my threads with your points.

You and others on here keep trying to say, in a thousand different ways, that I should keep my mouth shut. Well it’s NEVER going to happen, you and the trumpers are all stuck with me. I will keep beating you all over the head with reason. I am a leftist honey badger that will nip at your heels relentless. So get some neosporin and bandaids and do yourself a favor and get over it good sure. Now let’s hug it out, because you are alright mrln, i enjoy your company.

 

[hedgerow]

You and others on here keep trying to say, in a thousand different ways, that I should keep my mouth shut. Well it’s NEVER going to happened, you and the trumpers are all stuck with me.

I know there's at least one time you should have kept your mouth closed, but no you opened it wide...and loved it

 

[Fäthër Cörpsë]

Who gives a fuck? First off, a lot of Hispanics are white. I am technically part Hispanic but I’m white. So that number is higher. Also more people are mixed race now.

But who gives a fuck if it was lower. They are still Americans. Or if they are immigrants they want to be Americans. What matters is the ideas in these people’s heads and their behavior not their skin color.

I don’t care if we become less white and if you do you’re racist idiot. Anyway WE NEED IMMIGRANTS. Also the same arguments you make were made about the Catholic Irish and Italian immigrants. Except the complaint was we would become Catholic and less Anglo Saxon. We turned out fine, in fact better than ever, and America would not be America without our Italians and Irish people. So calm the fuck down and stop watching whatever white nationalist or whatever media you watch.

What are you so afraid of hedge? Why is Americans being less white such a bad thing?

That’s the thing, though - they don’t want to be Americans. They want to be wherever they came from, but soak up all that America can offer them.

If they truly wanted to be American they would 1. Enter the country legally and correctly 2. Strive for citizenship 3. Incorporate themselves into the American culture.

 

[mrln]

I don’t debate every response that’s a lie or exaggeration. Mrln, who are you to decide what is more or not?My threads are not more or less, they are exactly where they should be for me. If for you debating and arguing is too hard or too much then stay away or at least don’t reply to my threads with your points.

You and others on here keep trying to say, in a thousand different ways, that I should keep my mouth shut. Well it’s NEVER going to happened, you and the trumpers are all stuck with me. I will keep beating you all over the head with reason. So yourself a favor and get over it my man. Now let’s hug it out, because you are alright mrln

i never said you should keep your mouth shut. your reading into it too much. because i would say,keep your mouth shut.
and what might seem as reason to you,is nonsense to others. theres nothing to get over.

 

[Christopher Hitchens]

hello CH. At this point it doesn't matter, that's why i'm so lackadaisical about that stuff now...years ago i was much more of a true believer.

A true believer in what white supremacy? I don’t quite know what you sure saying. You used to hate moon crickets and spics taking over our country but now you care less, is that what you’re saying?

You must understand, when i was born America was almost 90% White, and now it's down to the 60s percentage wise.

I know and like said who cares

Huge change in a brief timescale. It really is like an un-armed invasion of foreigners. First the Mariel boatlift invasion, and now this.

Again people talked like that about the waves of poverty stricken immigrants from Ireland and souther italy, be weary.

With apologies to my Hispanic friends here, I hear Spanish being spoken almost everyday now when i leave my White hamlet of old-America.

Idk where you live, im from California and of course you hear Spanish here but again who cares. Don’t talk to them. Their kids learn English in a school and a lot of them learn it as well. People said the same about Italian and also Yiddish from the poor Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire. All their descendants speak English now, only English usually

America is an English-speaking nation. i don't want to hear foreign languages in my country...learn English, all you filthy immigrants.

Their kids will and do speak English. Just like the other immigrants who have come here

Speaking of Irish and Italians, did you know the US only instituted immigration controls when the Irish Catholics started arriving? haha.

Yes I know they did do that in 20s I belive they shut it down. Look as I’ve said, I’m not for the status quo. I think things should be legalized and reformed and then we could have more control.

Another thing, we don't need immigrants anymore, the US is full, the free lodging is over, or should be!

Perhaps we don’t for now, I honestly don’t know, but you don’t just want to stop any more from coming, you want to deport all who are here. We do need some of them and white and other Americans don’t have enough kids.

I don't like change who knows why...you do you and i'll do me.

Well obviously you do like change if it’s Trump and his actions. This mass deportation is a change.

ps - "I am technically part Hispanic but I’m white." Okay, but if the lifeboat can fit only one more person, it's going to be me.

America isn’t a life boat and there is plenty of room.

 

[Christopher Hitchens]

i never said you should keep your mouth shut. your reading into it too much. because i would say,keep your mouth shut.

You did in an indirect way though. You said “but you debate every response though. making it more than it needs to be.”.

That means to me that I shouldn’t have responded, shouldn’t have made the arguments, should have said what I said. Don’t you think it’s fair that I see that as shutting up?

and what might seem as reason to you,is nonsense to others. theres nothing to get over.
View attachment 883958

Alright I was being dramatic then and thinking it was more of a problem to you than it is. I can be grandiose sometimes.