During an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News on Tuesday, President Trump insisted that the man his administration had mistakenly deported to El Salvador had a gang name tattooed on his hand.
“On his knuckles,” Mr. Trump said, “he had MS-13.”
Pause the tape. Rewind it to about a week earlier, when Mr. Trump in a social post held up a photograph of the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, showing him with four tattoos, one on each finger. There was a leaf, a smiley face, a cross and a skull. Above those symbols the alphanumeric term “MS13” had been superimposed onto the photo, essentially serving as a caption, decoding the tattoos. (Some gang experts have questioned whether they are truly MS-13 symbols.)
In the interview with Mr. Moran, the president appeared to believe that the characters that had been typed onto the photo he triumphantly held up in his social media post were in fact tattoos themselves. Mr. Moran gingerly tried to correct the record about that, but Mr. Trump was having none of it.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Hey, Terry. Terry. Terry.”
Mr. Moran tried again: “He did not have the letter —”
“Don’t do that,” Mr. Trump cut in. “M-S-1-3. It says M-S-1-3.”
When Mr. Moran said that those characters had been photoshopped onto the picture, Mr. Trump looked positively mutinous. The exchange went around and around as the president continued to claim, with increasing exasperation, that these numbers and letters that he so badly wanted the world to see did in fact exist in ink on this man’s knuckles.
He could not bring himself to admit that Mr. Abrego Garcia did not have the words “MS-13” tattooed on his hand.
“Why don’t you just say, ‘Yes, he does,’” Mr. Trump finally said to Mr. Moran, “and, you know, go on to something else.”
Asked about the exchange on Wednesday, Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, asserted that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s tattoos were the insignia of the violent gang. But Mr. Desai declined to answer questions about why Mr. Trump would not accept that Mr. Abrego Garcia does not in fact have “MS-13” tattooed on his hand, and that the photograph Mr. Trump had posed with in his social media post had been altered.
The subtext of the knuckle-text back-and-forth is this: The Trump administration has faced increasing scrutiny from the courts over its handling of Mr. Abrego Garcia, and it has chosen to respond to that scrutiny by waging a war of public opinion.
Rather than release the detailed information about the steps it should be taking to comply with a Supreme Court order to “facilitate” this man’s release, the administration is instead releasing statements and photographs hammering home its view that Mr. Abrego Garcia is a criminal. It’s what Mr. Trump’s original post about the tattooed hands was about in the first place.
It’s all part of an administration P.R. blitz. The White House lawn
is embellished this week by lawn signs showing the names, faces and alleged crimes of migrants who have been deported.
As for Mr. Abrego Garcia and his tattoos? It is not exactly the clear-cut picture Mr. Trump would prefer.
The president’s advisers have repeatedly argued that two courts had “ruled” that Mr. Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13. In truth, he has never been charged with or convicted of being a member of the gang. But during his deportation proceedings, evidence was introduced that he belonged to MS-13, and judges decided it was enough to keep him in custody during the process.
In fact, an immigration judge in 2019 ruled that Mr. Abrego Garcia could not be deported back to El Salvador because he could face persecution or violence from a gang there. The judge allowed him to stay in the United States, and he obtained a work permit. A federal judge has also found the evidence that Mr. Abrego Garcia is a gang member to be dubious.
“The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived,” Judge Paula Xinis wrote in an order this month.
The Trump administration has increasingly zeroed in on tattoos when identifying Venezuelan migrants as gang members who could be deported to the prison in El Salvador. Immigration officials have cited markings like crowns and clocks as evidence of membership in Tren de Aragua, the transnational gang with roots in Venezuela. In an effort to determine the gang affiliation of the migrants, the Homeland Security Department created a scorecard and assigned the men points for different aspects of their tattoos. Having tattoos associated with the gang was worth four points. A tally of eight points was considered evidence of gang membership.
But law enforcement experts have questioned whether tattoos in general provide reliable evidence for identifying gang members. None of which comports with the message Mr. Trump has been pushing, both in his social media posts and in his interview on ABC News Tuesday night.