Ordinary tattoos made Venezuelans identified as gang members and deportees, according to lawyers

A crown on a football ball, an eyeball that «looked cool», Flores; Those are some of the ordinary tattoos that the defense lawyers say they helped take the sudden deportation of the weekend of approximately 200 Venezuelan men who are accused of being members of the ruthless gang Train of Aragua.

President Donald Trump ordered that men be expelled from the United States and sent to a prison in El Salvador under a law of war of the 18th century that allows those who are not citizens without due process.

The proclamation issued by Trump argued that the war law was applied because the gang is «perpetrating an invasion» of the United States.

Most lawyers have rejected this argument and have pointed out that the government has not presented evidence that demonstrates that men are members of bands. The men were expelled from the country before they could meet with their lawyers.

In some Latin American bands, tattoos are signs of belonging, being the facial tattoos of the Salvadoran group MS-13 perhaps the best known. However, experts say that tattoos are not fundamental to the Aragua train. They also point out that tattoos, enormously popular worldwide, are often nothing more than body art.

The US authorities have said that the agents were not based «only on tattoos» to identify the band members before the weekend flights. But lawyers and relatives say that tattoos were used repeatedly to argue that men belonged to the Aragua train.

For example, there is the case of Jerce Reyes Barrios, 36, whose defense lawyer affirmed in an affidavit that the authorities identified him as a member of a band partly by a tattoo of a crown on a football ball and the word «God.»

Reyes Barrios, however, had been a professional soccer player and chose that tattoo because the crown looked like the logo of his favorite team, Real Madrid, said his lawyer, Linette Tobin, in the statement.

The lawyer included a photo of the tattoo in the demand.

The crown is very similar to the Real Madrid logo.

AP