How We Reported "You're Here Because of Your Tattoos" (Mother Jones)

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/el-salvador-tattoos-cecot-venezuela-sidney-hillman-interview-noah-lanard-isabela-dias/?utm_source=mj-newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily-newsletter-04-22-2025

This month, Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias won the Sidney Award for “You’re Here Because of Your Tattoos,” a Mother Jones feature revealing that young Latino men are being deported without due process because of innocuous tattoos. The Trump administration falsely claims the tattoos indicate affiliation with Tren de Aragua, a notorious Venezuelan gang.

This is an interview conducted by the Sidney Hillman Foundation describing how Lanard and Dias reported the story.

How did you find out that men were being deported because of their tattoos?

Isabela Dias: On Saturday, March 15, a day after President Donald Trump quietly signed a proclamation invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged gang members without due process, the administration flew three deportation planes to El Salvador. Shortly after, we came across Spanish-language reports and social media posts from families in Venezuela who were growing suspicious that their relatives—many of whom had called to say they were being deported to their home country—had instead been taken to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT.

We then started to message the families and log the names of the men we could find on a spreadsheet, even before the list identifying the 238 Venezuelans sent to the megaprison became public. One of the first cases we looked into was that of aspiring musician Arturo Suárez Trejo. His wife had recognized him in a photo the Salvadoran government published of the detained men, who had their heads shaved and were put in white prison uniforms, because of his tattoos. We kept hearing different versions of that from several of the relatives we contacted and spoke with. The men had tattoos, but their families were adamant that they had no ties to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua [TdA] or, in most cases, any criminal history

Describe these tattoos.

Dias: The tattoos of the men whose families and friends we spoke with can be described as anodyne. One young man, Neri Alvarado Borges, for example, has a colorful tattoo of an autism awareness ribbon. His 15-year-old brother has autism. And back in Venezuela, Neri taught swimming classes to children with developmental disabilities. Through our reporting, we learned that, according to Neri’s boss, an [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agent specifically told Neri that he was being targeted because of his tattoos.

b]Lots more at link.