Trump Makes His Most Unhinged Claim Yet About Kilmar Abrego Garcia

Donald Trump has taken his tirade against immigrants with tattoos to new heights, baselessly claiming that Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s knuckle tattoos clearly associate him with MS-13.

“This is the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, that the Courts are trying to save from being deported?” the president wrote on Truth Social Monday night. “He was supposed to be, according to the Judge and the Democrats, a wonderful father from Maryland, but then they noticed he had ‘MS-13’ tattooed onto his knuckles (and lots of really bad stories about his past!).”

The post includes a photo of Trump holding up a photo of a hand, supposedly Abrego Garcia’s, with a marijuana leaf, smiley face, cross, and skull tattooed across the knuckles. On top of each individual tattoo is written M-S-1-3, the president’s way of explaining each tattoo clearly translates to an individual letter or number, which all together spell … MS-13?

“This is the gang that is, perhaps, the worst of them all. What is wrong with our Country?” Trump’s post concluded, leaving out any explanation for how he broke the tattoo code.

Abrego Garcia was unlawfully deported to El Salvador last month due to an admitted “administrative error” by the Trump administration, though officials have since doubled down on unfounded claims that Abrego Garcia is part of MS-13. Now the president is resorting to one of his favorite, but most outrageous, justifications for deporting Latino men without due process: They have tattoos.

After he ignored court orders and deported 200 Venezuelan immigrants to a megaprison in El Salvador, Trump cited photos of their tattoos as proof that they were part of Tren de Aragua. One man had a tattoo of a rose and a skull; another had a tattoo of a soccer ball. Even if gang-affiliated tattoos were sufficient evidence to deport someone (they’re not), none of those are associated with Tren de Aragua. In fact, experts on the gang have revealed that Tren de Aragua does not have affiliation tattoos.

“The truth is that a tattoo identifying Tren de Aragua does not exist,” Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan journalist who published the definitive book on TdA, told The New Yorker at the start of the month. “Tren de Aragua does not use any tattoos as a form of gang identification; no Venezuelan gang does.”

Last week, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return, but all the administration has done is continue to push lies about the 29-year-old’s identity. A growing number of Democrats are traveling to El Salvador to push for his release.

“While Donald Trump continues to defy the Supreme Court, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being held illegally in El Salvador after being wrongfully deported,” California Representative Robert Garcia said in a statement Monday. “That is why we’re here—to remind the American people that kidnapping immigrants and deporting them without due process is not how we do things in America.”