In its sweeping deportation campaign against Venezuelan immigrants, the Trump administration has repeatedly relied on tattoos to determine whether someone is a member of the feared criminal syndicate Tren de Aragua.
But The Independent has found that the U.S. government’s examples of TDA tattoos, created under the Biden administration, include art by artists in the UK and India, who say the tattoos they etched had innocent meanings. One honored the birth of a child, while another appears to commemorate the Aussie rock band AC/DC.
“It is mind-blowing that this is being used as an example of gang tattoos. It makes no sense at all,” the British artist whose clock tattoo appears in a 2024 Department of Homeland Security briefing on “detecting and identifying” TDA members told The Independent. “I have no relationship to Venezuelan gangs, and my art has nothing to do with them.”
Other examples used by DHS can be found in online posts dating back up to 11 years, suggesting that they were acquired simply by searching the internet for tattoos of various topics, including crowns, trains, stars, clocks, and the words “Hijos de Dios” (meaning “sons of God”), or “HJ” for short.
“Yes, this tattoo was done by me,” said Vipul Chaudhary, a tattooist in Gujarat, India whose image posted on Pinterest in 2021 appears to be the original version of DHS’s “HJ” example.
“The person who got this tattoo is my friend, and he lives in Gujarat.”
The briefing is one of eight U.S. government documents, obtained by the transparency group Property of the People via public records requests and shared with The Independent, which reference tattoos as a way for law enforcement officers to spot potential members or affiliates of TDA.
Largely compiled under Biden, these documents have now taken on new weight thanks to Trump’s use of 18th-century wartime powers to deport hundreds of alleged TDA members with little to no due process — following a deal with El Salvador’s president to hold them in a notoriously harsh mega-prison.
Among those deported so far are Andry Jose Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist who has repeatedly denied any association with TDA, and Neri Alvarado Borges, who has an autism awareness tattoo in honor of his brother.
“Well, you’re here because of your tattoos,” an ICE agent allegedly told Borges. “We’re finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos.”
Court papers shared by the ACLU suggest that DHS is using an “Alien Enemies Act Validation Guide” to decide who can be deported, assigning different point values to various characteristics including tattoos.
It’s unclear whether these documents played any role in the current deportations. But they are some of the only public evidence available of what kind of tattoos DHS considers “indicative” of someone “possibly being a member or associate of TDA”.
“I can’t say whether these particular documents were in the hands of particular agents at particular moments. What I can say is these documents have been circulated widely among law enforcement, and that the clear, intended purpose of these documents is to be instructional for law enforcement in identifying supposed TDA members,” said Ryan Shapiro, executive director of Property of the People.
Experts say that TDA, like most Venezuelan gangs, doesn’t use tattoos to signal membership, and several documents seen by The Independent clearly warn officers not to rely solely on tattoos.
“It’s an idea that has been taken from Central America… and has been incorrectly applied to Tren de Aragua,” Rebecca Hanson, a University of Florida professor who studies violence and policing in Venezuela, told The Independent.
And while some of the example photographs of tattoos feature actual Venezuelan nationals detained at the U.S. border, others have more obscure origins.
‘It looks like they’ve just pulled random images off Google’
Take the elaborately detailed arm tattoo of a pocket watch and dove, which comes from the Instagram page of a tattoo artist in Nottingham, England. In DHS’s version, someone has manually removed the artist’s watermark.
“The tattoo was done in England on someone that is of caucasian ethnicity,” said the artist, who asked to remain anonymous. “It was to represent the birth of his child and love.”
In DHS’s briefing the tattoo is blurred, but on the artist’s Instagram page it clearly includes a date across the clock face.
The artist called the DHS document linking it to TDA membership as a “total misrepresentation” of the tattoo’s meaning, saying: “To me it honestly looks like they have just pulled random images off Google or Pinterest… I’m not happy that it’s been used within some document about this issue.”
The Independent has confirmed that the man who got the tattoo lives in the UK, but is withholding his identity out of respect for his privacy.
Or take the “HJ” tattoo inked in India by Vipul Chaudhary, which appears cropped and stretched in the DHS briefing.
Chaudhary said he has known the tattoo’s owner for about two or three years, and that rather than meaning “Hijos de Dios”, the letters are simply family initials. “My friend’s name’s first letter and his wife’s names’ first letter. That’s all,” he told The Independent.
Meanwhile, one of the examples of a train tattoo DHS provides was actually inked in 2019 by Revival Tattoos in the historic English seaside resort of Blackpool, according to a post on Pinterest.
Revival did not respond to requests for comment, but the photo offers a clear clue to the tattoo’s true meaning: the logo of Australian rock band AC/DC, who performed in front of a giant model train during their 2008-10 world tour.
The other three train examples included in the documents were all featured in a 2015 article on the men’s lifestyle site Next Luxury, entitled ‘70 Train Tattoo Ideas for Men’.
DHS’s example of a crown tattoo appears to have come from a Spanish-language tattoo ideas blog, while one of its “Real hasta la muerta” examples came from the TikTok page of a Colombian tattoo artist — who indicated that it was actually quoting the debut album of widely popular Puerto Rican reggaeton artist Anuel AA.
The photos’ provenance was first spotted by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, a pro-immigrant non-profit, UK-based political consultant Arieh Kovler, and Bluesky user @itsTyGrey. The documents themselves were first reported by USA Today.
A spokesperson for DHS did not respond to questions from The Independent.
Hundreds deported with minimal due process
The documents seen by The Independent predate Trump’s recent declaration of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, spanning July 2023 to January 2025. They bear the marks of various government agencies such as DHS, the FBI, and the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Although some documents are based purely on photos and details of named Venezuelan nationals whom agents suspected of TDA links, several incorporate internet material with no apparent connection to the gang.
In one briefing from the Homeland Security Investigations’s Chicago Field Division, whose serial number suggests it was created in 2024, eight out of the nine reference photos appear to have come from innocuous online posts.
“Open source material has depicted TDA members with a combination of the below tattoos,” it reads (see Exhibit 2 here), under the heading “DETECTING AND IDENTIFYING”.
Most of the documents offer little detail about how agents decided certain designs were linked to TDA. The exception is a DHS summary of an interview with Venezuelan asylum seeker who claimed to have been a high-ranking police officer in his home country, and who described tattoos as “the easiest but least effective way” to spot TDA members.
“The documents make plain what should have already been obvious: The use of tattoos to justify these deportations is a ploy to disguise nativism and cruelty as a national security imperative,” said Shapiro from Property of the People.
On DHS’s “Alien Enemies” scorecard, tattoos linked to gang membership is worth four points, while clothing such as “high-end streetwear” or Michael Jordan gear counts for another four. That is despite some of the documents explicitly warning that these alone are not proof of TDA membership.
ICE only needs eight points, according to the guide, to determine whether a suspect is a “validated member” of Tren de Aragua and can be summarily deported.
The ACLU has accused DHS of wrongly deporting people with no opportunity to challenge the claims against them, and multiple judges have ordered such deportations be halted. Officials have admitted that at least one of the prisoners was deported in error.
“That they are placing so much weight on common tattoos and hand gestures is inconsistent with what experts say are reliable methods of determining TDA membership,” ACLU’s lead counsel on the case Lee Gelernt told The Independent.
When The Independent questioned White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt about these criteria on Monday, she did not dispute the document but said DHS considers a “litany of criteria that they use to ensure that these individuals qualify as foreign terrorists.”
Then she turned her fire on our reporter. “Shame on you and shame on the mainstream media for trying to cover [for] these individuals,” she said.
Additional reporting by Alex Woodward.
