Summary
Trump reportedly held up a digitally altered image of the hand of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was deported by the Trump administration, in an attempt to prove Garcia is a gang member.
Trump can be seen holding a printed-out photo… demonstrating that “MS-13” is tattooed across his knuckles.
“This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back,” Trump posted. However, many have pointed out that the image appears photoshopped.
“MS-13 looks like it was typed on the photo.” “Needing to have a photo doctored… is definitely something a psychopath would do.”
Alright, I’ll take the bait. Let’s all assume he has an MS-13 tattoo. What does this change? The dude still gets his constitutional rights, and his day in court. On US soil.
This is what they always do, get you arguing about something that doesn’t matter. Just eats up time and energy about nothing.
I think this whole Garcia deportation is part of that. It wasn’t supposed to in the beginning, but they’re cooking with what they have.
Instead of talking about how fucking insane it is to deporting people to a death camp without any due process. We’re now talking about how insane it is to deport someone who wasn’t “supposed” to be deported to a death camp, and then refuse to do the bare minimum to get him back.
They’ve made sure we ignore the hundreds of people getting removed with no sign of evidence against their crimes.
You just made my stomach hurt. Thanks. I’m glad you pointed this out to me and I wish I had been smart enough to see it for myself.
This is exactly it. They flood the stage with all sorts of distractions, and then run with whatever issue gets traction. While everyone is focused on this one guy, dozens of others with the same non-criminal background are forgotten about, because they have nobody to support them, or their family didn’t spot an identifying tattoo in a propaganda photo.
Eventually they’ll let this guy go, and everyone will celebrate, and the Nazis will act insulted, while secretly cebrating that dozens of equally innocent people will still endure life sentences in a torture prison for the crime of being born brown.
The goal is to use fear, hatred, bigotry etc as a means to normalize authoritarianism and the destruction of rights, in exchange for non-existent “security” and “protection”.
See terrorism and pedophilia.
And on top of all that, even if somehow you could justify foregoing due process, the dude STILL can’t legally be sent to El Salvador because of his withholding of removal to that country which I’m pretty sure is what the"administrative error" was that the white house admitted lol.
It kind of looks like annotation to imply that the symbols actually on his hand mean MS-13, but I’d easily believe Trump is dumb enough to think he has “M S 1 3” printed in Arial font on his fingers.
If it is an annotation…show us those court records, you fascist son of a bitch.
It’s so obvious that the letters and numbers are there to show what the tattooed symbols represent. I feel like I’m in bizarro world that people don’t understand that and think they’ve found some smoking gun.
It doesn’t change the need for due process, but come on people.
Yeah, the story should have been, “Trump comes up with another distraction to avoid admitting he’s violating the Constitution,” or at least, “Trump too stupid to understand a picture and says stupid thing.”
Yeah, that seems obvious to me too. I’ve got no clue how the symbols are supposed to represent the letters though. I’ve a friend who has similar symbols on her fingers and they don’t stand for anything, they just look cool.
It starts off plausible:
M=Marijuana
S=SmileyBut then it gets stupid:
1=Cross?
3=Skull???The explanation I read is that skull is cranéo in spanish - “cranium” - which would give us C = 3rd letter of the alphabet. The jury is still out on the cross, but perhaps “god is number one” or something. Never mind that actual MS-13 members have no qualms about tattooing the actual letters all over their bodies instead of elaborate ciphers…
None of this matters though, focus should be kept on the right to due process. They can smear him all they want, it doesn’t change the facts.
That really just sounds like working backwards from a conclusion to me.
Trump’s own words indicated that he thought the MS13 tattoos were on the knuckles, which is where the Arial font characters are. So either Trump doesn’t know what a knuckle is, or he was speaking imprecisely, or he’s a fucking moron, or all of the above.
In any case, as someone pointed out above, it’s unlikely MS13 would be working with acronyms in English for their tattoos, especially acronyms in English that only 50% work because Marijuana Smiley Cross Skull says MSCS, not MS13.
“Knuckle tattoo” is the common term for tattoos on the back of the fingers like that.
It looks like people believe the M S 1 3 annotations are what they are saying is on his hand. We’re in some dire straits.
The annotations are bullshit tho
The annotations are bullshit tho
How so? Marijuana, Smile are pretty clear, the cross you can see in place of 1 on other MS13 tattoos (using image search of MS13 tattoos).
The only one I’m not sure of is the skull, but the available image is a bit blurry. Maybe the 2 eye holes plus the nose hole?
1 isn’t really a cross, but I guess if you really stretch it?
But the skull also has a mouth. That’s 4.
This guy is obviously a member of MS14 and that’s one worse than MS13, to the camps with 'em!
Yeah, they think that the evidence is the annotations and ignore them as being annotations as a bad faith argument.
Do the symbols on his knuckles means “MS13”? That is up for debate without supporting evidence from those who have relevant knowledge and authority on the subject, which DHS has not validated as of yet but the arresting officers in a 2019 incident when he was arrested with two others that were also “MS13 affiliated” by the local PD; if that was out of authority or guilt by proximity is up for debate.
Is it plausible that a gang member has coded tattoos? Absolutely because gangs do use symbols to code like white power people use 1488 and similar. To be fair members of MS13 and similar tend to be more blatant with their tattoos, but it may offer a tactical advantage to be more obtuse in tattoos depending on the individual’s role in the organization. So him not having “MS13” tattooed on his face is not necessary absolute proof that he is unaffiliated.
He was alleged to be affiliated to MS13 by an informant, who is advantaged by lying financially and legally. $100 bucks can make a guy busted for drug trafficking say anything to avoid the consequences of his actions.
His wife censors his tattoos in her calls for his return, which implies she knows the tattoos are a optics problem and she has also avoided admitting or denying any past gang affiliation. Not damning, but draw enough points and you can draw a line.
Could he have been a victim of circumstances and has a checkered past due to where he grew up and has been trying to reform himself and be a decent, honest, and lawful person? Absolutely, but his traffick stop in 2022 sure is questionable.
At the end of the day he was here illegally and two judges have decided he was at one time an MS13 member based on the information available to them, which is greater than we are privileged to.
You can disagree with deporting him because a prior administration decided he should not be immediately be deported, but administrations change and so can the decisions of a prior administration with a new administration.
How he is treated in his home country is a concern, but that is a concern of his family and the people of El Salvador who advocate on behalf of the imprisoned, not the American government because he is not a naturalized citizen.
Hey, dipshit:
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Two judges just decided he was a bad dude and so out he goes, zero trial or process whatsoever? And this administration sure took an awful lot of time to get to that information as they literally admitted that it was an error that got him sent away. They already admitted to it being a fuck-up, dumbass.
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The US as a country made a promise. Every four years the whole world has to figure out if that shithole will keep said promises. It is one of the least trustworthy nations on the planet at this point, constantly flip-flopping on its positions and being as unstable as bear on a unicycle.
Your brain is rotten mush if you’re so confident with these weak-ass excuses. This dude could literally be secretly the head of the fucking gang and he should still get more than just being picked up and thrown south without even a second thought or any evidence to support the act of doing so besides “whoopsie we made a mistake” and weeks later a “look at his tattoos that could stand for something maybe”. Can’t wait for “oh, turns out he was and that makes it ok even though we had basically nothing at the time we deported a man who was promised safety within our borders.”
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You can disagree with deporting him because a prior administration decided he should not be immediately be deported, but administrations change and so can the decisions of a prior administration with a new administration.
NOEM v. ABREGO GARCIA is pretty clear.
At the end of the day he was here illegally
Actually, at the time he was kidnapped he was a legal resident and the administration had court orders specifically not to send him to El Salvador. Anything anyone tries to say about his tattoos, one way or another, is completely irrelevant nonsense and attempting to defend the administration’s actions against him is a moral evil.
From what I read his parents owned a store that started getting extorted, which is why he fled El Salvador originally at 16 to live with relatives in the US. Whether he is or was in a gang or not in a gang is completely irrelevant to the fact that people have a right to due process. Maybe he does deserve to be deported, but what has been done to him is not a deportation. Also a changing administration does not have any relevance to the court decision allowing him to live in the US, unless you’re suggesting the rule of law ended too? Until a judge says otherwise, he can not legally be deported to El Salvador. What has been done to him is a crime.
Here’s a closeup of the image
A Nigerian prince puts more effort into fooling people.
Wait, the letters are clearly digitally added on top of the photo, but aren’t they just used to label the tattoos on each finger?
Not that would change anything…
If they wanted to indicate a translation for the symbols, they could have done so off of the part of the image consisting of the hand. Trump said verbatim “he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles”. Not symbols for MS-13, the phrase itself. Additionally, the real tattoos are clearly not on the knuckles, but the photoshopped letters are. Trump believes the photoshopped letters are actual tattoos and/or wants to convince people of it.
[EDIT: Trump 100% means to convince us that the photoshopped letters are actual tattoos. We are as cooked as the old coot’s brain.]
He should have used a sharpie. It would be more convincing than the pixelated font that doesn’t align wit the hand at all.
I have to think someone overlaid text on the photo to persuade people that the pictures on the fingers represented MS13, but Trump got the wrong end of the stick, made an idiot of himself in front of the media, and no one dared tell him he was a fucking moron.
This is 100% it. Still unacceptable to sit in the oval office and deny a man his rights like this, but if they wanted to doctor the images they have access to FAR more effective ways to generate a convincing photo… Trump is just a senile dumbfuck who didn’t understand what he was looking at.
Can you elaborate?
like (M)arijuana (S)miley …. then i suppose devils advocate could say cross is like a 1 and skull is a 3? though skull is more like an 8? but also totally not either so…
edit: after writing this I kept scrolling and others have posted similar things way before i did. So maybe that is the “official” line they’re going with.
edit2: guys, we’ve had it all wrong…
(W)eed, (D)ead, 4 (jezuz died 4 our zins) 0 (as in nothing, like no more, like… a skull.)
Based detective skills.
We all know WD40 and any symbolism representing it, is a common tattoo for the vile “Propane Gang”. The “Hank Hill’s”, as they’re more commonly known
Omfg I literally had to double check this was really what trump was holding up. “internet sleuth” my ass, a ten year old could point out how stupidly fake this is.
That was my first reaction, but apparently the letters were placed there to explain the tattoos “meaning”.
Supposedly:
Marijuana stands for M Smiley face stands for S Cross stands for 1 for some reason Skull stands for 3 for some reason
They forgot that:
- wouldn’t the text be in Spanish and not English?
- MS 13 hand members are proud of being in it, they put giant letters on their chests, backs, face, of he wanted to hide it, why even bother having a tattoos? Wouldn’t other hand members get upset that he is hiding it?
I also couldn’t find anyone else who was using such cryptic tattoos.
Also you can literally assign any meaning to it for example:
- Pot
- Ecstatic
- “t”
- Afterlife
This shows that Abrego Garcia is actually an animal lover and supports PETA.
But this is beside the point. The problem is he had no due process, and wasn’t deported but human trafficked to a prison in 3rd world country.
If they have undeniable proof give it to the court and then either deport him or put him in US jail if he committed a crime.
Spanish would work for the first two, as silly as it is, since marijuana is already a spanish word and sonrisa is smile. You could almost get away with 1 for the cross, though it would be c by the logic of the first two.
The skull, though, is utter nonsense.
That doesn’t even qualify as a Photoshop. It should be called an “MS Paint”
“MS Paint? That sounds an awful lot like MS-13! Off to the El Salvador gulag with you, terrorist scum!”
There are five possibilities:
- Trump was given this as proof that the guy is really a gang member, didn’t ask if it was fake, presented it without vetting it
- Trump ordered someone to find proof that he’s in a gang and someone gave it to him as proof
- Trump ordered someone to create proof that he’s in a gang
- Trump was given this as proof, he asked if it was fake, and was told the truth, and presented it anyway
- Trump was given this as proof, asked if it was fake, was lied to, and presented it
All of these have problems.
Somehow this seems like lower effort than a sharpie.
It’s sharpie gate all over again!
His skills have improved. He learned to use ms paint.
It’s nice to see Trump can learn and grow. It wasn’t that long ago when he would have just scribbled it with a sharpie. Anyway, it must really annoy Trump that thanks to Senator Van Hollen’s visit, where he proved he could do what Trump admitted that he himself could not, we now have unadulterated photos of Garcia’s hand without the shitty photoshop.
At this point, the guy could be a rabid neonazi pedophile for all I care: he should still not have been deported without a trial. People are presumed innocent until proven guilty in court. Do your fucking job.
Why would a cop get deported?
What insults me more than anything is that he thinks I am so stupid that I would accept that obviously doctored photo as real. I felt the same way when he pitched his hurricane weather map with his Sharpie edit.
Hey, HitlerPig, we aren’t all as stupid as you, and the people around you.
It’s the default font. They didn’t even bother to select an appropriate “gang” font.
Ok, so what happened here is that police added letters to the photo explaining what each symbol means. Some idiots on twitter thought those added letters are the claimed MS-13 tattoo. It’s not clear if Trump also thought that those letters were actually tattooed, probably yes.
Bruh. So they went from M to S to 1 to 3? Instead of A to B to C … to 1 to 2 to 3?
No. Don’t try to muddy the waters and spread more supposition as fact. Trump has already been proven to alter images to fit his own internal incorrect narrative, just look at that hurricane path incident from his last term. All evidence and common sense points to someone digitally editing this picture in order to fabricate support for this man’s illegal deportation.
I think the point is that we all know they put in the MS13 digitally
The argument isnt against that
We all know it
The argument is that the republicans arent arguing he literally has MS13 tattooed
But that even they know that was added
And thats its just added to help people figure out why the tattoos would represent MS13
Its not that Republicans are saying the edited in part is part of the tattoo
Just that the tattoos that are there represent MS13
That doesn’t explain why, though. That excuse is even worse.
Marijuana= M smiley = S Cross= 1 Skull = 3
Thats what the printed texts above each knuckle represents. These dumb people claiming it has poor photoshop… Has something loose in their head
Actual MS-13 gang members don’t bother encoding their tattoos. They straight up say “MS-13”. The gang is many things, ambiguous and shy are not two of them.
They’re kind of like white supremacists in that regard, they don’t try to hide who they are:
I’d like some independent decoding of these symbols. He could be celebrating his Master of Science in Computer Science.
(Also, the whole Trump argument is irrelevant because they already admitted he was “deported” in error)
Yeah, like the first two are enough of a stretch, but how come a cross is 1 and not c and what does a scull have anything to do with 3?
I thought maybe like a bowling ball has 3 holes, but a skull has a mouth so even that doesn’t work.
I think you’re right. Remember, a skull does not have a mouth! The jaw is not attached to the skull by a bone, just ligaments. So indeed the skull looks like a bowling ball.
Ah. Forgot about the 2 ear holes.
I think cross is 1 because “one god”. As in Jesus is himself and the manifestation of god.
What about the holy trinity?
Even if it wasn’t. We don’t throw people in jail, much less deport them for tattoos. I know some people in thr Trump shitshow who should go to jail for their tattoos if this is what they want to start doing.
Who do I trust?
A lying asswipe who wouldn’t know the truth if it slapped him in his orange face?
A man I don’t know that has been sent to a foreign nation’s prison for no reason?
Easy choice.
the individual is not the issue. it’s the process. i’m not going to go to bat for some rando who might very well be involved in nefarious shit, but i will damn sure defend the idea that every person is allowed a chance to defend themself. this is the issue. people need to stop treating this dude like a saint. it could very well backfire.
in fact, leftists and liberals in general need to stop automatically assuming the opposite of everything a conservative claims is true. that’s a fucking trap and it’s illogical.
Why do you think the wife tries to cover his hand in photos? https://redstate.com/beccalower/2025/04/18/leftists-are-losing-their-minds-over-trump-photo-of-abrego-garcias-ms-13-tattoos-here-are-the-receipts-n2188040
Yeah…. RedState dot com. Totally trustworthy source there!
Please no one click their link. It’s a propaganda site.
How is it propaganda when the link you directly to the twitter feed of the wife? It’s more like you don’t want anyone to see it because it doesn’t fit your narrative.
Why would she be covering a coded tattoo? Non-gang members would have no idea what it meant anyway. Can YOU explain why the cross represents a 1 and the skull represents a 3?
It doesn’t, and actual MS-13 gang members don’t bother encoding their tattoos. They straight up say “MS-13”. The gang is many things, ambiguous and shy are not two of them.
They’re kind of like white supremacists in that regard, they don’t try to hide who they are:
Some do, but not all of them. Just look up MS13 gang tattoos and look at the pics, or do a little research and you’ll learn that they do have coded tattoos that represent different things such as their rank in the gang.
The tattoos you’re showing aren’t white supremacist tattoos btw.
That theory has been completely been debunked:
So umm… What’s the problem? Return. Prove it in a court of law. Due process for all. It doesn’t matter who the person is or what they’ve done. What matters is how the government acts.
The problem is that they are trying to do away with due process. They want to be able to throw anyone they want into a gulag in another country where they will disappear forever. They start with immigrants, claiming that they are gang members and terrorists. They are refusing to prove it because they want to set the precedent that they do not need to prove their claims. They start with alleged foreign gang members, then will come “homegrowns,” as Trump has called them.
If we don’t make them prove their claims now in a court of law, it’ll be that much harder to do it later, and they know it.
Sure. We are in agreement. That’s exactly why it’s important to adhere to our constitution. Due process is an instruction for how to operate our government when looking to use its violent capabilities upon individuals. “No person shall” has nothing to do with who the individual is, only how our government must go about depriving them of “life, liberty, or property”, if it sees fit.
Until we change our constitution, due process for all.
How much more do they need to impeach this liar ?
Look. I wish he could be removed by impeachment. But we need to accept that he’s an outlaw.
He is a clear proponent of extrajudicial capital punishment.
Only an overdose of his own medicine will take him down.
The SCOTUS immunity superpowers aren’t the gift he thinks. All they did was remove the civilized options for his removal, leaving nothing but the worst case scenario options for him.
The only two things that could remove Trump early is a military coup, an armed revolution, or both.
A sniper or cyanide could also work.
Or a Luigi
An assassination would put Vance up. The entire admin is the same or worse.
You wanna bring up possibility of criminal history as an argument against someone being entitled to their rights as a US citizen? Let’s not throw big and obvious stones in very precarious glass houses.
So first things first man, if you have gang ink they photograph that shit and validate them. He was arrested in 2019 so, show me his ink and the photos they took of it when they arrested him.
