Have a sports-related tattoo? The Trump Gestapo could be coming for you next. Because, for all they know, which isn’t much, you could be a terrorist.
This isn’t hyperbole.
A Real Madrid tattoo is what the Gestapo used to justify disappearing a Venezuelan pro soccer player and youth coach to a prison in El Salvador.
“He has a tattoo on his arm of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word ‘Dios’. DHS alleges that this tattoo is proof of his gang membership. In reality, he chose this tattoo because it is similar to the logo for his favorite soccer team, Real Madrid,” wrote Linette Tobin, the attorney for Jerce Reyes Barrios, 36, who had fled his home country after he was tortured for taking part in anti-regime demonstrations last year, in a legal brief in his case.
Now Barrios, who had an asylum hearing scheduled for April 17, is being tortured in an El Salvadoran prison, because of a friggin’ soccer tattoo.
The Gestapo also pointed to a photo on social media of Barrios displaying what the jackboots called a “gang sign,” but was actually Barrios using the International Sign gesture for “I love you.”
Dummkopfs.
Hard as it is to believe, the Real Madrid tattoo and the sign for “I love you” was enough for the Gestapo to link Barrios, who has no criminal record in the U.S. or in Venezuela, to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which, coincidentally, our MAGA attorney general, Jason Miyares, himself the son of Cuban immigrants, also has in his political and legal crosshairs.
“The core duty of government is to protect its citizens. The president, acting within his constitutional and statutory authority, did just that by ordering the removal of TdA gang members who have no legal right to be in this country and pose a direct threat to Americans’ safety,” said Miyares, whose state taxpayer-funded PR people sent out a press release on Tuesday touting how their boss has signed onto a MAGA legal brief urging a federal appeals court to lift a nationwide restraining order that is preventing the deportation of more alleged Tren de Aragua gang members.
Not for nothing, but Miyares had better hope he doesn’t have any soccer tattoos or photos on his social media flashing sign language, or his Latino ass could be on a plane to El Salvador before this is all over with.
ICYMI
- Virginia AG Jason Miyares mum on Trump 2.0 Department of Education cuts
- State AGs, not ours, but others, fighting Trump over gender-affirming care
We haven’t heard anything from Miyares on the disappearing of Badar Khan Suri, a Northern Virginia resident in the U.S. teaching at Georgetown on a student visa, who was deemed “deportable” by the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the titular head of the Trump Gestapo, because his father-in-law, Ahmed Yousef, is a former adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, a top Hamas leader who was assassinated in an Israeli-led operation last year in Iran.
Rubio, incidentally, like our guy Miyares, is the son of Cuban immigrants, and his wife, Jeannette, is the daughter of Colombian immigrants.
It’s not long before they get their own taxpayer-funded plane ticket to El Salvador, is what I’m getting at here.
Back to the story of Suri, an Indian national, who was disappeared from his home in Rosslyn on Monday, and is now awaiting a court date in a Louisiana prison, according to his lawyer, Hassan Ahmad.
Suri, like Barrios, has not been charged with a crime, and like Barrios, has no criminal record.
His “offense,” according to a Trump Gestapo spokesperson, is that he was “spreading Hamas propaganda and promoting antisemitism on social media,” though the spokesperson, who works for the Department of Homeland Security, didn’t offer any evidence to support that claim.
Ahmad said it is clear that the accusations against Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown who is conducting research on peacebuilding in Iraq and Afghanistan, are “based on who his father-in-law was.”
Uncomfortable note for the Gestapo on that: Yousef left his position in the Hamas-led government in Gaza more than a decade ago, and he has publicly criticized Hamas’s decision to launch the cross-border attacks in Israel in 2023 that set off the war in Gaza.
Which is to say, you got the son-in-law of one of the good guys.
Congratulations.
The Trump Gestapo disappeared a postdoctoral fellow in peacebuilding because of who his father-in-law used to be and a soccer player and youth coach because they don’t know anything about La Liga.
Don’t think because you’re White and were born here that they won’t find an excuse to disappear you.
Share
Chris Graham
