Venezuelan Tattoo Artist Deported for Tattoos Using Outdated Law

A Venezuelan LGBTQ+ tattoo artist seeking asylum has gone missing from ICE systems and is believed to have been forcibly deported because of his tattoos. The asylum seeker is said to have been deported under the Trump administration using The Alien Enemies act, a 27-year-old law that has been used in the past to justify placing Japanese, Italian, and German Americans into concentration camps during World War II.

Lindsay Toczylowski, the founder and president of Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), made a series of posts on social media trying to bring attention to the situation and advocate for her client. ImmDef is a social justice law firm that defends immigrant communities from injustices in the system. Toczylowski has reported that her Venezuelan client was deported to El Salvador because his tattoos were thought to be affiliated with a Venezuelan crime group. Immigration officers were convinced that the tattoos were connected to the Tren de Aragua, but only provided photos of the tattoos as “evidence.” There was no other reported connection between the crime group, or any other crime affiliation, and the asylum seeker. Toczylowski says they are mistaken about the photos, and that her client’s tattoos, “are benign and reflect his work in the arts.”

The asylum-seeker had reportedly fled Venezuela and made it to the U.S. but was detained by ICE for months before being deported. ICE failed to bring him to his court hearing, and the government lawyer had no idea why he wasn’t there. Toczylowski was told after contacting the Texas facility her client was being held in that he was “no longer there” and had “disappeared from (the) online detainee locator.”

The Trump administration pulled out an over 200-year-old act to justify the “disappearing” of this person. Trump proclaimed that the gang, Tren de Aragua, was, “conducting irregular warfare” against the U.S. and “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.” The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was last used during World War II to imprison an estimated 120,000 people of German, Italian, and mainly Japanese ancestry into U.S. concentration camps. This was the rationale behind the Venezuelan asylum seeker’s deportation. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg did end up ordering a halt to all deportations covered by the same act for 14 days, but the asylum-seeker’s location is still unknown. Toczylowski said she is horrified by what has happened and fears for what “might happen to him now.”

While places like Denver have had people advocate for our immigrant friends, there is clearly a growing amount of hostility towards people of these communities. It should be no surprise that this current administration would align themselves with a law that was used to justify an unforgivable act of injustice. The Japanese-American Incarceration is one of this country’s many atrocities committed, and the revival of this law should not be taken lightly.