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.”
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.
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.
Trump - “I bet photoshop is one of those computer thingies…I definitely didn’t use that.”
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:
You mean the US government had someone they considered a terrorist and instead of holding them, they released them?
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.
I mean at least he didn’t use a sharpie this time…
Even if it wasn’t, it would still be won’t to kidnap and throw him into a concentration camp without due process.
It’s not photoshopped. Why do you think in the wife’s posts, she tries to cleverly cover his hand? The guy got pulled over with 8 people in his car also, traveling from Texas to Maryland, and when asked for their addresses, everyone of them gave his address in Maryland. The guy was arrested with other MS13 gang members to and was identified by an informant as being member of the gang. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck… 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
You are missing the point. Let’s first ignore the fact that the link you provided is anecdotal and contains not one thread of proof, we are supposed to be a society of law, and if he is a criminal there needs to be due process and he should NOT be sent to a concentration camp.
Not missing the point at all. The Laken Rilley Act was passed for a reason. He doesn’t need to be convicted of anything to be deported. He only needs to be arrested
Please no one give that propaganda site any clicks.
Lol, reassuring yourself with the left-wing bias website I see. Just stay in that echo chamber bud. They would never tell you something that wasn’t true. Trust me
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
deleted by creator
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.
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, if he wanted to hide it, why even bother having a tattoos? Wouldn’t other gang members get upset that he is hiding it?
I also couldn’t find pictures of anyone else from MS13 who was using such cryptic tattoos.
Also with the interpretation is that 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!”
Microsoft made Internet Explorer: MSIE. Turn the E around and it’s clearly a gang code. Can we send Microsoft to a gulag now? Windows 11 is also a crime against humanity.
I read that in Gloria Estefan’s voice;
Turn the E around, Microsoft confessin’
Turn it upside down,
also starts the bashin’.
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.
Its sad that those are all legitimate possibilities
Somehow this seems like lower effort than a sharpie.
OH, COME ON! That isn’t even a plausible fake. Couldn’t they find a third-grader to do a better job?
This is the HitlerPig 2.0 version of the hurricane weather map. I’m surprised he didn’t just scribble on the photo with a Sharpie.
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.
The problem is, that’s even dumber. No matter how you twist it, the whole thing falls apart at the skull. Mind you, even the others are already a massive stretch.
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.
You don’t think Marijuana is an English word, do you?
Smile is sonrisa in Spanish, also…
The skull is still a puzzler though.
So, in Spanish you get MSCC? Still makes no sense as an acronym.
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.”
But others of this gang don’t have cryptic tattoos, so where are they getting this meaning from? Not to mention a quick search of MS13 tattoos does not show this.
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.
Ultimately I think you’re right, but on the other hand, do your really expect Mr Weather Map Sharpie to not try to pass off dumb blatant lies?
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!
How the tattoos I see they are pretty proud to be part of MS13 and actually have that tatooed not some BS cryptic message. Got any examples or these kind being used. Here is a hand tattoo https://na11.campaigns.federalbank.co.in/current/ms13-tattoo
I don’t think all of the gang members being deported from the US are wearing the tattoos so boldly. They probably had to be a bit more subtle than that in the US than in Venezuela or El Salvador (before last year).
Look at these 5 guys from 2023 https://www.foxnews.com/us/five-suspected-ms-13-gang-members-us-illegally-charged-murder-death-maryland-15-year-old
Or these three from 2018: https://www.foxnews.com/us/3-ms-13-gang-members-who-took-turns-shooting-suspected-rival-sentenced-to-prison-for-murder
Or all of these ones from 2021: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/08/06/illegal-alien-ms-13-gang-members-indicted-for-murders-kidnappings/
It’s going to be hard to find subtle versions of the tattoos with image search since they all give the same results of blatant face tattoos.
All the MS13 tattoos I’ve ever seen online are straight up “MS13”. Admittedly, I’m not an expert in gang affiliated tattoo cyphers.
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.
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.
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.
Removed by mod
There are literally annotations under the symbols.
Marijuana, Smile, Cross
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.
People are presumed innocent until proven guilty in court.
That was in the last century or so.
Why would a cop get deported?
Or a senator.
That’s trump you’re thinking of
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.
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.
