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AP Photo\/Evan Vucci<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n On Friday, the Trump administration<\/span> asked the Supreme Court to lift a lower court ruling blocking the mass deportation of thousands of detained Venezuelan migrants under the controversial Aliens Enemies Act of 1798, claiming<\/a> in a filing that it has a \u201crigorous process\u201d for identifying gang members.<\/p>\n However, Mother Jones<\/em>\u2018 reporting<\/a> suggests that the Trump administration is detaining people without due process on the flimsiest evidence, including their tattoos.<\/p>\n Since March, Donald Trump has been using the Alien Enemies Act to give himself the power to send migrants to El Salvador<\/a> under the loosest of suspicion that they\u2019re connected to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the president has designated as a \u201cglobal terrorist group.\u201d Despite claiming to have a strict vetting process of identifying alleged TdA members, the Trump administration has provided little to no evidence that this is the case. As my colleagues Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias reported,<\/p>\n When pressed on the criteria used for their identification, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt\u00a0pointed<\/a>\u00a0to unspecified \u201cintelligence\u201d deployed to arrest the Venezuelans she has referred to as \u201cheinous monsters.\u201d Trump\u2019s border czar Tom Homan has\u00a0insisted<\/a>\u2014without providing specific details\u2014that the public should trust ICE to have correctly targeted the Venezuelans based on \u201ccriminal investigations,\u201d social media posts, and surveillance.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The administration\u2019s Supreme Court filing likewise does little to provide evidence of careful vetting, simply describing the process as \u201cweeks of work by President Trump and his cabinet.\u201d<\/p>\n Lanard and Dias spoke with the families, friends, and lawyers of 10 men detained in El Salvador by the Trump administration, all of them contesting that their loved ones were profiled based on their tattoos and have no connection with gang or terrorist activity. As Lanard and Dias report<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u00a0The families have substantiated those assertions to\u00a0Mother Jones<\/em>, including\u2014in many cases\u2014by providing official documents attesting to their relatives\u2019 lack of criminal histories in Venezuela. Such evidence might have persuaded US judges that the men were not part of any criminal organization had the Trump administration not deliberately deprived them of due process.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n One of these men is Frizgeralth de Jesus Cornejo, a baker who has a tattoo of an autism awareness ribbon dedicated to his 15-year-old brother.<\/p>\n \u201cI never imagined being imprisoned just for getting a tattoo,\u201d Cornejo wrote. \u201cI never imagined being separated from my family. I wouldn\u2019t wish this on anyone, not even my worst enemy if I had one. It\u2019s horrible, it\u2019s mental torture every day.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
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