President Donald Trump repeatedly clashed with Terry Moran of ABC News about whether Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was deported by the United States government to El Salvador in March disregarding a court order, had “MS13” – representing the MS-13 gang – tattooed on his knuckles.
During the ABC interview that aired on April 29, Trump referred to an image he shared on his Truth Social platform on April 18 showing what he said was Abrego Garcia’s tattoo.
The image shows a left hand with four tattoos, one on each finger: a marijuana leaf, a smiley face with the letter X for eyes, a cross, and a skull. It also displays an “M”, “S”, “1”, and a “3” in a printed font above these tattoos. The words describing the pictorial tattoos also appear below each one in a small, printed typeface.
Trump insisted Abrego Garcia’s hand says “MS13”, which Moran said was disputed and that some had said the tattoos were “interpreted that way”. The president said, “Don’t do that. M, S, one, three, it says M, S, one, three.”
Moran countered, “That was photoshopped.”
He tried to move on, but Trump continued. “Terry, do you want me to show you the picture?” Trump said. “He had M, S as clear as you can be. Not interpreted.”
After Moran again tried to shift to a question about Ukraine, Trump said Abrego Garcia has “got ‘MS13’ on his knuckles”.
The interview goes far beyond the impression Trump left when he shared an image on Truth Social of what he said were Abrego Garcia’s finger tattoos, as he insisted that the “MS13” tattoo was part of the evidence used to deport him.
When we asked the White House for comment, a spokesperson said any law enforcement or immigration official with on-the-ground experience could link Abrego Garcia’s tattoos to the MS-13 gang.
The letters and figures M, S, 1 and 3 and the words below the symbols do not appear in other recent photographs of Abrego Garcia’s hand, including one that Salvadoran government officials took when he met Senator Chris Van Hollen Jr on April 17. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele shared it on X.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the “death camps” & “torture”, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!🍹 pic.twitter.com/r6VWc6Fjtn
The tattoos also do not appear in a family photo of Abrego Garcia shared by immigration advocates.
MS-13 experts told PolitiFact that none of the pictorial tattoos in the photograph is a known signifier of MS-13.
The Abrego Garcia case and gang allegations
The Trump administration deported Abrego Garcia on March 15 to CECOT, a Salvadoran mega-prison where it has sent hundreds of Salvadoran and Venezuelan men who were previously in the US. But Abrego Garcia had a protection order that was supposed to prevent him from being deported to El Salvador. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement lawyers acknowledged that they were aware of the restriction and, in court filings, called his removal an “oversight” and “an administrative error”.
The Trump administration has said Abrego Garcia and others deported to El Salvador were MS-13 gang members, which Abrego Garcia and lawyers have denied in court filings. All the men were deported without due process; the government did not present evidence of their gang membership before a judge in the deportation case, and the migrants were not given the opportunity to defend themselves. The New York Times reported that most of the 238 men deported to El Salvador have neither criminal records in the US nor documented links to a Venezuelan prison gang.
When Abrego Garcia was arrested in March 2019, a police informant told police he was an MS-13 member, according to a report known as a “gang field interview sheet”. A judge initially ruled in 2019 that government evidence about Abrego Garcia’s gang membership was “trustworthy” and was upheld on appeal; later, two federal judges ruled that the government’s information was unsupported. It was based on clothing Abrego Garcia wore at the time of his 2019 arrest and information from what a since-fired police officer called a confidential source.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers say the MS-13 gang membership accusation was fabricated. They have sought to reverse his deportation, but the government has argued that since he left US jurisdiction, it cannot take action.
The US Supreme Court ruled that the government must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release. Abrego Garcia has since been moved to a lower-security prison, according to news reports.
What do the tattoos in the photograph mean?
As for the pictorial tattoos on Abrego Garcia’s hand, marijuana leaves, crosses and skulls are widely used by people who do not belong to gangs. Gang crime experts said they did not stand out to them as MS-13 markers.
“I don’t believe a dangerous individual would have such anodyne and farcically generic tattoos on his hand,” said Liliana Castaneda Rossmann, a California State University San Marcos emerita professor of communication and author of the book Transcending Gangs: Latinas Story Their Experience.
Sean Kennedy, a former federal public defender in California and now a Loyola Law School professor, said in his experience representing and interacting with current and former MS-13 members, “The tattoos in the photo don’t look familiar to me.”
Such designs are out of character with typical MS-13 tattoos, Kennedy said.
“Within MS-13 culture, such markings would likely be frowned upon and even viewed as a sign of cowardice, as they could be interpreted as an attempt to hide or downplay gang affiliation,” Kennedy said. “That type of concealment goes against the gang’s norms, which often demand bold, visible demonstrations of identity and loyalty.”
Charles Katz, director of Arizona State University’s Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety, concurred.
While Katz said local law enforcement would be more familiar with specific tattoo designs in a given region, “I have worked on issues related to MS-13 for the past 15 years in El Salvador and the US, and I have never seen tattoos or graffiti suggesting that these particular tattoos are associated with MS-13.”
Experts said tattoos can be helpful in identifying gang members, as long as they are one of multiple pieces of evidence.
“While police gang experts often use so-called gang tattoos as circumstantial evidence of alleged gang involvement, in my experience, they never use tattoos alone as definitive evidence of gang affiliation,” said David M Kennedy, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor who studies gangs. “This is particularly true where, as here, the tattoos are ambiguous and may reflect things other than gang ties, such as religion, loss, personal transformation or cultural identity.”
Our ruling
Trump said Abrego Garcia “had ‘MS-13’ on his knuckles tattooed … He had MS as clear as you can be, not interpreted.”
The figures M, S, 1 and 3 and the words below the symbols do not appear in other photographs of Abrego Garcia’s hand, including one shared by the Salvadoran government.
Experts in MS-13 and other gangs say the pictorial tattoos shown are not typical designs for MS-13 or other gangs, and they say that several of those tattoos are commonly used by people unaffiliated with gangs.
