Marked for Exile, Marked for Power: The Hypocrisy of Tattoos in Trump’s America
By Carl Cimini
In the dim glow of a tattoo parlor’s buzzing needle, history is inked onto flesh. The human urge to etch symbols, beliefs, and allegiances onto skin stretches back millennia—from the sacred body art of the Māori to the faded blue numbers on the arms of Auschwitz survivors. Tattoos are deeply personal, sometimes cultural, sometimes aesthetic. But in Trump’s America, a tattoo can be a scarlet letter, a mark of presumed guilt—unless, of course, the ink belongs to the powerful
The world has watched in horror as the former Biden administration’s attempt to claw back what remained of America’s tattered commitment to human rights, reversing a shocking deportation scandal that should have never happened during Trump’s first run of president in the first place, rolled back as hundreds of Venezuelans were forcibly expelled to El Salvador—many with no criminal record, no due process, and no link to the infamous MS-13 gang that the Trump administration used as its bogeyman. Their only adjudicated crime? Having tattoos.
Some of these men had inked odes to their favorite soccer team—Real Madrid crests mistaken for gang insignia by border agents eager to fulfill quotas. Family names, religious symbols, abstract designs—all enough to get them thrown onto a plane, shackled and bound for a country that was not theirs. Even after a federal judge ruled that the deportations were illegal and ordered the return of these planes, the Department of Justice simply refused. The flights continued on and landed in El Salvador. The administration’s lawlessness in service of their brand of “law and order.”
The same administration that saw fit to exile these men for their ink has no such aversion to tattoos when they appear on the bodies of its own. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s hand-picked Secretary of Defense, wears a Norse rune tattoo linked to neo-Nazi groups. He has marked himself with symbols long favored by white supremacists, yet his ink has not cost him his citizenship, his freedom, or his career. It has not seen him ripped from his home or locked in a foreign prison. Instead, it has elevated him, allowing him to preside over the most powerful military force in human history.
This is the hypocrisy of authoritarianism: the tattooed poor are criminals, the tattooed powerful are patriots. A man with a soccer crest is a gangster. A man with a hate symbol is a decorated war hero.
The Trump administration’s approach to law and order was never about justice. It was about hierarchy. About who is marked for exile and who is marked for dominion.
And in the end, that is the most permanent ink of all.
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