Edwin Chavez has the Salvadoran national seal tattooed on the back of his head. He got it in prison around 1999, a few years into his incarceration. “Back then I was a proud Salvadoran,” he explains. Later, he got “LA” tattooed on the right side of his head. He has the “G” of the Green Bay Packers on the other side and “The World Is a Ghetto” on his back, a reference to the song by War from 1972, four years before he was born. At forty-nine, Chavez is in his twenty-eighth year of incarceration in a California state prison. Born in El Salvador, he came to the United States in 1989 when he was thirteen, joining his mother Maria Elizabeth Hurren and older brother Gabriel Chavez, who had fled the violence of the Salvadoran civil war in the early eighties and settled in Los Angeles. Edwin recalls his kidnapping and rape by members of a Salvadoran rebel group when he was nine years old. He remembers seeing bloody bodies on the streets outside their home and spent his first month in California in the custody of coyotes who refused to deliver him to his mother until she paid the smuggling fee.
Edwin and Gabriel arrived in Los Angeles speaking no English. After a few years, Edwin and Gabriel joined the 18th Street gang (also called Barrio 18). “Having low self-esteem and being overwhelmed with fear, we needed some type of protection,” Edwin says. The 18th Street gang has its origins in 1960s LA as a small gang for Mexican immigrants. It grew in size and notoriety when, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it opened membership to other immigrants, mostly El Salvadorans, fleeing the civil wars and coups in Central and Latin America, turmoil made worse by U.S. interventions. The 18th Street gang, and its better-known rival MS-13, were heavily policed after their participation in the 1992 Rodney King riots, and by 1994 the FBI had formed a task force dedicated to incarcerating the gangs’ leaders. But rather than dismantling the gangs, the FBI’s incarceration of its members led to their expansion to prisons. Both Edwin and Gabriel were entangled in the escalating violence that ensued from the crackdown. Gabriel was arrested in 1992 and convicted of murder; Edwin was arrested three years later, just days after his nineteenth birthday, and in 1997 was convicted of attempted murder.
In 2022, after three decades in prison, Gabriel was eligible for parole. But on the day of his scheduled release, instead of reuniting with his mother, who was waiting outside the prison, Gabriel was transferred to an ICE Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, and placed on suicide watch. The family fought his deportation for a year and a half. According to Maria, after an immigration lawyer disappeared with the $7,000 she paid, Gabriel was deported to El Salvador in September 2024 and incarcerated in the country’s forty-thousand-person prison (the largest in the Americas), Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). This is the same facility recently in the headlines as the destination of deportees under the second Trump administration, including the illegally incarcerated Kilmar Ábrego García, a green card holder from Maryland.
Edwin claims his brother’s deportation and incarceration without due process were largely based on the tattoos that identified him as a former gang member. Tattoos as assumed markers of gang membership are a recurring feature of the current mass deportation project. This spring, President Trump agreed to pay El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele $6 million to incarcerate around three hundred suspected members of Tren de Aragua deported from the United States for one year. Trump claimed Ábrego García had tattoos on his knuckles signifying membership in MS-13, a charge based on an obviously doctored photograph.
Ink Positive
Tattoos have long been a visual language connoting identity, belonging, and status. They have also become aesthetic adornments for many, sometimes for sentimental reasons or for no reason at all. Though they date back to neolithic times (Otzi the Iceman had tattoos), tattoos were popularized in the last eighty years by figures such as the train-hopping Sailor Jerry, military rank-and-file, counter-culture movements of the 1960s through the 1990s, bikers, punks, Angelina Jolie, and Tupac. Tattoos, as political or social expressions, are used by gangs to signify membership and status but also as illustrative life narratives: spider webs for time in prison, a teardrop for murder or attempted murder, three dots meaning “mi vida loca” (my crazy life). Despite their ubiquity, the “wrong” kind of tattoo in the eyes of U.S. immigration enforcement, can be justification for deportation. Based on frequently careless research, tattoos are commonly imbued with criminal meaning, especially for undocumented people.
Race and tattoos are visual indicators used to police immigrants and gang members, groups deemed by the state as undeserving of the full rights of citizenship.
Edwin stated in an interview that, once in prison, he renounced his gang affiliation and “burned both of my wrists and right hand with plastic bags to remove the three dots and any of the 18th Street tattoos I had. Up to this day my scars are visible.” Edwin is also removing the letter “E” for Edwin tattooed on his finger because he worries it will be interpreted as an “E” for 18th Street. Most of Edwin’s tattoos, including the Salvadoran national seal, are representations of his cultural identifications, not gang-related. “Prison culture is based on identity. I wanted to highlight my own,” Edwin noted. It is illegal to give or receive a tattoo in prison, but that rarely stops incarcerated people from using anything from sewing needles and guitar strings to the motors from CD players or beard trimmers as tattoo guns; burning oil, Vaseline, cooking grease, or plastic makes the ink. Punishment for tattoos tends to be arbitrary, likely because they are so prevalent in prisons.
In 2019, the state of California allocated $6.4 million to expand tattoo-removal services from two California state prisons to twenty-one. Overseen by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), the program is available to incarcerated people with highly visible tattoos (on the hands, wrist, neck, or face) who have disassociated from gang activity, prioritizing convicts within two years of release. Edwin meets CDCR criteria and has begun removing his most visible tattoos. While slow and painful, the tattoos that cover Edwin’s head, neck, and those inside his fingers are fading. He knows that they could be used against him under the current immigration enforcement. “I am beginning to feel like my true self now. I was seeking approval when I got my tattoos,” he said, “I was running from myself and my past and created an alias.”
State of Exception
The criminalization of gangs depends on what criminology professor Ana Muñiz calls gang phantasmagoria. In a 2022 paper, she argued that “the constant, amorphous, unpredictable, and haunting threat of racialized gang allegations,” is, like mass deportation, a form of racialized social control. On October 24, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security released a statement describing alleged Tren de Aragua members as “monsters . . . sexual predators, and violent thugs” who “should have never been in our country in the first place.” Gang profiling and gang databases are notoriously opaque and inconsistent, and in the absence of a clear definition of what even constitutes a gang, suspected members are subject to surveillance and unclear criteria that “do not require an arrest, charge, or conviction” but instead rely on “discretionary assessments by law enforcement or correctional officers.” These discretionary assessments are, Muñiz writes, “based on broadly construed, subjective criteria including clothing, tattoos, social networks, and geographic location. . . . Over-labeling and mislabeling is common.” Race and tattoos are visual indicators used to police immigrants and gang members, groups deemed by the state as undeserving of the full rights of citizenship.
The story of the Chavez brothers—how two young immigrants, part of the quarter of El Salvador’s population that fled the country between 1980 and 1992, became members of an LA street gang—illustrates the complete failure of U.S. foreign policy in El Salvador. In the 1960s, under Democratic Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, the United States intervened in El Salvador and trained native security forces in physical and psychological torture methods and established El Salvador’s intelligence network (described by Amnesty International as designed to “use clandestine terror against government opponents”). During the civil war of the 1980s, the U.S.-trained, -armed, and -funded El Salvadoran military was responsible for 85 percent of the war’s acts of violence. A majority of the one million Salvadorans who had migrated and settled in the United States—under temporary asylum status, through crossing the border, or overstaying visas—were in the LA or D.C. area, the former already home to established and evolving Hispanic and Latino gangs: 18th Street, MS-13, and the Mexican Mafia, among others. Thousands of unaccompanied minors, having witnessed or experienced extreme violence, were arriving without community or money. It was under these conditions and in impoverished and underserved neighborhoods that LA’s gangs grew in membership and notoriety.
Is it possible to come out unmarked, physically and emotionally, from a civil war and decades of incarceration?
The El Salvadorans forcibly expelled from the United States in the 1990s returned to a still-volatile country. President Bukele, a former business and bitcoin savant, has used gang violence as a pretext for authoritarian rule, vigilante death squads (such as Sombra Negra), and rampant incarceration in mega prisons. In 2022, he declared a “state of exception,” suspending suspected gang members’ rights to due process, legal representation, freedom of assembly, and the right to be informed of the reason for arrest. As of March 2025, this state of exception had been extended thirty-six times. El Salvador, which employs what it calls el mano duro (the iron fist), has the highest incarceration rate in the world (costing $200 million per year), with the United States following close behind.
Mass deportation and the criminalization of immigrants “has become more efficient, less discretionary, and much more rigid,” Daniel Kanstroom writes in Deportation Nation. This spring, El Salvador emerged as the U.S. government’s deportation program’s go-to destination. The conditions at El Salvador’s CECOT—prisoners are not allowed visitors, to go outside, or leave their shared cells for more than thirty minutes a day—are an inspiration for Trump’s carceral vision. Deportation, the sociologist David Brotherton and psychologist Luis Barrios write, represents “the massive contradictions of dependency and colonialism . . . and the interests of elite-dominated security states whose leading parties continue to fashion crime and immigration controls on the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable sections of society.” Maria traveled to El Salvador in November 2024 to visit her son Gabriel in CECOT and deliver his seizure medication. (Gabriel, now fifty-one, was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2009 and still suffers from brain damage, including epilepsy.) She was neither allowed entry nor given any information as to Gabriel’s well-being. Regardless, Maria continues to pay the $7 a day for Gabriel to receive a bed and food while incarcerated.
Police of the World
Mario (a pseudonym to protect his identity) came to the United States from El Salvador in the 1980s with his grandmother when he was five years old. He remembers hearing the explosions, gunfire, and tanks of the civil war when he was a child. Now forty-four, loud noises still make him anxious. Mario works as a clerk at the chapel in the California prison in which he is incarcerated. Mario “sets up the tables, chairs, sound system, and makes sure it’s clean and looks like a church,” as he explains it. Mario has not been gang affiliated since 2017 but still has tattoos that signify his previous allegiances to Varrio Nuevo Estrada and Los Sureños. Because Mario’s tattoos—depicting “cultural art, dark evil stuff, and of course some gang things”—are on his arms (up to his elbows), stomach and back, he does not qualify for California’s prison tattoo removal program. “We emphasize the representation of gangs on our flesh,” he says, “because visibility has more impact and it’s for protection from rivals, in the street and in prison.”
At his last board hearing Mario declared himself “unsuitable” for release, in part because he feared his release would mean immediate deportation and incarceration at CECOT. “I knew what I was doing was wrong. I didn’t join the gang hoping to become a career criminal or a prisoner for life,” he explained in an interview. “But once I took on the lifestyle, I pledged myself full force to it. I don’t say it proudly but it’s a fact. What I can say is that as a Salvadoran immigrant I didn’t fit in here and gang membership met my need for belonging and acceptance.” Mario and Edwin both report that friends and family in El Salvador, most of whom refuse to publicly acknowledge they know anyone with tattoos, say that any Salvadoran with a tattoo will be incarcerated in CECOT without due process.
In gangs, as in prison, reputation is survival and so is identity. Tattoos are testimonies of a moment, a reminder of something that seemed to matter at a formative time. But time doesn’t stand still. Rather than acknowledge that tattoos may be a product of coercion or a means of survival—or the remnant of an abandoned path—U.S. immigration enforcement uses tattoos as proof of dangerous intent, transforming the body into a physical criminal record that supersedes context, history, and testimony. In Mario’s case, a marking made twenty years ago continues to define him now as the person he was then.
Is it possible to come out unmarked, physically and emotionally, from a civil war and decades of incarceration? According to Edwin, the risk is too high. He has declined, at least for the time being, to pursue parole; he’d prefer to remain incarcerated in the United States than be deported and incarcerated without due process in a country he no longer feels any connection to. “It’s the irony of life,” he says. “I’ve worked so hard to get out of prison and now none of it matters. Deportation is a death sentence for anyone from El Salvador.” Across his back Edwin has “Grounded 4 Life” tattooed, surrounded by images of wired fences, tears, and a rifle. “It’s a political statement,” he explains, “that the U.S. is the police of the world.”