Trump’s nominee to lead DEA claims Kilmar Ábrego García’s tattoos are MS-13 related, but Salvadoran expert disagrees
During his confirmation hearing in the Senate on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Drug Enforcement Administration, Terrance Cole, was asked to weigh in on the dispute over the meaning of the tattoos on the hand of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man who was deported to El Salvador from Maryland by mistake.
Cole was asked by Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, to say if, “based on your time as a DEA agent in the field, particularly in Mexico, these tattoos are consistent with MS-13 associations”.
As he spoke Graham held up a printed out close-up image of the symbols tattooed on Ábrego García’s left hand: a marijuana leaf; a smiley face; a crucifix and a skull.
“Yes, sir, that’s correct,” Cole answered.
“Do you know of any other set of combinations, that would suggest some other organization this represents,” Graham asked.
“With this particular one, no sir,” Cole answered, pointing at what appeared to a copy of the print out displayed by Graham.
An official White House account on the social media platform X posted video of this exchange in support of its campaign to tarnish the wrongly deported man by claiming that his tattoos are proof of his membership in the Salvadoran gang MS-13.
However, it is important to note that the image of the tattoos displayed by Graham at the hearing was not the same one that Trump held up in a social media post from the White House earlier this month. The image held up by Trump in that post showed the tattoos but also had text annotation added to interpret the symbols as representing M,S,1 and 3.
In his contentious interview with Terry Moran of ABC News broadcast Tuesday, Trump repeatedly insisted that those letters and numbers were not added to the photo as annotation, but were actually tattooed onto Ábrego García’s knuckles. “He had “M, S, as clear as you can be, not ‘interpreted’”, Trump told Moran.
When Moran then tried to explain to Trump that there was no M, S, 1 or 3 on Ábrego García’s left hand in a photo taken during his recent meeting with Senator Chris Van Hollen in El Salvador, Trump refused to believe the correspondent. “But they’re there now,” Trump said. “He’s got MS-13 on his knuckles,” the president of the United States asserted with conviction, despite being wrong.
Cole’s claim appears to clash with what the Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez wrote two weeks ago, in response to the image of Trump holding up the annotated photo: “I covered MS-13 for over a decade: its history, crimes, symbolism, cruelty, pacts with Salvadoran governments. I wrote a book about it. Never, ever, did any of the hundreds of sources I spoke to say anything that would allow us to believe Trump’s strange interpretation of tattoos.”
Key events
United States and Ukraine sign deal to create a reconstruction investment fund for the country, Treasury says
The US Treasury department just announced that the United States and Ukraine signed a deal on Wednesday to establish a reconstruction investment fund for the country.
A Treasury press release does not explicitly mention any US stake in Ukraine’s reserves of minerals. It does, however, suggest that the United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund is some sort of payback for US support for Ukraine’s defense from the full-scale Russian invasion that began in 2022.
“In recognition of the significant financial and material support that the people of the United States have provided to the defense of Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion, this economic partnership positions our two countries to work collaboratively and invest together to ensure that our mutual assets, talents, and capabilities can accelerate Ukraine’s economic recovery” the Treasury statement said.
“Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, the Treasury Department and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) will work together with the Government of Ukraine to finalize program governance and advance this important partnership” the statement also says.
For his part, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, is quoted as saying that the agreement was made possible by “President Trump’s “tireless efforts to secure a lasting peace”.
“This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump Administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term”, Bessent added. “President Trump envisioned this partnership between the American people and the Ukrainian people to show both sides’ commitment to lasting peace and prosperity in Ukraine. And to be clear, no state or person who financed or supplied the Russian war machine will be allowed to benefit from the reconstruction of Ukraine.”
Trump says he understands interest rates better than Fed chair Jerome Powell
Speaking to business leaders at the White House on Wednesday, Donald Trump once again criticized Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell for not lowering interest rates. Powell has cited Trump’s massive tariffs on imports from nearly every country, except Russia, as a reason to fear inflation and so not lower rates.
“Mortgage rates are actually down slightly, even though I have a guy in the Fed that I’m not a huge fan of”, Trump said, apparently departing from his prepared remarks. “But that’s alright, these are minor details. Don’t tell him I said that please”.
“I mean, he should reduce the ener– he should reduce interest rates” the president, who has relied on loans to finance his real estate purchases for decades, added. “I think I understand interest a lot better than him, because I’ve had to really use interest rates. But we should have interest rates go down, it would be positive, but it’s not going to matter that much, because ultimately what we’re creating has much more to do with other things than it does just pure interest rates, but it would be nice for people wanting to buy homes and things”.
Noem defends Trump’s pick to lead CBP accused of ‘cover-up’ over death of man beaten by US agents
Chris Stein
Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem has defended Rodney Scott, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead Customs and Border Protection (CBP), after a Democratic senator and former CBP official accused him of mishandling the investigation into the 2010 death of an unauthorized border crosser.
Scott’s confirmation hearing began a few minutes ago before the Senate finance committee, whose ranking member Ron Wyden last week wrote to Noem with concerns that his handling of the death of Anastasio Hernández Rojas was “deeply troubling”.
“The minority’s uninformed account of Mr Scott’s alleged role in the 2010 investigation of the death of Mr Anastasio Hernandez Rojas was infuriating and offensive to read,” Noem wrote in reply.
Wyden had questioned Scott’s authorization of an administrative subpoena to obtain Hernández Roja’s medical records. Hernández Roja died after being beaten and tased by CBP agents who were preparing him for deportation, following his arrest for crossing into the San Diego area from Mexico.
Noem rejected Wyden’s attacks, saying: “Mr Scott did not impede any investigation, nor did he take steps to conceal facts from investigators” and that his use of the subpoena was “consistent with law and agency policy”.
The secretary also said that James Wong, a former top CBP internal affairs official who in a letter to Wyden accused Scott of orchestrating “a cover-up” was “assigned to a wholly separate component of CBP”.
“Your public disclosure of these false allegations demonstrates the reckless nature of partisan politics. The plain explanation offered to the committee in this letter would have been better addressed in private to avoid tarnishing Mr Scott’s sterling reputation,” Noem wrote to Wyden.
‘This is Biden’s economy,’ Trump says as GDP shrinks amid tariff disruption
At the start of a speech on the investment in the White House, Donald Trump just said that weak economic data released on Wednesday was not his fault, because “this is Biden’s economy.”
In a confusing, contradictory statement, Trump pointed out that what economists call “core GDP was up plus 3%”. While that is correct, Trump then immediately repeated, “but this is the Biden economy”.
As numerous commentators noted earlier in the day, after Trump posted: “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s,” the president made the opposite claim when the stock market boomed during the Biden administration.
In an all-caps social media post in a January 2024, Trump wrote: “THIS IS THE TRUMP STOCK MARKET BECAUSE MY POLLS AGAINST BIDEN ARE SO GOOD THAT INVESTORS ARE PROJECTING THAT I WILL WIN, AND THAT WILL DRIVE THE MARKET UP.”
Trump’s nominee to lead DEA claims Kilmar Ábrego García’s tattoos are MS-13 related, but Salvadoran expert disagrees
During his confirmation hearing in the Senate on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Drug Enforcement Administration, Terrance Cole, was asked to weigh in on the dispute over the meaning of the tattoos on the hand of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man who was deported to El Salvador from Maryland by mistake.
Cole was asked by Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, to say if, “based on your time as a DEA agent in the field, particularly in Mexico, these tattoos are consistent with MS-13 associations”.
As he spoke Graham held up a printed out close-up image of the symbols tattooed on Ábrego García’s left hand: a marijuana leaf; a smiley face; a crucifix and a skull.
“Yes, sir, that’s correct,” Cole answered.
“Do you know of any other set of combinations, that would suggest some other organization this represents,” Graham asked.
“With this particular one, no sir,” Cole answered, pointing at what appeared to a copy of the print out displayed by Graham.
An official White House account on the social media platform X posted video of this exchange in support of its campaign to tarnish the wrongly deported man by claiming that his tattoos are proof of his membership in the Salvadoran gang MS-13.
However, it is important to note that the image of the tattoos displayed by Graham at the hearing was not the same one that Trump held up in a social media post from the White House earlier this month. The image held up by Trump in that post showed the tattoos but also had text annotation added to interpret the symbols as representing M,S,1 and 3.
In his contentious interview with Terry Moran of ABC News broadcast Tuesday, Trump repeatedly insisted that those letters and numbers were not added to the photo as annotation, but were actually tattooed onto Ábrego García’s knuckles. “He had “M, S, as clear as you can be, not ‘interpreted’”, Trump told Moran.
When Moran then tried to explain to Trump that there was no M, S, 1 or 3 on Ábrego García’s left hand in a photo taken during his recent meeting with Senator Chris Van Hollen in El Salvador, Trump refused to believe the correspondent. “But they’re there now,” Trump said. “He’s got MS-13 on his knuckles,” the president of the United States asserted with conviction, despite being wrong.
Cole’s claim appears to clash with what the Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez wrote two weeks ago, in response to the image of Trump holding up the annotated photo: “I covered MS-13 for over a decade: its history, crimes, symbolism, cruelty, pacts with Salvadoran governments. I wrote a book about it. Never, ever, did any of the hundreds of sources I spoke to say anything that would allow us to believe Trump’s strange interpretation of tattoos.”
The day so far
It’s been a day of many twists and turns for the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, whom the Trump administration has admitted it mistakenly deported to El Salvador and whose return to the US it has been instructed by the supreme court to facilitate. Federal judge Paula Xinis again directed the administration to provide information about its efforts so far, if any, to comply with her order to retrieve him.
It came as Trump told a cabinet meeting that he didn’t know if El Salvador would return Ábrego García and said he had not spoken to president Nayib Bukele. That followed his comments last night to ABC that he “could” secure Ábrego García’s return but he wasn’t going to. As his administration officials continued to publicly express unwillingness to bring Ábrego García back to the US (homeland security secretary Kristi Noem repeated White House assertions that he would only be deported again anyway), the New York Times (paywall) reported that the Trump administration recently sent a diplomatic note to officials in El Salvador, citing sources, to inquire about releasing Ábrego García, to which Bukele had said no.
The Guardian has not independently verified the Times report and it is unclear if this was a genuine bid by the White House to address the plight of Ábrego García or if this was, per the Times, “an attempt at window dressing by officials seeking to give the appearance of being in compliance with the recent supreme court ruling ordering the White House to ‘facilitate’ his release”.
Elsewhere:
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A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to ensure immigrants held at Guantánamo Bay are given a chance to raise any concerns about their safety before deporting them to El Salvador or countries other than their places of origin.
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Mohsen Mahdawi walked out of immigration detention after a federal judge in Vermont ordered his release. The Palestinian green card holder and student at Columbia University had been detained by the Trump administration on 14 April despite not being charged with a crime.
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While the US economy shrank in the first three months of the year, according to official data, triggering fears of an American recession and a global economic slowdown, Trump continued to blame Joe Biden for the figures. “This is Biden’s Stock Market, not Trump’s,” the Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that the contraction “has NOTHING TO DO WITH TARIFFS, only that he left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. BE PATIENT!!!” However, economists said it was largely driven by an unprecedented surge in imports, as consumers and companies braced for the president to impose his controversial wave of tariffs.
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US treasury secretary Scott Bessent said Washington was “ready to sign” a minerals deal with Ukraine. “Our side is ready to sign,” Bessent said, adding that the Ukrainians had “decided last night to make some last-minute changes”. Ukraine’s first deputy prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko was due to be in Washington today to sign the deal. But a source told Reuters that the US was pushing Ukraine to sign two additional documents as well as the main minerals deal. The Trump administration urged Ukraine to sign all three documents connected to the deal, but Kyiv felt they were not ready yet, Politico reported.
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Donald Trump said Elon Musk, who has taken more of a backseat in the administration recently but was in attendance, could stay “as long as he wants” in his administration, before adding that “at some point he wants to get back home to his cars”.
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House Republicans moved to block Democrats from forcing votes on the Trump administration’s use of Signal, potential conflicts of interest involving Elon Musk and the impact his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has had on local economies and communities.
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The supreme court’s conservative majority seemed open to establishing the country’s first public religious charter school as they weighed a case that could have significant ramifications on the separation of church and state.
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Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem defended Rodney Scott, Trump’s nominee to lead Customs and Border Protection (CBP), after a Democratic senator and former CBP official accused him of mishandling the investigation into the 2010 death of a man detained while trying to enter the country from Mexico.
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Eleven people are under investigation for “illegal, unauthorized leaks to the media of classified intelligence”, the US director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, said. The announcement, reported by ABC News, comes nearly a week after Gabbard said three intelligence officials were referred to the justice department for criminal prosecution.
El Salvador rejected US request for release of Kilmar Ábrego García – report
The New York Times (paywall) reports that the Trump administration recently sent a diplomatic note to officials in El Salvador to inquire about releasing Kilmar Ábrego García, whose return to the US government officials have been ordered by the supreme court to facilitate, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
The Guardian has not independently verified the Times report, in which two of the people claimed that El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said no. The Bukele administration said the man should stay in El Salvador because he was a Salvadoran citizen, according to one of the people.
It remained unclear whether the diplomatic effort was a genuine bid by the White House to address the plight of Ábrego García, whom administration officials have repeatedly acknowledged was mistakenly deported to El Salvador last month in violation of a court order expressly prohibiting him from being sent there.
The Times writes: “Some legal experts suggested that the sequence of events could have been an attempt at window dressing by officials seeking to give the appearance of being in compliance with the recent supreme court ruling ordering the White House to ‘facilitate’ his release.”
The story adds to the confusion about the Trump administration’s efforts, if any, to secure Ábrego García’s release and whether it is seeking to comply with court orders. As we’ve been reporting today, it continues to publicly express unwillingness to bring him back to the United States and even repeated suggestions that he would only be deported again if he was to return.
Kristi Noem says Kilmar Ábrego García would be deported immediately if sent back to US
Maya Yang
Kristi Noem, the US homeland security secretary, said that if Kilmar Ábrego García was sent back to the US, the Trump administration “would immediately deport him again”.
Noem repeated White House assertions about Ábrego García, whom the Trump administration has admitted was mistakenly deported to El Salvador last month, in a new interview with CBS.
“[Ábrego García] is not under our control. He is an El Salvador citizen. He is home there in his country. If he were to be brought back to the United States of America, we would immediately deport him again,” Noem said of the 29-year-old who entered the US illegally around 2011 after fleeing gang violence.
Ábrego García was subsequently afforded a federal protection order against deportation to El Salvador. Despite the order, on 15 March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials deported Ábrego García to El Salvador where he was held in the Center for Terrorism Confinement, a controversial mega-prison.
Though the Trump administration admitted that Ábrego García’s deportation was an “administrative error”, it has repeatedly cast him as an MS-13 gang member on television – a claim his wife, a US citizen, and his attorneys staunchly reject. Ábrego García has no criminal record in the US, according to court documents.
Since Ábrego García’s deportation, the Trump administration has refused to bring him back to the US – despite the supreme court unanimously ordering it to “facilitate” his release. On Wednesday a federal judged again directed the Trump administration to provide information about its efforts so far, if any, to comply with her order to retrieve Ábrego García from El Salvador.
Trump officials claim that US courts lack jurisdiction over the matter because Ábrego García is a Salvadorian national and no longer in the US.
Judge re-ups demand that White House show efforts to retrieve Kilmar Ábrego García from El Salvador
A federal judge has again directed the Trump administration to provide information about its efforts so far, if any, to comply with her order to retrieve Kilmar Ábrego García from an El Salvador prison, the Associated Press reports.
The US district judge Paula Xinis in Maryland temporarily halted her directive for information at the administration’s request last week. But with the seven-day pause expiring at 5pm ET, she set May deadlines for officials to provide sworn testimony on anything they have done to return him to the US.
Ábrego García, 29, has been imprisoned in El Salvador for nearly seven weeks, while his mistaken deportation has become a flash point for Donald Trump’s immigration policies and his increasing friction with the US courts.
The president acknowledged to ABC News on Tuesday that he “could” call El Salvador’s president and have Ábrego García sent back. “And if he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that,” Trump told ABC’s Terry Moran in the Oval Office, as he doubled down on his claims that Ábrego García is a member of the MS-13 gang. Asked by a reporter at his cabinet meeting on Wednesday if Nayib Bukele would respond to a request to return a Ábrego García, Trump said he did not know and he has not spoken to him.
Xinis ordered the Trump administration to return him nearly a month ago, on 4 April. The supreme court ruled on 10 April that the administration must facilitate bringing him back.
But the case only became more heated. Xinis lambasted a government lawyer who couldn’t explain what, if anything, the Trump administration has done. She then ordered officials to provide sworn testimony and other information to document their efforts.
The Trump administration appealed. But a federal appeals court backed Xinis’s order for information in a blistering ruling, saying: “We shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the supreme court’s recent decision.”
The Trump administration resisted, saying the information Xinis sought involved protected state secrets and government deliberations. She in turn scolded government lawyers for ignoring her orders and acting in “bad faith”.
Federal judge limits Trump’s ability to swiftly deport immigrants held at Guantánamo Bay
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Wednesday to ensure immigrants held at Guantánamo Bay are given a chance to raise any concerns about their safety before deporting them to El Salvador or countries other than their places of origin, per Reuters.
The US district judge Brian Murphy in Boston issued the order after immigrant rights advocates argued the administration had violated a court order he issued by flying four Venezuelans held at the US naval base in Cuba to El Salvador on a flight conducted by the Department of Defense.
Murphy in late March had issued a temporary restraining order, which he later extended into an injunction, restricting the Department of Homeland Security’s ability to rapidly deport migrants to countries other than their own without allowing them to first raise concerns about their safety or potential torture.
Donald Trump’s administration argued it did not violate the judge’s order as it only applied to the Homeland Security Department, which oversees US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), not the defense department.
The Department of Justice called three of the four immigrants members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and said the Department of Defense removed them to El Salvador without the knowledge or direction of the homeland security department.
Trump says he does not know if El Salvador would return mistakenly deported Kilmar Ábrego García and hasn’t asked
Donald Trump said on Wednesday he did not know how El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, would respond to a request to return a man his administration mistakenly deported from Maryland, adding he has not spoken to him.
At the cabinet meeting earlier, a reporter had pulled Trump up on his comments in his ABC News interview last night that he “could” secure Kilmar Ábrego García’s return but won’t do so, despite the supreme court’s ruling that his administration must facilitate Ábrego García’s return to the US.
Trump said:
I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him. I really leave that to the lawyers and I take my advice from Pam [Bondi] and everybody that is very much involved. They know the laws and we follow the laws exactly.