Donald Trump insisted in an ABC News interview with Terry Moran that a wrongly deported man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had “MS-13” tattooed on his knuckles, despite the president referring to a Photoshopped picture.
In an interview in the Oval Office that aired Tuesday, Trump appeared to refer to a photo in which the gang’s initials were digitally added to draw correlation between the tattooed symbols and MS-13. The image shows “M,” “S,” “1,” and “3” Photoshopped on each of Abrego Garcia’s knuckles, above his existing tattoos — a leaf, a smiley face, a cross, and a skull — along with labels that describe each symbol underneath. Trump seems to believe the initials are actually there.
“Even the man you picked out,” Trump said about Abrego Garcia, “he said he’d — wasn’t a member of a gang … and then they looked and on his knuckles, he had ‘MS-13.’”
Moran: “There’s a dispute over that. … He had some tattoos that are interpreted that way. … He didn’t have the letter ‘M,’ ‘S,’ ‘1,’ ‘3.’”
Trump: “It says ‘MS-13.”
Moran: “That was Photoshopped.”
Trump: “That was Photoshopped? Terry, you can’t do that. Hey, they’re giving you the big break of a lifetime, you know? You’re doing the interview. I picked you because, frankly, I never heard of you. … But you’re not being very nice.”
Experts have raised doubts that Abrego Garcia’s tattoos definitely prove gang membership.
The Trump administration admitted it made an “administrative error” in March, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained and deported Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father with legal protection from deportation, to El Salvador.
