<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/08/01/he-was-asked-about-his-tattoos-and-a-tiktok-video-in-court-five-days-later-he-was-in-a-salvadoran-prison/>
"In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks
observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were
changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan
asylum-seeker caught my attention.
Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond
hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas,
and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter.
More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the
Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He
found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went
to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal
authorities detained him at his apartment on Chicago’s South Side and accused
him of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
“Are any of your tattoos gang related?” his attorney asked at the hearing,
going through the evidence laid out against him in an Immigration and Customs
Enforcement report. “No,” said Rodríguez, whose tattoos include an angel
holding a gun, a wolf and a rose. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show his
parents’ names inked across his chest.
He was asked about a TikTok video that shows him dancing to an audio clip of
someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de
Aragua is going to get you,” followed by a dance beat. That audio clip has been
shared some 60,000 times on TikTok — it’s popular among Venezuelans ridiculing
the stereotype that everyone from their country is a gangster. Rodríguez looked
incredulous at the thought that
this was the evidence against him."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
