A British man fears his family holiday to Miami could become a ‘six-month all-inclusive holiday to Guantanamo’ after his tattoo appeared in a US government document to identify members of an infamous Venezuelan gang.
Pete Belton, 44, from Ilkeston, Derbyshire, was surprised to find an image of his forearm featured in a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) document used to spot alleged members of international crime organisation Tren de Aragua (TdA).
His concerns that his upcoming trip to America with his wife and daughter in August might become a ‘holiday’ to the US military prison located in Cuba comes amid President Donald Trump‘s clampdown on gangs , which has seen his administration haul hundreds alleged criminals to a high-security jail in El Salvador.
The Brit’s tattoo – a clock face with the date and time of his daughter’s birth – was included in a set of nine pictures for ‘detecting and identifying’ TdA members.
The DHS document says that open source material ‘has depicted TdA members with a combination of the below tattoos’, which includes engravings of crowns, trains and stars.
Reverse image searches carried out by BBC Verify have suggested that images of the tats first appeared on tattoo websites with no obvious links to the Venezuelan gang.
Meanwhile, the image of Mr Belton’s tattoo was traced back to an Instagram post by a Nottingham-based tattoo artist.
But Mr Belton is worried about being linked to the gang, telling the BBC: ‘In my head I’m thinking if I’m working in border force and I saw me walking through I’d think “hey up we’ve got one, he’s the one in the document”.
Brit Pete Belton says his tattoo has been wrongly linked to a Venezuelan gang by a US document
Belton’s tattoo was included in a set of nine images es for ‘detecting and identifying’ TdA members
The father-of-one has even considered cancelling his family trip to the US, but has said he will monitor how the situation develops.
‘Hopefully now they’d realise I’m not a Venezuelan gangster,’ he said, ‘but I’ve seen crazier things happen in the news recently, so we’re just going to wait and see.’
Trump announced that Guantanamo will be a holding centre for 30,000 immigrants – the ‘worst criminal aliens’ and people who are ‘hard to deport’.
The president ‘is not messing around and he’s no longer going to allow America to be a dumping ground for illegal criminals from nations all over this world’, said his press secretary.
Some will be bound for a small detention centre at the base, which is currently used to house migrants picked up from the Caribbean Sea heading for the US, while many more will be housed in tents that hundreds of soldiers and marines are already erecting.
While tattoos are being used to identify men as alleged members of the TdA, US experts have said that body art is not a reliable marker of affiliation to the criminal organisation.
Trump has called on wartime authorities to expel migrants and signed an order invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport alleged criminals, which has already sent hundreds of men to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Centre.
Lawyers and family members of some of the migrants have said their tattoos were reasons they were labelled as alleged TdA members.
While tattoos are being used to identify men as alleged members of the TdA, US experts have said that body art is not a reliable marker of affiliation to the criminal organisation
Earlier this year, President Donald Trump unveiled plans to ouse 30,000 illegal migrants at Guantanamo Bay
Rebecca Hanson, an assistant professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Florida, wrote in a court filing for a case involving a Venezuelan migrant believed to have been sent to El Salvador, said there are no tattoos, symbols or hand gestures associated with the group.
‘The TdA, and gangs more generally in Venezuela, do not have a history of using tattoos to indicate membership,’ she said.
‘TdA members may, of course, have tattoos, but this is not part of a collective identity.’
TdA is a Venezuelan criminal organisation that spread out of the South American nation when it entered a humanitarian and economic crisis in 2014.
The group operates by forming alliances and partnerships with local criminal organisations.
It is estimated to have around 5,000 members and annual profits of between $10 million and $15 million.
