The Trump administration is doubling down on depicting Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a dangerous gang member. The government’s proof for this claim appears to hinge on a Chicago Bulls cap and a hoodie.
While Trump continues to flout court orders to facilitate the Maryland father’s release from a notorious El Salvador prison, it is pointing to flimsy evidence of alleged MS-13 ties — adding to a long-running pattern of dubious gang designations by law enforcement and immigration agents.
Last month, immigration enforcement officials rounded up hundreds of migrants under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, accusing them of being members of gangs the administration deemed terrorist organizations. Abrego Garcia, 29, a Salvadoran national, was among the men sent to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, prison. The government admitted in court filings that he was sent there due to an “administrative error,” in violation of a court order blocking his deportation due to threats to his safety in El Salvador.
While many of the other detained men appear to be labeled as gang members mainly because of their tattoos, law enforcement officials seem to have singled Abrego Garcia out for his attire, additional documents released Wednesday by Attorney General Pam Bondi show.
“Wearing the Chicago Bulls hat represents that they are a member in good standing with MS-13.”
The documents released detail a Prince George’s County Police Department encounter with Abrego Garcia in 2019. “Officers observed he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears, and mouth of the presidents,” they wrote. “Officers know such clothing to be indicative of the Hispanic gang culture.”
The gang field interview sheet from the Prince George’s County Police Department notes that “wearing the Chicago Bulls hat represents that they are a member in good standing with MS-13.”
Officers also stated they reached out to a confidential informant who claimed that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13. In court, it was revealed that the source claimed Abrego Garcia was a member of the gang in New York — a place where he never lived. Abrego Garcia has never been charged with a crime, and his family maintains that he was never a member of any gang.
Ana Muñiz, a professor of criminology, law, and society at UC Irvine, said it’s not at all surprising that police and immigration officials put so much emphasis on his hat as a way to prove his gang ties.
“A gang designation is something that police really use to maintain contact, mainly with men of color in low-income urban neighborhoods, when they can’t find enough to actually charge them with a crime,” said Muñiz, the author of “Borderland Circuitry: Immigration Surveillance in the United States and Beyond.” You have people with gang designations, people on gang databases who are designated on things like clothing [from] very popular sports brands.”
Muñiz explained that law enforcement agencies generally use a 9 or 10-point system to determine gang affiliation based on factors as mundane and subjective as wearing sports apparel or “frequenting a gang area.” To be placed on a gang database, suspects often only need to meet two of the categories, she said.
In an ethnography Muñiz conducted on gang designation in Los Angeles, she found that the Los Angeles Police Department “considered Dodgers gear to be indicative of gang membership, in certain contexts,” Muñiz said. “If you’ve ever been to LA, everyone is wearing Dodgers gear.”
Though the Chicago Bulls aren’t local to Maryland, where Abrego Garcia lived, Bulls apparel has reportedly been the best-selling pro basketball apparel in the state.
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Gang designations can become sweep up wide swaths of the population; at one point, roughly half of all Black men in Los Angeles between the ages of 21 to 24 years old were listed on a gang database, according to a report published in the Asian Pacific American Law Journal.
For people like Abrego Garcia, being listed as having a gang affiliation — no matter how thin the justification — can have serious immigration consequences. Yet in some cases, people might not even be aware that they’re on a gang database. “It’s really common for police when they can’t charge someone with a crime or find something to get them on to slap this very easy designation on them,” Muñiz said, “and then eventually, it will make its way up to ICE, and ICE will use that in court to argue for things like expedited deportation or compulsory detention.”
Abrego Garcia is far from the first case of Chicago Bulls attire being weaponized in the immigration process. An investigation by The Intercept during the first Trump administration revealed that students at a Long Island high school were reported to ICE for among other things wearing Chicago Bulls jersey and posting the Salvadoran flag on Facebook.
Many of the men shipped to the CECOT prison with Abrego Garcia appear to be detained under similarly flimsy gang affiliation claims. Federal law enforcement officials reportedly rated them on a 10-point scale, with a score of 8 or more designating them a member of Tren de Aragua, and thus immediately deportable since President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act to alleged members of the gang. Certain tattoos were 4 points. Another 4 points could be added for “notations, drawing, or dress known to indicate were allegiance to TDA.”
On Thursday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., met with Abrego Garcia after traveling to El Salvador to check on his constituent’s welfare and “discuss” his release.
“My main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance,” Van Hollen wrote on X. “I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return,”
Muñiz said she predicted that the Trump administration would use gang affiliation as a tool to fuel the president’s mass deportation strategy and system of racialized state terror. “You don’t need probable cause. You don’t need to prove this in court,” she said. “It’s a label you can apply very easily, without criminal charges, without really any proof. And then, once that person is labeled, you can justify doing a lot of things with them, like detaining them, like deporting them.”
