Washington DC - Interviews conducted with some of the relatives of Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador last weekend revealed that many were targeted for innocuous tattoos.

Some of those targeted by ICE in last weekend's brutal deportations (which had been barred by a US judge) were arrested on the basis of tattoos thought to be attributed to membership of the Tren de Aragua gang.

It turns out, however, that many of these tattoos were utterly innocuous, including religious tributes, references to family, and even football teams.

"He’s just a normal kid … he likes tattoos – that’s it," Martin Rosenow, a Florida-based attorney representing Venezuelan asylum seeker Franco José Caraballo Tiapa, told The Guardian.

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Caraballo is thought to have been arrested and deported based on tattoos that US authorities attributed to the gang. Instead, a razor blade on his neck simply represented his work as a barber, and two other tattoos were tributes to his eldest daughter.

The Department of Homeland Security issued a document in February claiming that Caraballo had been identified as a member of the gang. They made no justification for the finding, but did reference his tattoos.

To make matters worse, Rosenow claimed, there are no known tattoos associated with Tren de Aragua, unlike other similar gangs.

"Tren de Agua has no tattoos," Rosenow said. "If you see pictures, they’re shirtless and many of them don’t even have tattoos."

He continued, saying, "I’m nauseated by it all. I’m distressed for these individuals. I’m sad for what this means. As an American, for me, it’s disgraceful that we would violate human rights so flagrantly on an international level."

The Guardian identified and spoke with the families of about six other Venezuelans who had been wrongfully accused of being gang members before they were deported last week. They are all suspected to have been targeted due to their tattoos.

Their names: Franco José Caraballo Tiapa, Daniel Alberto Lozano Camargo, Neri José Alvarado Borges, Luis Carlos José Marcano Silva, Jerce Reyes Barrios, Francisco Javier García Casique, and Anyelo Sarabia González.