Daisy Rodriguez has seen her husband, Santos, just once in the last two years. She flew down to his homeland, Guatemala, where they spent a few days hiking around the country’s spectacular lakes and volcanoes. It was beautiful, she said. But her memory of the trip is colored by the pain of their separation.
“When we were out there, it just didn’t feel right,” she said. “We wanted to feel happy, but not like that.”
She needed only to look at his arm to be reminded of how their lives had been torn apart. There, Santos has a tattoo, a large B then below an A. It was an unfinished piece referencing his childhood nickname, Bau, Santos says.
But in his US visa process, the consular officer rejected Santos’ application because he decided it meant something else: Barrio Azteca, the Mexican-American prison gang and former armed wing of the Juarez Cartel.
Since the start of the year, cases of Latin American immigrants like Santos judged to be gang members for little more than tattoos have made news thanks to the mass deportation campaigns of US President Donald Trump.
But as Daisy’s case shows, fears over the links between organized crime and immigration began to tip the balance between due process and security long before.
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Sat in the Mexican restaurant she runs in the tiny town of Sweetwater in the state of Tennessee, Daisy described how she and Santos have launched one last attempt to recover the future she once felt was all laid out: a lawsuit against the State Department and the US Consulate in Guatemala calling on the court to force them to reconsider the decision to reject Santos’ application, which, it says, was based on a bad faith assessment that the defendants refused to overturn despite substantial evidence showing as much.
“It’s been two and a half years and I didn’t think it would come to this,” she said. “I really thought they were going to say ‘we made a mistake over tattoos.’ But here I am.”
Living Under a Shadow
Santos had just turned 18 when in 2006 he fled poverty and lack of opportunity in rural Guatemala, and the familial instability of his own life. “He just wanted better for himself,” Daisy said.
He didn’t like to talk about his experience crossing the border illegally. And Daisy didn’t like to ask.
“I think it hits something in him that he doesn’t like,” she said. “And part of me would like to block it, it’s hard to hear.”
Daisy, who was born in California, moved to rural Tennessee from Illinois as a teenager. She met Santos around 2011, while she was waitressing in a restaurant and he was working in landscaping and construction.
After a few years of dating, they decided to try a move to California, where Daisy studied business administration while Santos worked in restaurant kitchens and took English classes. But they moved back to Tennessee in 2015, when Daisy’s parents offered to help her open their own restaurant.
It was only after they got married in 2017 that Daisy began to worry about Santos’ immigration status and encourage him to apply for his permanent residency – or green card, as it’s known in the United States.
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“I started to think I don’t want him to be here undocumented, I don’t want him to live in fear. I wanted us to grow together and to have a future, I wanted to feel safe,” she said. “But it turned out to be the worst thing that we could have done.”
The immigration authorities approved Santos’ application and gave him permission to leave the United States and head back to Guatemala to complete the final step – a consular interview.
In his first interview, he was told he had a document missing and was sent away with instructions to find it and make another appointment.
On his second interview, the official questioned him about his tattoos, then told him to come back for a third interview. And that’s when their lives began to unravel.
According to Santos’ affidavit in his legal filings, the officer aggressively interrogated him, telling him he knew that he was a criminal and he should confess to make everything go easier on him. His evidence was Santos’ BA tattoo – and the time he and Daisy had spent in California.
“The officer said he previously worked in California and knew all about the Barrio Azteca gang. I told the officer that I was never part of the gang and I was not a criminal. The officers were really angry and yelling at me,” Santos said in his statement.
His protests made no difference. For the consular officers, Santos was a member of Barrio Azeteca. His application was refused.
From the Barrio?
In their first appeal of the visa rejection, Daisy and Santos held up their own lives as evidence Santos was not a gang member.
This included testimonies on his good character, his position as a restaurant owner in Tennessee, and the origins of his BA tattoo in his childhood nickname. But when that was rejected, they turned their attention to Barrio Azteca.
Barrio Azteca first emerged in the prisons of El Paso, Texas in the 1980s before being exported across the border when Mexican prisoners were deported after serving their sentences.
In the 2000s, it expanded its influence in the border region by striking alliances with Mexican drug trafficking networks, above all the Juarez Cartel.
US law enforcement agencies have in the past reported the presence of members in states around the country, but the gang’s influence has always remained focused in the border region and its prisons.
Daisy and her legal representatives collected testimonies from three of the foremost Barrio Azteca experts in the United States from law enforcement, journalism, and academia.
Among them was a retired detective from the El Paso Sheriff’s Department who has previously trained consular officials in El Paso and Juárez on identifying Barrio Azteca gang members in immigration processes.
The experts all offered the same perspective: in their years investigating the group, they had never seen members who were not Mexican or Mexican-American – Santos is Guatemalan – and they had never seen members who were not recruited in prison – Santos has no criminal record and has never been in prison.
The experts also commented that Santos’ tattoos were not consistent with tattoos commonly used by Barrio Azteca members.
Their conclusions reflected an intelligence assessment on Barrio Azteca tattoos issued to US law enforcement agencies from shortly after Santos first left Guatemala in 2006.
The assessment states gang members mostly use Azteca imagery, and while they may tattoo the number 21 to represent the position of B and A in the alphabet, the actual letters rarely appear.
All of the experts agreed: they had never seen a Barrio Azteca member that looked anything like Santos. But it made no difference. Their second appeal was rejected. And with that, the time they had to get the decision overturned ran out.
From Rising Suspicions to Suspending Due Process
Santos’ visa was rejected under the terms of a provision that bars entry to people who an officer has “reasonable ground to believe” is seeking entry to the United States to engage in “unlawful activity.”
Of the 1,833 immigrant visas denied under that provision from 2000 to 2024, not a single person was able to overcome the presumption of ineligibility, according to US State Department records.
While the provision has been in place for decades, it was rarely used until the number of cases per year suddenly spiked in the 2010s.
This rise can be traced to the surge in migration from Central America over this period, according to Eric Lee, the president and executive director of the Consular Accountability Project, which is representing Daisy and Santos in their lawsuit against the State Department.
While many of those heading north were fleeing gang violence, fears grew that hidden among them were members of those same gangs, above all MS13, or Mara Salvatrucha, and Barrio 18, he said.
“The consulates developed this blanket assumption that any man from Central America who has tattoos is a gang member,” he said.
Unlike in criminal cases within the country, which are based on a checklist of criteria, that assessment could be based on little more than the officials’ own opinion.
“Every American has a basic understanding that that you can’t be punished unless you did something wrong and that the government is not allowed to make assumptions without giving you notice, an opportunity to respond, and fair adjudication based on whatever evidence you’re able to submit to establish your innocence,” he said. “All of that goes out the window in the consular process.”
While that process was limited to those seeking entry to the United States, Lee sees a direct line between this and what he and other immigration lawyers consulted by InSight Crime say is a suspension of due process amid the mass deportations of alleged gang members currently taking place under US President Trump.
While assessments of gang membership ostensibly continue to be based on criteria rather than opinion, check lists used show how officials can reach those conclusions based on nothing more than tattoos, social media posts, and dress.
And media reporting on the subject has shown how loosely even those rules are being applied in some cases.
“Going back to the [former US President Barack] Obama administration at least, administrations have been pre-judging immigrants based on their tattoos, and now we’re seeing the very high price of that under Trump,” Lee said.
A spokesperson for the US State Department said they do not comment on ongoing litigation. The US Embassy in Guatemala did not respond to a request to comment on Daisy’s case.
Reasons to Believe
For the last two years, Santos has been back in rural Guatemala, stranded in a world Daisy can barely imagine, while she has struggled to continue with life in Tennessee alone.
With their last gasp appeal filed against a backdrop of mass detentions, deportations, and the militarization of the border, all in the name of combatting gangs and organized crime, their hopes of reuniting feel ever fainter.
“A little part of me believes that it will work, that’s the only hope I hang on to. But with everything going on, the majority of Americans wanted that, voted for that, so who’s going to care about my situation? Who’s going to care about me?” she said.
Amid the uncertainty and anxiety, she has also been left with the burden of feeling guilty for causing their separation by encouraging Santos to follow the rules.
“I thought we were doing the right thing,” she said. “I thought the tattoo can’t be more valuable than a criminal record, or your life, your activities, your family members, your business. But it was ‘we have reason to believe,’ and that is enough.’”
