The first time Youmbi Roberto Nfor heard of MS-13, it was from Donald Trump.
A native of the remote Grassfields region of Cameroon, Nfor spent the majority of his life more than 8,000 miles from Los Angeles, the birthplace of Trump’s favorite bogeyman, La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, the notoriously violent street gang whose international presence is largely confined to the Northern Triangle countries of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) as well as Canada and a few cities in the United States.
However, none of that seemed to matter last year when, in a bid to prevent Nfor from obtaining asylum in the United States, attorneys with U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement accused him of being an MS-13 member. Their evidence was that Nfor, who’d been a tattoo artist in Cameroon, has several tattoos on his legs and chest.
An expert on gang symbology says his tattoos have nothing to do with MS-13.
speeches and tweets in which he has described the violent gang’s members as “animals” and an “infestation” in American communities.
It also shows how the immigration court system, with loose evidentiary standards, limited access to legal representation and overall lack of transparency, can be used by officials to keep out immigrants by arbitrarily designating them as a “gang member” or “gang associate.”
In 2016, Nfor, then 22, was forced to flee his home in West Africa under threats of death after he was caught having sex with a man. Not only is homosexuality a crime in Cameroon, punishable by up to five years in prison, but LGBT citizens are often subject to vigilante violence, including murder. With the help of a friend, Nfor was able to get a plane ticket from Nigeria to Ecuador, where he embarked on a grueling and dangerous journey to the United States, where he planned to request asylum.
After traveling by land for about a month and a half, Nfor said he finally reached the border between Tijuana and San Diego only to be turned away at the Otay Mesa port of entry. He ultimately entered the United States through the San Ysidro port of entry in early June 2016 and landed in immigration detention — for the next two years.
As of 2016, the year Nfor began his asylum process, the national average grant rate for parole requests from immigration detention was 5.6 percent. At the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga., where Nfor spent the majority of his time in custody, the average grant rate for parole requests was zero.
Despite passing his credible fear interview, Nfor’s requests for release — which he drafted himself because, like the majority of people in immigration detention, he had no lawyer — were repeatedly denied.
During the course of Nfor’s detention at Stewart, one of the country’s largest privately run immigrant prisons, Donald Trump was nominated for president, won the 2016 election and took office.
Nfor recalls watching constant coverage of Trump’s campaign on CNN and describes how he and the other detainees “were scared that we are all going to be deported.”
It was during one of Trump’s televised speeches that Nfor says he first became aware of MS-13’s existence. Still, his knowledge of the gang never extended much beyond the fact that most of its members spoke Spanish, a language he barely understood.
In July 2018, more than two years after he first entered the U.S. in search of asylum, freedom finally felt imminent. An immigration judge granted his request for asylum, but instead of being released, Nfor was taken back to the Stewart detention facility in Lumpkin.
That day, Nfor recalls, two unusual things occurred. First, an officer at the detention center took pictures of his tattoos.
“That was the first time they ever did that,” Nfor told Yahoo News, noting that while he believes the officers who first detained him in California were aware that he had tattoos, no one had asked to photograph them before. Even as pictures were being taken, the interest in his tattoos was not clear. “They didn’t really ask what they meant,” he said.
At Stewart, like other large, privately owned prisons that contract with U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement, detainees are required to wear jumpsuits whose color signifies their status: red for those with a criminal record, blue for those whose only infraction was immigration-related.
For the duration of his asylum proceedings, Nfor had been in the second category. But when he was sent back to Stewart he was handed a red jumpsuit and directed to the section of the facility reserved for high-security detainees. Convinced this must be some kind of mistake, Nfor sought answers from a friendly guard who showed him a form and asked, “Are you … MS-13?”
Nfor was stunned. “In a way, it was funny,” he said. But his next thought was, “Are these people really trying to get rid of me? Do they hate me personally?”
For the entire time he’d been in the U.S., he’d been in custody, and every request for release on parole or bond had been denied or ignored. With this gang allegation, Nfor wondered if the U.S. officials were simply trying to make him so frustrated that he would give up and accept deportation. He’d seen it happen to others at Stewart, worn down by the miserable conditions compounded by seemingly insurmountable hurdles to asylum or other forms of relief. “Just, like, two to three weeks before I left the detention, a guy killed himself because he was facing deportation,” Nfor recalled.
Nfor said the guard who informed him of his alleged gang membership asked to see his tattoos, but when Nfor removed his clothes, the guard told him “there’s nothing that symbolizes MS-13.” Nevertheless, he was told he had to put on the red jumpsuit.
“How can I do that? I am not a gang member,” he protested. But the guard told him that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had the power to make that decision. “ICE is the one that has classified me like that.”
