Brian Kilmeade Suggests Venezuelan Soccer Player Was ‘Up to No Good’ Before He Was Deported: ‘It Wasn’t a Tattoo Arrest’
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade explained Monday why he believed the recent deportation of a Venezuelan soccer player was justified.
Last week, the attorney representing a man named Jerce Reyes Barrios claimed he was unjustly sent to El Salvador’s maximum security prison CECOT. Barrios, the attorney said, was a professional soccer player with no gang affiliations and no criminal history. Barrios fled his home country after being detained and tortured for protesting the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Barrios entered the U.S. and applied for asylum in September 2024. He was scheduled to appear in court on April 17 to determine the status of that application.
In the statement, Barrios’s attorney said he arrested due to his tattoos. While the Department of Homeland Security claimed the tattoos matched those commonly seen on members of the gang Tren de Aragua, the attorney insisted that the tattoo in question was simply a reference to the logo of Spanish soccer club Real Madrid — his favorite team. In the U.S., Barrios was working as a children’s soccer coach.
On Monday’s episode of Fox & Friends, Kilmeade suggested that Barrios was not as innocent as reports made him out to be.
“But now you’re concerned that this was a tattoo arrest,” Kilmeade said during a segment about the administration’s mass deportation. “It wasn’t a tattoo arrest; and as much as it pains me to say it, just because you’re a professional soccer player, it doesn’t mean that you’re a great person and weren’t up to no good when you escaped and got across our border. If you were that good, you could have been transferred to another team.”
Not long after the attorney’s statement was widely reported, a spokesperson for DHS said in a New York Post report that the arrest was “beyond a single tattoo.” The spokesperson also said DHS was “confident” that Barrios was a gang member.
Watch above via Fox News
