AFP, New York :
For a president obsessed with deporting “bad hombres” from the United States, the Latino street gang known as MS-13 is the perfect target.
Known for its horrific murders, in which victims are set upon with machetes and baseball bats, it has a reach that now extends from its base in Central America into 40 US states as well as Mexico, Canada and Spain.
“MS-13 is a very well-known criminal brand,” says Samuel Logan, author of a book on the gang. “It’s a brand that creates fear and they use fear as a weapon.”
And Donald Trump, whose administration has declared MS-13 a national security threat, has seized on that fearsome brand to justify stepped up deportations of undocumented immigrants, a border wall and pressure on so-called “sanctuary cities” to stop protecting vulnerable migrants.
MS-13 has “literally taken over towns and cities of the United States,” Trump said last week, arguing that the border wall is needed to keep gang members out.
“MS-13 is going to be gone from our streets very soon, believe me,” he said on another recent occasion.
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency this month announced the arrests of nearly 1,100 gang members or associates. But two-thirds of those arrested were US citizens, not immigrants, and only 104 were members of MS-13.
Last week, Los Angeles police arrested 21 members of MS-13 — a dozen of whom were gang leaders-and charged 44 people in the city’s biggest ever operation against the group.
Hector Silva, a Salvadoran with Insight Crime, a research group that focuses on organized crime in Latin America, says the gang is the perfect foil for Trump’s policies.
MS-13, he says, kills two birds with one stone for Trump: “In the minds of Americans, gangs are Latin American, hence they are both bad and foreign,” Silva says.
But experts and law enforcement officials warn that the strategy could make combating MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha as the gang is also known, more difficult.
Police say undocumented Hispanics are the victims in nearly all MS-13 crimes, and Trump’s anti-immigration policies keep them from coming forward with information about the violence, for fear of being deported.
New York’s Suffolk County was the scene of a brutal murder in April of four young men, whose mutilated bodies were found dumped in a wooded area in the town of Central Islip.
One was 16 years old, two were 18 and the fourth was 20 — and the extreme violence with which they were killed pointed to MS-13.
But the county’s police commissioner, Timothy Sini, told a US Senate hearing this week that cracking down on illegal immigrants is not helping police investigators.
For a president obsessed with deporting “bad hombres” from the United States, the Latino street gang known as MS-13 is the perfect target.
Known for its horrific murders, in which victims are set upon with machetes and baseball bats, it has a reach that now extends from its base in Central America into 40 US states as well as Mexico, Canada and Spain.
“MS-13 is a very well-known criminal brand,” says Samuel Logan, author of a book on the gang. “It’s a brand that creates fear and they use fear as a weapon.”
And Donald Trump, whose administration has declared MS-13 a national security threat, has seized on that fearsome brand to justify stepped up deportations of undocumented immigrants, a border wall and pressure on so-called “sanctuary cities” to stop protecting vulnerable migrants.
MS-13 has “literally taken over towns and cities of the United States,” Trump said last week, arguing that the border wall is needed to keep gang members out.
“MS-13 is going to be gone from our streets very soon, believe me,” he said on another recent occasion.
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency this month announced the arrests of nearly 1,100 gang members or associates. But two-thirds of those arrested were US citizens, not immigrants, and only 104 were members of MS-13.
Last week, Los Angeles police arrested 21 members of MS-13 — a dozen of whom were gang leaders-and charged 44 people in the city’s biggest ever operation against the group.
Hector Silva, a Salvadoran with Insight Crime, a research group that focuses on organized crime in Latin America, says the gang is the perfect foil for Trump’s policies.
MS-13, he says, kills two birds with one stone for Trump: “In the minds of Americans, gangs are Latin American, hence they are both bad and foreign,” Silva says.
But experts and law enforcement officials warn that the strategy could make combating MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha as the gang is also known, more difficult.
Police say undocumented Hispanics are the victims in nearly all MS-13 crimes, and Trump’s anti-immigration policies keep them from coming forward with information about the violence, for fear of being deported.
New York’s Suffolk County was the scene of a brutal murder in April of four young men, whose mutilated bodies were found dumped in a wooded area in the town of Central Islip.
One was 16 years old, two were 18 and the fourth was 20 — and the extreme violence with which they were killed pointed to MS-13.
But the county’s police commissioner, Timothy Sini, told a US Senate hearing this week that cracking down on illegal immigrants is not helping police investigators.
