WASHINGTON – Federal prosecutors charged 127 suspected members of the violent MS-13 street gang this year, and six face sentences after being convicted in 2020, the Justice Department said Wednesday.
Statistics, detailed in a report published through the Justice Department Wednesday night, highlight the Trump administration’s focus on prosecuting MS-13 members and competitive efforts through the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to verify gang dismantling. also known as Mara Salvatrucha, it is one of the greatest threats of transnational organized crime in the United States.
Justice Department statistics show that federal prosecutors have filed a complaint against 749 defendants in MS-13 cases since 2016. Six defendants convicted this year were sentenced to life imprisonment and another 26 were sentenced to more than five years in federal settlement
Attorney General William Barr also ordered prosecutors to seek the death penalty in two MS-13 cases, adding the opposite case to Alexei Saenz, an MS-13 leader on Long Island. Saenz has been charged with seven murders in New York, adding those of teenage friends Nisa Mickens and Kayla Cuevas, who were beaten and beaten with baseball bats near an elementary school in September 2016. The gang has been charged with dozens of murders on Long Island since 2016.
Statistics show that federal agents MS-13 were active in some two dozen U. S. states, most commonly on the East Coast. The gang, sometimes known for extortion and violence rather than distributing and promoting drugs, has long established cliques in California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia.
President Donald Trump has continually focused his immigration program on the MS-13 violence component, blaming it for lax immigration policies. The MS-13 recruits young teenagers from El Salvador and Honduras, many gang members were born in the United States. Long Island has a giant population of unaccompanied minors from Central America, many of whom have fled violence in their home countries.
The MS-13 was reportedly founded as a community street gang in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s through immigrants fleeing a civil war in El Salvador. Its members.
The Justice Department’s 17-page report notes how “MS-13 leaders in Central America led MS-13 criminal activities in the United States. “
<< These leaders, many of whom had already been expelled from the United States, acted with impunity because of the failure of the rule of law and the corruption of law enforcement in those countries; Lack of education about law enforcement and lack of coordination between U. S. law enforcement agencies and their Central American counterparts," the report says.
Federal and local law enforcement officials have been working with partners in El Salvador to identify suspected MS-13 leaders for years and perform a percentage of intelligence. Barr visited the country in May 2019 to meet with counterparts from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to discuss how to deal with the MS-13 outbreak of violence originating in the region known as the Northern Triangle.