CRIME/IMMIGRATION/JEFF SESSIONS/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “Early in his term, Attorney General Jeff Sessions instructed his top investigative deputies to target the transnational gang MS-13 as a priority. A year later, drug task forces have new powers to fight MS-13, more federal prosecutors are pursuing charges against the street gang with ties to El Salvador and foreign allies have been enlisted to capture its members.
Few dispute the violent menace that MS-13 is to pockets of communities across the United States. Its members yield machetes, kill with abandon and terrorize — for the most part — immigrant communities. But law enforcement officials at local, state and federal levels describe the Trump administration’s hard-charging campaign against MS-13 as out of proportion with the threat.
President Trump has seized on the gang’s brutality and violence to symbolize the risks of illegal immigration. Not all members of MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, are illegal immigrants. Nor does the gang survive on the global trafficking of drugs, guns or people.
Police and prosecutors in areas where MS-13 is most active said the heightened focus on the gang has come at the expense of fighting more widespread threats to the United States, particularly opioids and human trafficking… The Trump administration is not the first to target MS-13.”
-Ron Nixon, Liz Robbins, and Katie Benner, “Trump Targets MS-13, a Violent Menace, if Not the One He Portrays,” The New York Times online, Mar. 1, 2018