President Trump said Wednesday that dozens of MS-13 gang leaders were caught across the country in the recent crackdown on Justice Department Operation Vulcan, with eight arrests in New York.
Attorney General William Barr told reporters in the Oval Office that the Justice Department will also seek the death penalty in an earlier case involving MS-13 leader Alexi Sáenz.
He and his co-defendants are charged with multiple murders on Long Island, including the infamous murder of best friends Nisa Mickens and Kayla Cuevas in Brentwood in 2016.
“We will not allow these animals to terrorize our communities, and my administration will not rest until every MS-13 member is brought to justice,” Trump said.
Operation Vulcan identified 15 MS-13 suspects in Las Vegas, and the Justice Department filed terrorism charges in federal court in Virginia against alleged MS-13 chief Nell García Díaz.
The Salvadoran group is “a band of vile and evil people,” said the president. “We have just completed a landmark operation that led to the arrest and prosecution of dozens of wild MS-13 members and leaders across the country.”
Barr and Trump were joined in the Oval Office by Assistant United States Attorney John Durham Jr. of New York, who is leading efforts against MS-13.
The 24-count indictment unsealed Tuesday in Central Islip federal court charges the eight gang members, who were caught in different states, with six murders, two attempted murders, and kidnappings and drug conspiracies.
“The victims were hacked with machetes, one shot multiple times, and another decapitated,” said the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Seth DuCharme.
The defendants in the New York indictment – Carlos Alfaro, José Moisés Blanco, Oseas González, José Guevara-Castro, Víctor López-Morales, Ever Morales-López, Sosa-Guevara and Kevin Torres – left a series of mutilated bodies in Shallow graves across Long Island, authorities said.
Torres, 24, who goes by the nickname Quieto, allegedly ordered the murder with a machete of Javier Castillo, 15, in October 2016 for his alleged membership in a rival gang.
He is also accused of orchestrating the murder of 19-year-old Oscar Acosta, an alleged member of a rival gang, in April 2016. Members of the MS-13 lured the teenager to a wooded area near a primary school in Brentwood, beat him until they knocked him unconscious with tree branches and tied his hands and feet, according to the Justice Department.
The group allegedly transferred him to a secluded area near an abandoned psychiatric hospital, beat him to death with a machete, and threw him into a shallow grave.
Saenz, who is known by the nicknames “Blasty” and “Plaky”, was charged in a previous indictment for his role in Acosta’s brutal murder.
The feds announced Wednesday that they would seek the death penalty for Saenz, accused of seven murders, including the tragic murder of two teenagers in 2016.
Mickens, 15, and Cuevas, 16, were flogged with a baseball bat and beaten to death with machetes in a dispute that erupted on social media. The girls were on their way home from school.
Trump has twice visited Long Island to address MS-13 gang violence and has met privately with the families of Mickens and Cuevas.
The president called Saenz a “bloody MS-13 leader” responsible for the despicable murder of seven Americans, including two teenagers.
“We believe that the monsters that killed children should be executed,” Trump said. “It looks like we have a good deal on that.”
The attorney general added that Saenz was involved in the “murder of two African-Americans whom they felt had just been seen on the street and thought they were from a rival gang and had just been killed.”
Barr said Long Island “is one of the MS-13’s pockets of activity, or at least it was.”
The announcement came a day after the United States government carried out the first federal execution since 2003. Daniel Lewis Lee, who was convicted of killing a family of three, died Tuesday of lethal injection in Terre Haute , Indiana.
If Saenz is convicted and sentenced to death, it would mark the first federal execution for murder in New York since 1954, Newsday reported.
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