Federal authorities in the United States announced terrorism charges Wednesday against an MS-13 leader, continuing a national crackdown on a notorious street gang that President Donald Trump described as “vile and evil.”
An open indictment in Virginia against Melgar Díaz marked the first time that the Justice Department filed terrorism charges against an MS-13 member. Attorney General William Barr described Diaz as “the person who would approve of the murders” for the gang in the United States.
Prosecutors also said they would seek the death penalty against Alexi Saenz, another MS-13 leader in Long Island, New York, accused of seven murders, including those of two high school students killed with a machete and a baseball bat. A lawyer for Sáenz declined to comment.
“We believe that monsters that murder children should be executed,” Trump told reporters at the White House, adding that his administration would not rest before bringing all gang members to justice. “There has never been a movement like this before.”
The announcement came a day after grand juries in New York City and Nevada filed new charges against nearly two dozen MS-13 members, ranging from drug trafficking and kidnapping to murder and crime. organized.
President @realDonaldTrump: “We have just completed a landmark operation that led to the arrest and prosecution of dozens of savage MS-13 members and leaders across the country.” pic.twitter.com/vnVfiAjYra
– The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 15, 2020
Barr said the prosecutions are part of the government’s efforts to dismantle a gang that he compared to a “cult of death.”
Also known as Mara Salvatrucha, MS-13 is considered one of the leading threats from transnational organized crime in the United States.
The organization is unique, Barr said, in that it is not driven by “business interests” but by pure bloodlust.
“It’s about the honor of being the wildest, bloodthirsty person you can be and building a reputation as a murderer,” Barr said.
MS-13 is believed to have been founded as a neighborhood street gang in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s by immigrants fleeing a civil war in El Salvador. The gang recruits young teens from El Salvador and Honduras, although many gang members were born in the United States.
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“The only way to defeat MS-13 is by attacking the organization as a whole, focusing on the leadership structure and deploying a government-wide approach against a common enemy,” said John Durham, a federal prosecutor in New York. who leads a special task force targeting the gang.
Trump, who visited Long Island in 2017 to address the gang problem, has attributed the violence and growth of the gangs to lax immigration policies.
The president said Wednesday that the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) has arrested more than 2,000 MS-13 members in recent years.
“We have eliminated them by the thousands,” he said.
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