What lies behind MS-13, the gang that Trump loves to hate (2024)

They are “true animals” who are “killing and raping everybody out there”, according to President Trump, who has made the MS-13 criminal network a regular part of his appeal to build a border wall with Mexico.

In a briefing note issued last month for journalists entitled: What You Need To Know About The Animals of MS-13, the Trump administration listed explicit case details of its barbarities, including decapitations and the ripping out of victims’ hearts.

“Transnational criminal organisations like MS-13 represent one of the gravest threats to American safety”, Jeff Sessions, the attorney-general, said.

The group is unquestionably brutal, but it’s neither new nor growing. There are other more dangerous and far bigger gangs operating in the United States. So why MS-13?

The best explanation is that MS-13 provides a vivid — albeit factually tenuous — link between immigration and crime. Almost all of its members are Latino and most have Central American connections.

The gang, Mr Trump claims, is in the business of trafficking criminals to the US. It provides a neat, ready-made reason to tighten border security.

The truth is MS-13 was founded in the US in the 1980s. Its full name is Mara Salvatrucha — roughly translating as the “guerilla gang”. The “13”, also used by the Mexican mafia, probably refers to the 13th letter in the alphabet, “M”.

The gang’s first members were Salvadorian migrants in Los Angeles, newcomers that decided to protect themselves by setting up a rival group to the already established black and Mexican street gangs.

In the 1990s, after the Central American wars ended, tens of thousands of Salvadorians were deported back home.

There, the gang thrived. Many of its leaders had by then spent time in Californian prisons, where they where schooled in the structure of criminal networks. In El Salvador, as well as Honduras and Guatemala, they put that knowledge to use, setting up lucrative extortion rackets.

The gang, which is particularly well established in urban El Salvador, has now become a significant incentive for emigration. Families that are unable to pay extortion money, or refuse to do so, are forced to leave their homes on threat of murder. Several people interviewed by The Times in a refugee centre at Mexico’s border with the US said they had left to escape MS-13.

Hannah Dreier, of the investigative journalism outlet Propublica, has been reporting on the organisation for the past year. She has reached out to gang members, spent hours combing through text messages of their associates, spoken to FBI detectives investigating the crimes of the group, and listened to hours of evidence from victims.

Her conclusion is that while many of the Trump administration’s claims about the bloodthirsty nature of the gang are true, most of its wider assertions that it is a serious threat to the security of Americans, beyond the specific communities where it operates, bears little resemblance to what she has seen on the ground.

“The group specialises in spectacular violence,” she said. “The murders are almost all staged to look like spectacular acts of terrorism.”

Machetes are a weapon of choice; bodies are often mutilated.

What she disputes is the claim that MS-13 is an organised criminal network with any serious intent to disrupt the security of the US border.

“These are mostly teenagers,” she said of the affiliated gang members in the US.

Many of their crimes begin as school arguments. On Long Island in New York State, one area where the gang is prevalent, its focus has been on controlling the corridors of a single high school. The gangs often meet at night, Ms Dreier said, simply because during the day its members are busy doing menial jobs, or studying.

Another claim made by the Trump administration, which has been used in part to justify its now reversed policy of separating children from their parents at the border, is that MS-13 was operating a sophisticated smuggling network, with gang members claiming to be parents of children.

The government’s figures show there were 191 cases of individuals using minors to pose as families at the US border during 12 months to February this year, only 1 per cent of those stopped and not a single case involved MS-13.

There have been hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors crossing the border since 2012, but just 56 were suspected of MS-13 links.

Mr Trump portrays MS-13 as an organisation that is doggedly setting up across the US.

“The weak illegal immigration policies of the Obama Admin allowed bad MS 13 gangs to form in cities across US,” he tweeted in April 2013, while boasting that he was removing them “fast”.

The Justice Department estimates there are 10,000 MS-13 members in the US, a number unchanged over the past decade.

There is certainly nothing new about alarmist reporting of the gang, whose members — with their distinctive, satanic face-tattoos — are perfect magazine cover material.

In 2005, National Geographic released a documentary describing MS-13 as “The World’s Most Dangerous Gang”, warning that it threatened to “infest” the US (a word Mr Trump has also used). The same year Time Magazine ran a story, describing the group as “the most dangerous gang in America”.

MS-13 remains one of the smaller gangs in the US, but is, in Ms Dreier’s assessment, “stubbornly persistent, but a boutique criminal organisation, accounting for a tiny portion of 1.4 million gang members nationwide”.

Other organisations, including the Crips, the Bloods and the Latin Kings all boast far larger memberships. ‘Gangster Disciples’, a murderous Chicago-based gang, is believed to have 50,000 members.

None of that is any consolation for those who are being preyed upon by MS-13, both in Central America and in communities in the US. But who are these victims? Almost all are impoverished Latinos, the very same group that is also being targeted by the president’s immigration policies, with the victims and the perpetrators being conflated for political ends.

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