Trump speaks in New York town hit hard by gang violence
NEW YORK » A wave of gang killings in New York’s Long Island suburbs, many involving teenage victims, has caught the attention of President Donald Trump, who traveled Friday to one of the towns hit hardest by the violence.
The Republican president spoke before an audience of law enforcement officers and assailed the MS-13 street gang, which his administration has made a symbol of the need for stricter immigration laws. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled to El Salvador on Thursday to talk about gang violence.
Trump has compared MS13’s “meanness” to that of alQaida and has promised he’d rid the country of it.
Here’s a look at the violence that has gotten the president’s attention:
THE KILLINGS:
Police officials say since Jan. 1, 2016, there
that have been 17 murders by MS-13 members in Suffolk County, many of which have been in just two neighboring suburbs, Brentwood and Central Islip. Some victims were high school students whose remains turned up months after they vanished, hidden in wooded areas or found on the grounds of an old psychiatric hospital.
The deaths began to get attention after best friends Nisa Mickens, 15, and Kayla Cuevas, 16, both students at Brentwood High School, were beaten and hacked to death in September by a carload of gang members who spotted them walking down the street. Investigators said Cuevas had been feuding verbally with gang members.
In April, three teenagers and a 20-year-old man were massacred in a park in Central Islip. Prosecutors said they were lured to the park and then ambushed by at least a dozen MS-13 members wielding machetes and other weapons. One person escaped. Prosecutors said they were marked for death because some were suspected of being rival gang members — something their families denied.
Twenty people have been charged publicly in eight homicides in recent months. They include five people accused in the deaths of Mickens and Cuevas and 10 people in the Central Islip massacre.
All but a few of those charged in the deaths were citizens of El Salvador or Honduras who entered the U.S. illegally, according to law enforcement officials.
WHAT IS MS-13:
MS-13, or La Mara Salvatrucha, originated in the 1980s in Los Angeles then entrenched itself in El Salvador and other parts of Central America when its leaders were deported.
The gang has had a presence in several U.S. states for many years. The FBI estimates that it has roughly 10,000 members in the U.S., though those numbers are fuzzy.