Sessions and Trump talk need to fight transnational gang
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — Attorney General Jeff Sessions is eager to use his aggressive work against the MS-13 street gang to help mend his tattered relationship with President Donald Trump. “I hope so,” he said Friday, trying to turn the corner from a week of sour performance reviews from his boss.
“It’s one of many issues that we share deep commitments about,” he told The Associated Press from a private room in the headquarters of El Salvador’s national police force, where he had met law enforcement officials to talk about quashing the violent transnational gang.
That common concern about MS-13 was on display Friday as Trump spoke about the gang in Long Island, where MS13 violence has resurfaced with a vengeance, and as Sessions toured a gang stronghold, motoring around El Salvador’s graffiti-laced streets alongside rifle-wielding police officers who had tried to clear the neighborhood of gangsters before he arrived. MS-13 has roots both in Central America and Los Angeles.
But in his speech vowing to crush MS-13, Trump never mentioned Sessions.
“These are animals,” Trump told law enforcement officials and relatives of crime victims in Brentwood, in Suffolk County, New York, where MS-13 has been blamed for a string of gruesome murders, including the killing of four young men in April.
The president battered Sessions for days with a series of tweets calling him weak and ineffective, his discontent centered on Sessions’ decision months ago to recuse himself from the investigation into Trump campaign ties to Russia. Sessions said Thursday he won’t resign unless Trump asks him to and spoke loyally of the president while saying he was right to take himself out of that investigation after acknowledging he had met the Russian ambassador during the campaign.
Though thousands of miles apart, Trump and Sessions seemed aligned in their message against MS-13. The gang has become a focal point in the national immigration debate, although it is in some respects a homegrown organization and it is unclear how many of its members are in the U.S. illegally.
“It is in a very expansive mode and we need to slam the door on that,” Sessions said in the AP interview. “We need to stop them in their tracks and focus on this dangerous group.”
The intense focus on gang violence is a departure for a Justice Department that has viewed as more urgent the prevention of cyberattacks from foreign criminals, international bribery and the threat of homegrown violent extremism.
But alarm about the gang has grown as it has preyed on largely suburban, immigrant communities. Several top officials in Sessions’ office have experience prosecuting the gang in Baltimore, Alexandria, Virginia, and other cities.
MS-13, or the Mara Salvatrucha, is believed by federal prosecutors to have more than 10,000 members in the U.S., a mix of immigrants from Central America and U.S.-born members. The gang originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s then entrenched itself in Central America when its leaders were deported.
MS-13 and rival groups in El Salvador now control entire towns, rape girls and young women, kill competitors and massacre students, bus drivers and merchants who refuse to pay extortion.