The presence of illegal alien gangs in U.S. communities is due to decades of failure on the part of our federal government to secure our southern border and policies that allow such criminals to find sanctuary on U.S. soil. From traditional street gangs, prison based gangs, and those that have evolved into transnational criminal organizations, these gangs are causing communities to drain valuable resources to combat the crime wave that accompanies them. Additionally, the flood of unaccompanied minors since 2012 from primarily El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala has provided some of these gangs with a steady flow of members to bolster their ranks.
The five listed gangs are gangs made up of primarily illegal aliens or a mix of illegal aliens and Mexican-American citizens. These gangs are operating in your communities as well as back in their countries of origin and are all engaged in street level or wholesale drug dealing, extortion by taxing, and murder. Some of these gangs are involved in human smuggling, sexual assaults related to their human smuggling activities, and each are working as foot soldiers for Mexican transnational drug trafficking organizations (cartels.)
1. MS-13 or Mara Salvatrucha or also known as “La Mara.”
MS-13 originated in the early 80’s, primarily in Los Angeles. A wave of refugees flooded into the U.S. during this time from El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua due to the civil wars that were ravaging central America. Originally, MS-13 consisted of primarily Salvadorans, but later the gang expanded to other Spanish-speaking nationalities; the gang later started expanding to other cities and states.
During a 10-year period between 2005 and 2014, U.S. officials arrested 4,000 members of MS-13, 92 percent were in the United States illegally, according to data obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies.
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