What Trump Doesn't Understand About MS-13
As President Trump sat for Time’s Person of the Year interview last year, he excused himself and returned with a copy of Newsday. He wanted to show editor Michael Scherer a headline. “‘EXTREMELY VIOLENT’ GANG FACTION,” it read, and the article told of murders in Suffolk County, New York, all linked to MS-13. One murder was that of 16-year-old Kayla Cuevas, who’d argued with MS-13 members at her high school. The gang, many of them also teenagers, found Cuevas and a friend walking along the street and beat them with baseball bats and hacked at them with machetes. “They come from Central America,” Trump said to Scherer. “They’re tougher than any people you’ve ever met. They’re killing and raping everybody out there. They’re illegal.”
Last week the Senate Judiciary Committee met with federal immigration officials to decipher this rise in MS-13 crime. Much of the testimony focused on the recent immigration of unaccompanied minors from Central America, and during the hearing Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley from . The report, like some of the senator’s questions, focused on a few regions in the U.S. where young migrants who’d joined MS-13 were accused of murders that have seized media attention. “The government’s total failure to establish an efficient process and
