Prioritizing the violent is the right move.
President Trump, known for his fierce and intense stance on immigration, has recently announced the reversal of his intention to deport “DREAMers,” or children brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents. The president’s focus, he says, is on going “after the criminals.” Following the brutal murders that have plagued towns in Long Island, New Yorkers should welcome this approach.
MS-13, formally known as Mara Salvatrucha, is an international criminal gang whose members are ethnically El Salvadorian. The gang originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s following the civil wars that encompassed much of Central America. One of MS-13’s members, Walter Yovany Gomez, has been at large since 2011 and is currently on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Ten Most-Wanted Gugitives list for the murder of a rival gang member in Plainfield, N.J. The victim, the FBI relates, was “struck in the head numerous times, had his throat cut, and was stabbed 17 times in the back.”
Long Island has a very large MS-13 population — around 400 members in Suffolk County alone, according to the county’s police commissioner, Timothy Sini. These members have infiltrated schools, are attracting new members at alarming rates, and are responsible for many serious violent crimes. In 2016, MS-13 was linked to 17 out of Suffolk County’s 45 homicides.
In September of last year, Nisa Mickens and her best friend Kayla Cuevas were brutally beaten with baseball bats and hacked with machetes, and their bodies were found dumped in the streets near their residences in my hometown, Brentwood, N.Y. Cuevas was murdered for her opposition to the gangs in school and via social media, and Mickens was murdered for simply “being at the wrong place at the wrong time,” as U.S. District Attorney Robert Capers put it. Thirteen members of MS-13 have been indicted and formally charged with these murders and other offenses, such as “racketeering, assault, arson, conspiracy to distribute marijuana and firearms charges.”
That same month, the skeletal remains of two teenage boys, 19-year old Oscar Acosta and 15-year old Miguel Garcia-Moran, were discovered in a remote area in Brentwood; the boys had been kidnapped, and they’d been missing for eight months. A few weeks later, 34-year-old Dewann Stacks’s body was found in the streets; he’d been beaten to death. These murders are also tied to MS-13 gang violence.
In October, Jose Peña-Hernandez, a member of MS-13 who was allegedly cooperating with the police and broke other “gang rules,” was also murdered. He was lured into a car; gang members took turns stabbing him to death and left his mangled body in a wooded area. Then, in April of this year, the bodies of four young males, ages 16 to 20, were found in a park in Central Islip, a town adjacent to Brentwood. These men died of blunt-force trauma after having been gruesomely beaten.
MS-13, alongside numerous other gangs whose members are largely undocumented men and women, have terrorized not just Long Island but the United States for far too long. The brutality of these gangs and their members calls for serious and permanent action. Too many families and friends have seen their loved ones hurt.
Prioritizing the violent is the correct path to take.
Because his campaign was riddled with promises of a wall that would prevent illegal immigration, Trump’s notion that DREAMers can “rest easy” has come as a shock to most. But given limited resources, prioritizing the violent is the correct path to take. It is about time that the federal government cracked down on MS-13, which has targeted people of all races, genders, and ages and bought to this country the violence, drugs, and criminality that is widely present in Central America. Children on Long Island should not have to fear walking to school or taking their dogs for a run. They are dreamers, too.
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— Sapna Rampersaud is an editorial intern at National Review and studies government, history, and French at Harvard University.