More deeply depraved thoughts flowed from Donald Trump's thumbs at around 5:40 AM Tuesday—this time on the violent Central American gang known as MS-13.
Naturally, Trump's assertion was completely baseless, writes Aidan Quigley.
The MS-13 gang, which is based in Central America, was formed by Salvadorans fleeing that country’s civil war in the 1980s. The FBI recognized that the gang was a growing threat in the early 2000s — before former President Barack Obama was elected — and in 2004 created a task force “to investigate this violent international street gang,” according to the FBI. In 2008, the FBI stated that MS-13 had expanded to at least 42 states and Washington, D.C.
The FBI has attributed a quadruple homicide in Long Island last week to the gang, and Trump is nothing if not desperate to change the subject away from his taxes and other administration failings. Ginning up his nativist base with the unfounded assertion that Barack Obama practically aided and abetted a notorious gang in a horrific homicide is just the ticket! Thus, his accompanying tweet, imploring followers to watch his Fox & Friends appearance at 6:00 AM, where he would peddle more lies.
Trump said his administration has kicked out dangerous undocumented immigrants who were in this country. He didn’t specify MS-13 gang members.
“I'm talking about illegal immigrants that were here that caused tremendous crime, that have murdered people, raped people; horrible things have happened. They are getting the hell out, or they are going to prison,” he said. “It is a serious problem, and we never did anything about it, and now we're doing something about it.”
What he's really bragging about is giving ICE agents unbridled authority to arrest whomever they want, even if it harms local law enforcement efforts.
As the Washington Post reports:
“My sense is that ICE is emboldened in a way that I have never seen,” Dan Satterberg, the top prosecutor in Washington state’s King County, which includes Seattle, said Thursday. “The federal government, in really just a couple of months, has undone decades of work that we have done to build this trust.”
Nearly three-quarters of the immigrants arrested from Jan. 20 to March 13 had criminal convictions, an increase of 15 percent over the same period last year.
But the biggest spike is the arrest of immigrants with no criminal records, with immigration field offices in New York, Boston and other places doubling or tripling their numbers from last year.
Sooner or later, Trump will find out what has already proven true in every other policy area he’s touched: making America safer is a tad more complicated than he originally thought, and scapegoating undocumented immigrants isn’t going to cut it.