Speaker 1: Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show
Speaker 1: where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news.
Speaker 1: I'm Noah Feldman from the campaign trail to the State
Speaker 1: of the Union. Donald Trump has put the spotlight on
Speaker 1: one gang in particular, MS thirteen, or Mara Salvatrucha, a
Speaker 1: gang that originated in Los Angeles, spread to Central America
Speaker 1: and has come back for Trump. MS thirteen has become
Speaker 1: the centerpiece of an argument on closing borders and deportation. Today,
Speaker 1: we're going to try to get behind the story. We're
Speaker 1: going to ask what is MS thirteen, what kinds of
Speaker 1: violence has it actually perpetrated, and what should we think
Speaker 1: about that for the question of policy on immigration. We're
Speaker 1: also going to focus on the question of what happens
Speaker 1: when the government tries to wrack down on a gang
Speaker 1: like MS thirteen. To do that, we're joined today by
Speaker 1: Hannah Dryer. Hannah is a reporter for Pro Publica. She
Speaker 1: spent three years in Venezuela as correspondent for the AP,
Speaker 1: and she won the twenty nineteen Pulitzer Prize for Feature
Speaker 1: Writing for a fantastic series Trapped in Gangland. How the
Speaker 1: MS thirteen crackdown shattered immigrant lives. Hannah, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for joining us. Oh, thank you. It's great to
Speaker 1: be here, Hannah. Maybe we can start with the most
Speaker 1: basic historical question, who or what is MS thirteen? Where
Speaker 1: do they come from? And what are they? MS thirteen
Speaker 1: is a funny criminal organization because it's really founded sort
Speaker 1: of between the US and Central America. So the first
Speaker 1: MS thirteen members were Central American immigrants and refugees in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles. These were people who were fleeing civil wars
Speaker 1: in their own countries and they banded together in LA
Speaker 1: to try to protect themselves from the other gangs that
Speaker 1: were already there. So this is south central LA in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties and then into the early nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: and it's an American born gang exactly. So they were
Speaker 1: sort of these scrappy young immigrants in LA who were
Speaker 1: getting picked on and bullied, and they were punk rockers.
Speaker 1: The aesthetic of MS thirteen is still very nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: It's like skinny black jeans and devil iconography. It's sort
Speaker 1: of this like punk rock or metal symbolism that they
Speaker 1: still use. And they grew into a gang, and then
Speaker 1: there was a wave of deportations in the nineteen nineties
Speaker 1: and a lot of hardcore MS thirteen members were sent
Speaker 1: back to Central America, and they're the gang really metastasized
Speaker 1: and became this hyper violent, terrible organization that we have today.
Speaker 1: And we're seeing a new generation of kids who are
Speaker 1: fleeing that violence coming back to the US. And those
Speaker 1: are really the MS their team members that we see
Speaker 1: committing the most murders and the most violence in the
Speaker 1: States today. Some of the writing that I've read about
Speaker 1: their early origins, about MS thirteen and even until today,
Speaker 1: emphasizes the idea of kids without parents. It emphasizes the
Speaker 1: idea that the first members of the gang were people
Speaker 1: who had fled Central America as teenagers, often without their parents.
Speaker 1: It emphasized that people who are crossing borders, whether they're
Speaker 1: being deported or whether they're coming across the border, are
Speaker 1: often doing without their parents. First of all, I'm wondering
Speaker 1: if you think that's accurate. And second of all, even
Speaker 1: if it was accurate historically, is it still accurate today
Speaker 1: at all? Yeah? I mean, I think it's a gang
Speaker 1: born out of dislocation in a lot of ways. The
Speaker 1: Civil Wars in the nineteen eighties and Central America are crucial.
Speaker 1: A lot of people who came over were coming over alone,
Speaker 1: and they also had seen a lot of violence in
Speaker 1: their own countries. So these are young people who had
Speaker 1: already been traumatized by civil wars, which is important to
Speaker 1: say the US how to roll in absolutely. And now
Speaker 1: we're seeing kids who are sometimes coming without their parents.
Speaker 1: Often they've been left behind in places like El Salvador
Speaker 1: and Honduras by their parents, and they sort of grow
Speaker 1: up without a strong family structure, and then they come
Speaker 1: to this country and they're reunited with their parents, but
Speaker 1: their parents are almost strangers to them, and usually they're
Speaker 1: working really hard. So these kids come and they're lonely.
Speaker 1: And what they've told me is that they feel like
Speaker 1: MS thirteen really becomes their family, and MS thirteen understands
Speaker 1: them in a way that their parents don't. And you know,
Speaker 1: they feel sometimes like their parents abandon them and the
Speaker 1: gang was there for them when they needed someone. So
Speaker 1: it's a gang that can function as a kind of
Speaker 1: surrogate family, and that has, in your word, from a
Speaker 1: moment ago, a commitment to hyper violence. So let's talk
Speaker 1: about that hyper violence for a moment, will try to
Speaker 1: be nonsensational about it, but just accurate and describe it
Speaker 1: as it is. What kinds of violence qualify in your
Speaker 1: mind as hyper right, So all gangs basically are out
Speaker 1: there committing violence. MS thirteen is unique, I think, and
Speaker 1: that it's committing violence for violence's own sake a lot
Speaker 1: of times. So it's not a gang that has huge enterprises.
Speaker 1: They're not doing a ton of human trafficking or drug dealing.
Speaker 1: They're basically too chaotic for that kind of big business.
Speaker 1: What they're mostly doing is spectacular violence, and it's calculated
Speaker 1: to be spectacular, so spectacular in the sense of it
Speaker 1: makes a spectacle. Everyone has to notice it exactly. People
Speaker 1: talk about it in the neighborhood. It terrorizes people. So
Speaker 1: it's usually violence committed with machetes, and MS thirteen will
Speaker 1: attack somebody in a big group, and this is partly
Speaker 1: to foster that sense of family in a sick way,
Speaker 1: and also meaning the attackers are exactly. So the attackers will,
Speaker 1: you know, surround somebody in a sugarcane field if you're
Speaker 1: in El Salvador, or surround somebody in the woods if
Speaker 1: you're in Long Island and run at them all at
Speaker 1: once with machetes, and the police who deal with these
Speaker 1: murders say often people look like they've been hit by
Speaker 1: a car. People are just completely destroyed by these attacks,
Speaker 1: and they'll cut off people's limbs. They'll leave people in
Speaker 1: these very disturbing tableaus with several bodies stacked together, and
Speaker 1: they'll also use baseball bats. Sometimes they'll use tree branches,
Speaker 1: and the violence is just very brutal. Do you have
Speaker 1: a theory about why the violence? I mean, we're accustomed
Speaker 1: to a kind of Godfather like myth of organized crime
Speaker 1: as a organized which this isn't, but be as sort
Speaker 1: of aimed at putting together, you know, real money. That
Speaker 1: does not seem to be the case at all for MS. Thirteen.
Speaker 1: It seems that the violence, as you said, exists to
Speaker 1: create some communal feeling about violence. I think that's one
Speaker 1: of the scariest things about the gang, And I'm wondering
Speaker 1: if you have a thought about why, why why the
Speaker 1: violence for the sake of violence? It's very biked into
Speaker 1: the culture of MS thirteen. So, going back to what
Speaker 1: we were saying about those nineteen eighties symbols, MS thirteen
Speaker 1: talks a lot about the devil and people off and
Speaker 1: say the devil is here with us, or the devil
Speaker 1: took me over, so I had to do it. And
Speaker 1: in fact they're the core gang symbol, right is a
Speaker 1: hand formed into the shape of an M, right, which
Speaker 1: because devil horns if you put it up, and it's
Speaker 1: the M for the MS thirteen if you put it down.
Speaker 1: So yeah, exactly, and so they an MS. Their team
Speaker 1: member would tell you, well, this is basically a satanic
Speaker 1: organization and the devil demands blood, and so that's why
Speaker 1: that will be their own self description completely. And if
Speaker 1: you had anybody actually say that to you, oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they say it's just like that. They say, oh, the
Speaker 1: devil took me. The devil was with us. And when
Speaker 1: they're trained into the gang, when they're first initiated, especially
Speaker 1: in Central America, they have to kill someone and in
Speaker 1: order to get into the gang, yeah, to be a
Speaker 1: real member. And somebody who was initiated in that way
Speaker 1: described it to me and said, the senior leader came,
Speaker 1: they went to a field together. There was a man
Speaker 1: who was tied up, and the senior leader said, the
Speaker 1: devil is here with us right now, the devil is
Speaker 1: inside you, you have to kill this man. That's very
Speaker 1: disturbing me. I was telling you this went on to
Speaker 1: say they, I mean they killed the person. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: all did. So the person who was telling me this
Speaker 1: doesn't know if he struck the fatal blow, but he
Speaker 1: definitely feels like he became a murderer that day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which was I guess the point of the ritual. It's
Speaker 1: hard to know if that serves a social function. You
Speaker 1: sort of want to say it doesn't. But another thing
Speaker 1: that people who are part of this gang tell me
Speaker 1: is that they joined because they wanted to feel powerful,
Speaker 1: they wanted to be known, and they felt like they
Speaker 1: were always getting picked on by other people. And Central
Speaker 1: America is a very violent place, and there's these real
Speaker 1: histories of trauma there. I mean, there were these very
Speaker 1: intense civil wars, and I think people live in a
Speaker 1: sense of perpetual fear, and they rightly live like that.
Speaker 1: I mean, they are often in fear for their lives,
Speaker 1: and being part of this gang and especially this violence,
Speaker 1: I think temporarily makes these young men mostly feel invincible.
Speaker 1: And then the other part of this culture that's really
Speaker 1: important is that it's a very fatalistic culture. So MS
Speaker 1: thirteen is sort of satanic in some ways. But the
Speaker 1: people who get deep into the gang also tell you
Speaker 1: that they know that they're going to end up dead
Speaker 1: or in prison. That feeds into this culture of violence
Speaker 1: because people don't care if they get caught, and so
Speaker 1: you do get a lot of people, and sometimes they're
Speaker 1: really young, like fifteen and sixteen, who are willing to
Speaker 1: go commit these acts of violence and not cover any
Speaker 1: of it up because they're figuring they're going to be
Speaker 1: dead soon anyway. They're going to be in prison anyway.
Speaker 1: And that fits in with what you were saying about
Speaker 1: MS thirteen not being focused on money. You know, if
Speaker 1: you have if you're a young gang banger and you
Speaker 1: have the fantasy that you'll get rich and retire from
Speaker 1: the gang life, then you might have some limits to
Speaker 1: what you might be prepared to do. You have a
Speaker 1: long run goal. But if your view from day one
Speaker 1: is I'm going to die, my soul already belongs to
Speaker 1: the devil, then there's not as much pressure I would
Speaker 1: think to try to amass money that there's a kind
Speaker 1: of long termism to the idea of amassing money completely.
Speaker 1: These are not goal oriented people. And most of the
Speaker 1: MS their team members who I reported on on Long Island,
Speaker 1: we're working normal jobs. So they were in maybe high
Speaker 1: school during the day, and then they were a dishwasher,
Speaker 1: or they were working at a car repair shop, they
Speaker 1: were working at fast food restaurants, and they're going and
Speaker 1: they're working full shifts, and then they're getting off and
Speaker 1: going to the woods and being MS their team members,
Speaker 1: and then they're getting up early and going to high school.
Speaker 1: So nobody is getting rich from this gang. Really, there
Speaker 1: was a story that I read it. I think this
Speaker 1: may have come from one of your articles that described
Speaker 1: a major drug bust that was set up with an
Speaker 1: MS thirteen leader that never happened because the leader couldn't
Speaker 1: raise the gas money to get in his car to
Speaker 1: drive and actually make the buy that the cops were
Speaker 1: staking out. Yeah, I mean, this was something that I
Speaker 1: saw all the time doing this reporting. I had access
Speaker 1: to one MS thirteen members Facebook messages, so I read
Speaker 1: through two thousand pages of Facebook messages between this one
Speaker 1: member and the gang leaders, and so much of what
Speaker 1: they were talking about was who can get gas today?
Speaker 1: Do we have a car today? Can anybody afford gas?
Speaker 1: If not, are we going to use our bicycles to
Speaker 1: go and try to sell weed or anybody even have
Speaker 1: a bicycle that's working right now. It's like being in
Speaker 1: the head of a broke teenager who's trying to get
Speaker 1: to the mall, except their teenagers who are trying to
Speaker 1: go find people to hurt or sell drugs. So that
Speaker 1: almost states why this is so terrifying, namely that it's
Speaker 1: transnational and you're describing teenagers trying to get to the
Speaker 1: mall in Long Island, except that they're not just going
Speaker 1: to the mall, They're going to engage in acts of
Speaker 1: organized violence. And the transnational aspect of Mstarchen has been
Speaker 1: there from the start. Right, It's a US gang that
Speaker 1: then gets transferred to Central America and then makes its
Speaker 1: way back to the United States in various complicated ways.
Speaker 1: So I guess what I want to ask you about
Speaker 1: is why does this violence persist in the US. I
Speaker 1: understand that in the case of Central America, there are
Speaker 1: countries that have been traumatized by violence, their individuals who
Speaker 1: have been traumatized. It somehow seems maybe this is just
Speaker 1: bias on my part, It somehow seems more comprehensible in
Speaker 1: the wake of long, painful violence, civil war which exists
Speaker 1: not only in El Salvadora but in other Central American countries,
Speaker 1: that one would get a kind of extreme gang of
Speaker 1: this sort. But here it is functioning in not just
Speaker 1: in the United States, but in Long Island, a few
Speaker 1: miles from where we're sitting right now, and that's of
Speaker 1: course inherently terrifying. Why is the violence following the group here?
Speaker 1: So this is sort of the most controversial point about
Speaker 1: MS thirt. Some people, especially at the Department of Justice
Speaker 1: right now and probably in the Republican Party, would tell
Speaker 1: you that MS thirteen is being directed in the United
Speaker 1: States by people in El Salvador and other people, mostly
Speaker 1: people who do direct gang intervention. Maybe immigration advocates would
Speaker 1: tell you that actually there's very little organization and MS
Speaker 1: thirteen functions like autonomous franchises, and there's almost no communication
Speaker 1: with El Salvador. And it's hard to know what's true
Speaker 1: because both sides sort of have an interest in arguing
Speaker 1: for their version of how this gang is working, and
Speaker 1: the gang's not going to come out and tell you.
Speaker 1: So what I saw, at least on Long Island, there
Speaker 1: is some communication with El Salvador, especially when it comes
Speaker 1: to green lighting people. That's how the gang talks about
Speaker 1: deciding to kill someone. So I saw that there is
Speaker 1: communication when it comes to killing a fellow gang member
Speaker 1: or figuring out if a gang is a snitch or not,
Speaker 1: and that when it comes to other kinds of violence,
Speaker 1: like going after the girls who are trash talking you
Speaker 1: in the school hallway the other day, I didn't see
Speaker 1: that there was much communication. I mean, it's fascinating you
Speaker 1: are offering an account that it's potentially consistent with both stories,
Speaker 1: with the FBI story and with the gang intervention story.
Speaker 1: In other words, one could credibly say that there is
Speaker 1: some kind of coordination if before you kill a fellow
Speaker 1: gang member you have to get a green light from
Speaker 1: someone in Elsalvador. But at the same time, most of
Speaker 1: the activity is presumably not of that nature, and so
Speaker 1: in that sense, it would be disorganized and uncoordinated and
Speaker 1: happening at the local level, right. I mean, like with
Speaker 1: so many of these super polarizing issues, the truth is
Speaker 1: probably somewhere in the middle. And as far as what
Speaker 1: we do about the violence that this gang is still
Speaker 1: perpetrating in this country, one thing I think is important
Speaker 1: to understand is that that violence isn't really growing. It
Speaker 1: sort of goes in cycles. So the gang has been
Speaker 1: the same size in this country for more than a
Speaker 1: decade at about ten thousand people, which is less than
Speaker 1: one percent of total gang members. And the violence that
Speaker 1: they commit is really insane. I mean, it grabs headlines.
Speaker 1: It's not like what other people are doing. But it's
Speaker 1: still less than one percent of gang murders. And what
Speaker 1: I saw is that it's really a local law enforcement issue.
Speaker 1: When law enforcement was able to take down this gang,
Speaker 1: it was mostly through the kind of sophisticated organized crime
Speaker 1: strategies that take down other kinds of gangs. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't about going to El Salvador and taking down like
Speaker 1: the head of MS thirteen. It was about figuring out
Speaker 1: who's in this gang in one town and finding reasons
Speaker 1: to arrest them, and then flipping them on each other
Speaker 1: and just sort of one by one, arresting everybody in
Speaker 1: the gang so that they weren't out on the streets
Speaker 1: committing murder and recruiting new people. Does that strike you
Speaker 1: as an approach that would address their root cause as well, though,
Speaker 1: or does it seem like it's more. In other words,
Speaker 1: you can imagine you need to join strategy. If in
Speaker 1: fact the gang is capable of sustaining itself at the
Speaker 1: number of ten thousand in the US, then it must
Speaker 1: be getting new members, and they're either American teenagers or
Speaker 1: teenagers who's come into the country, or some combination. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't you would think that that's a
Speaker 1: simple strategy, and if it worked, then we just wouldn't
Speaker 1: have MS thirteen violence here. But it's not as simple
Speaker 1: as you would think. For one thing, this is a
Speaker 1: Spanish speaking gang and it's mostly composed of Latino people,
Speaker 1: and a lot of these small town police forces have
Speaker 1: very few Latino people who could infiltrate the gang and
Speaker 1: don't speak Spanish. So this is a phenomenon that we
Speaker 1: see all over the country, but it's very prevalent, for example,
Speaker 1: on Long Island, where you have large Latino populations that
Speaker 1: have come relatively recently in historical terms, and then you
Speaker 1: have police forces that are made up of the people
Speaker 1: who have been on Long Island for fifty or sixty years.
Speaker 1: Great so on Long Island during the height of an
Speaker 1: MS thirteen killing spree in twenty sixteen that was getting
Speaker 1: national headlines. Trump got very fixated on this nice spree.
Speaker 1: We're coming to him soon. The police force, which is
Speaker 1: one of the biggest police forces in the country, had
Speaker 1: three people who were certified to speak Spanish, and it's
Speaker 1: just very hard to see how a police force like
Speaker 1: that can effectively police this gang and protect the community
Speaker 1: from the gang. And what ended up happening on Long
Speaker 1: Island is the Long Island FBI Gang Task Force really
Speaker 1: beefed off its presence and brought in FBI agents who
Speaker 1: spoke Spanish and they were then able to pretty much
Speaker 1: dismantle the gang out there. And we haven't had a
Speaker 1: killing in almost a year. So it wasn't a pure
Speaker 1: local law enforce and effort. It was local law enforcement
Speaker 1: assisted by, in fact necessarily it sounds like assisted by
Speaker 1: the FBI, right, But I mean, why why was that necessary?
Speaker 1: You would think that a police force that is dealing
Speaker 1: with a lot of immigrant people. Some of the towns
Speaker 1: on Long Island are mostly immigrant, would be more equipped
Speaker 1: to deal with those kinds of problems, for sure. I mean,
Speaker 1: of course the police forces need to add, need to
Speaker 1: have lots of Spanish speaking officers, but I do wonder
Speaker 1: if I mean a small town police force isn't necessarily
Speaker 1: equipped to handle major gang violence. Yeah, So, I mean
Speaker 1: in this case, it worked pretty well. The FBI came
Speaker 1: in and they really cleaned house, and they did it
Speaker 1: by being on the ground in this community. And it
Speaker 1: had almost nothing to do with the border. And that's
Speaker 1: one thing that I hear a lot when people talk
Speaker 1: about MS thirteen. There's this idea that we just need
Speaker 1: to close the border or secure the border, and then
Speaker 1: we'll be able to get rid of this gang. And
Speaker 1: I think that really ignores the fact that the gang
Speaker 1: was founded in the US and most of the people
Speaker 1: who I've spoken with who are in the gang now
Speaker 1: were recruited in the US. So the typical situation that
Speaker 1: I saw was people would come over from Central America,
Speaker 1: land in one of these towns like the suburbs of
Speaker 1: New York or the suburbs of Virginia or LA and
Speaker 1: not have a strong support system and get recruited in
Speaker 1: an American high school or at an American McDonald's where
Speaker 1: they were hanging out after school. So closing the border
Speaker 1: doesn't do a lot to solve that. And FBI task
Speaker 1: forces also don't really help with that. I think that's
Speaker 1: something we need a different kind of program for. So
Speaker 1: there's an anthropologist called Tom Ward who wrote a book
Speaker 1: that's based on I think about a decade of field work,
Speaker 1: fourteen years of field work. He says inside of some
Speaker 1: parts of MS thirteen and it's periphery, and he called
Speaker 1: the book Gangs Without Borders to emphasize the transnational nature
Speaker 1: of the gang, that it goes across borders. And then
Speaker 1: the opening paragraph of the book when you open it up,
Speaker 1: is an apology for the title, which is very rare.
Speaker 1: You know when you write, when you write a book,
Speaker 1: you don't usually want to have to apologize for the
Speaker 1: title of first thing out of the box. And he says,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't want you to think, in hearing
Speaker 1: this title, that we're talking about something like an international
Speaker 1: terrorist organization. On the other hand, I am trying to
Speaker 1: show you that the nature of moving between country has
Speaker 1: been part of or significant to the experience of MS thirteen,
Speaker 1: and I want to use that balance to try to
Speaker 1: ask about this this point of the border closing. Clearly
Speaker 1: we're thinking of this when we hear it because of
Speaker 1: Donald Trump. Trump maybe he was influenced by the fact
Speaker 1: that he's from Queens, which is part of Long Island,
Speaker 1: and is aware of what's going on in the Long
Speaker 1: Island world. And then this spike of murders in Long
Speaker 1: Island that you described from MS thirteen happened around the
Speaker 1: time that he was running for president, and he made
Speaker 1: this a centerpiece of his rhetoric. And since part of
Speaker 1: his run of the presence he was to emphasize closing
Speaker 1: the border and the dangers of immigrants crossing the border,
Speaker 1: and particularly of Central American immigrants crossing the borders, it
Speaker 1: was sort of like a cause made to order for him.
Speaker 1: What is the danger associated with thinking of border closings
Speaker 1: as something that could reduce or cut down on MS thirteen?
Speaker 1: You've made the case that it wouldn't work. But what's
Speaker 1: the danger associated with saying, well, let's try Why don't
Speaker 1: we try to do more work of deporting gang members
Speaker 1: if they're not US citizens and trying to stop gang
Speaker 1: members from coming in. Yeah, I mean, I do think
Speaker 1: the fact that Trump is from Queens has a ton
Speaker 1: to do with how focused he's been on this gang.
Speaker 1: It's funny, there have been all of these there's been
Speaker 1: all this violence on Long Island, and there's also been
Speaker 1: all this MS thirteen violence in the suburbs of DC,
Speaker 1: but Trump is so much more focused on what's going
Speaker 1: on up in New York, even though he's technically closer
Speaker 1: to what's going on like Virginia and Maryland, so those psychologically,
Speaker 1: he's very much a product of the Long Island milia completely.
Speaker 1: One danger of focusing on immigration enforcement when you're thinking
Speaker 1: about how to get rid of MS thirteen is that
Speaker 1: the same people who you need to be helping you
Speaker 1: dismantle this gang, the same people who would be your informants,
Speaker 1: are the people who might be targeted by harsher immigration enforcement.
Speaker 1: So I saw this happen a few times on Long Island,
Speaker 1: where young teenage boys who are involved with the gang
Speaker 1: or adjacent to the gang when kid had been attacked
Speaker 1: by the gang, were turned into FBI informants and started
Speaker 1: working with police in the FBI to try to bring
Speaker 1: down the kids who were torturing them, the gang members
Speaker 1: who were in their community. And after a few months
Speaker 1: they were turned over themselves to Ice for deportation. And
Speaker 1: so one informant was locked up with the same people
Speaker 1: who he'd been informing on and they knew that he
Speaker 1: had been an informant and they started threatening his life.
Speaker 1: That gets around if the people who try to help
Speaker 1: law enforcement end up being arrested for deportation. People know that,
Speaker 1: and they're much less likely to go to detectives and
Speaker 1: help them. And this is a gang that's composed of
Speaker 1: Latino teenagers, so it's already going to be hard for
Speaker 1: US law enforcement to infiltrate it. And so when you
Speaker 1: don't protect informants, that can really destroy an investigation. And
Speaker 1: I had detectives from the FBI Gang Task Force and
Speaker 1: local police complaining to me about this. Is it that
Speaker 1: the minute you start thinking about deportations, you're inevitably going
Speaker 1: to alienate the people who might work with the government
Speaker 1: to fight the gang. Or is it that the government,
Speaker 1: ice and others just do it badly? In your fascinating
Speaker 1: and rich reporting, often it seemed as though it was
Speaker 1: the incompetence of the enforcement system that was causing the problems.
Speaker 1: You know that someone who was helping the FBI would
Speaker 1: get on a list and then someone would bureacratically say well,
Speaker 1: now they're on the list and we can't get them off.
Speaker 1: The list, and then that would lead to a deportation.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm over characterizing it, but you know what
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. And then when I read that, my
Speaker 1: instinct was to say, well, they have to do it better.
Speaker 1: They have to be more careful and make sure that
Speaker 1: if someone is helping the government, that person doesn't get
Speaker 1: deported and doesn't get put into these categories. So that
Speaker 1: would be an argument not so much for taking this
Speaker 1: out of the deportation and border's frame as for staying
Speaker 1: in that frame, but doing it in a much more
Speaker 1: sophisticated and successful way. Or the alternative view I guess
Speaker 1: would be that no, the minute you go into that
Speaker 1: frame at all, you're going to alienate people and you're
Speaker 1: not going to be able to fight the gang. Do
Speaker 1: you have an instinct between those versions? Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: in some ways it's above my pay grade, Like I
Speaker 1: have the nice job of being able to critique policy
Speaker 1: and I don't have to make it. But I do
Speaker 1: think that some people need to be deported. I don't
Speaker 1: think anybody would disagree that some of these really hardcore
Speaker 1: MS thirteen killers who've stuck into this country illegally and
Speaker 1: are doing lots of damage here shouldn't be protected at all.
Speaker 1: Some of these people are to me, they really seem irredeemable,
Speaker 1: and I'm glad that law enforcement gets them off of
Speaker 1: the streets. What I saw a lot of in the
Speaker 1: first two years of the Trump administration was sort of
Speaker 1: a rush to get more MS thirteen arrests. There was
Speaker 1: I make the numbers as it were, right, right, So
Speaker 1: there is a pressure internally to get those numbers up,
Speaker 1: and there was also pressure to get the proportion of
Speaker 1: criminal arrests versus administrative arrests up. That's a little tricky
Speaker 1: to understand. Basically, you can arrest somebody just for being
Speaker 1: an immigrant here without papers, or you can arrest somebody
Speaker 1: because they've committed a crime and they're here without papers. Yes,
Speaker 1: so the Trump administration wanted to say they were going
Speaker 1: after more what they call criminal aliens, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: to be fair, is also a continuation of the Obama
Speaker 1: administration's policy. I mean, the Obama aministration really emphasized that
Speaker 1: it was going to arrest large, large numbers of undocumented
Speaker 1: people and support them. They just said they would focus
Speaker 1: on people who had committed crimes, and in fact, that's
Speaker 1: one of the reasons that many immigration out of it
Speaker 1: gates were very before Donald Trump were very angry at
Speaker 1: Barack Obama because he deported. His administration deported much much
Speaker 1: higher percentages and much much higher raw numbers of undocumented
Speaker 1: people than prior administrations, including the Bush administration. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: now we're deep in the weeds of im gratian coverage.
Speaker 1: But that's a really key thing because Obama was going
Speaker 1: after Okay, shows called deep back, but we gotta go
Speaker 1: deep Okay, great, So here you have Obama, he's mostly
Speaker 1: going after criminal immigrants. Trump comes in. He just wants
Speaker 1: bigger deportation numbers, so they start going after non criminal immigrants.
Speaker 1: They start going after anybody they can find, basically, and
Speaker 1: so the numbers get very skewed. Suddenly it looks like
Speaker 1: they're not arresting any criminals because they're arresting so many
Speaker 1: of the other kind of people who haven't committed crimes,
Speaker 1: who have to all the way also be detained by
Speaker 1: the way, So there's actually a literal space issue right right,
Speaker 1: and resources, I mean, ICE agents are like running around
Speaker 1: arresting anybody they can find. And so the idea was
Speaker 1: if they start tagging more people as MS their team members.
Speaker 1: That's going to make the numbers look a lot better.
Speaker 1: Suddenly you're going to have more criminal immigrant arrests, which
Speaker 1: is what you want. What I saw on Long Island
Speaker 1: was suddenly almost anything getting adjacent could get you tagged
Speaker 1: as an MS thirteen member in ICE's eyes. So what
Speaker 1: happened was there was this Operation Matador initiative, and that
Speaker 1: was a program designed specifically to find MS thirteen members
Speaker 1: around New York State and arrest them for deportation. So
Speaker 1: in the spring of twenty seventeen, people started to get
Speaker 1: tagged as gang members for being in the same park
Speaker 1: as gang members or wearing blue Nike sneakers. I wrote
Speaker 1: about one kid who drew a devil in his school
Speaker 1: notebook and was tagged as a gang member for that reason,
Speaker 1: and because that's a symbol of the gang. Well, right,
Speaker 1: so that longle of the gang it also happened to
Speaker 1: be his high school mascot. People started staying home from school,
Speaker 1: they started staying inside. These immigrant communities are very close knit,
Speaker 1: and words spread very quickly that anybody is being tagged
Speaker 1: as a gang member right now. And what the people
Speaker 1: who lived in these places told me that at first
Speaker 1: they thought, oh, that kid seemed fine, but I guess
Speaker 1: he must have been a gang member because he just
Speaker 1: got arrested. And people were hopeful at first because they
Speaker 1: were very scared of this gang, and then they started
Speaker 1: to realize no, a lot of these arrests are basically pretexts.
Speaker 1: Ice touted this as a wonderful initiative to rid the
Speaker 1: community of MS thirteen and finally arrest criminal immigrants, but
Speaker 1: in reality, a lot of those people were eventually let
Speaker 1: go because they had nothing to do with the gang.
Speaker 1: What has it been like for you to talk to
Speaker 1: I guess mostly teenagers. It sounds like who are who
Speaker 1: have been either purple to the gang or in the gang?
Speaker 1: How do you what prepared you to go in and
Speaker 1: actually talk to people and hear these hear these things?
Speaker 1: I mean, I felt very unprepared. I spoke fine Spanish.
Speaker 1: I learned a lot of gang slag over the course
Speaker 1: of this reporting. Like when you text message with these kids,
Speaker 1: they write in this almost incomprehensible language. I had to
Speaker 1: make myself a glossary, but I had been reported in
Speaker 1: all teenagers just not that is very true. They're also
Speaker 1: very into snapchat, which I didn't understand before I started
Speaker 1: this reporting, But that doesn't quite get to the human level.
Speaker 1: I mean, how did you get kids to open up
Speaker 1: to you. I think it probably goes back to how
Speaker 1: isolated kids are who joined this gang. The people who
Speaker 1: I talked to told me that they felt very lonely
Speaker 1: and like nobody understood them. Their own parents were absent
Speaker 1: or didn't want to admit maybe what had happened with
Speaker 1: this gang and their kids on Long Island or back
Speaker 1: home in El Salvador. And so some of the people
Speaker 1: I talked to when I first started speaking with them,
Speaker 1: they just sort of I would ask them one question
Speaker 1: and they would just go I would ask one question,
Speaker 1: they would talk for an hour. I think they really
Speaker 1: wanted somebody to understand what was happening with them and
Speaker 1: listen to them without judgment, which I think is something
Speaker 1: that journalists always need to do by other adults in
Speaker 1: their lives, like teachers or their parents. The police wouldn't
Speaker 1: do with them. And once I started talking to a
Speaker 1: couple of kids, they started introducing me to their friends.
Speaker 1: I started understanding how people were networked to each other
Speaker 1: out there, and so then I was able to talk
Speaker 1: to them in a way that I think was probably
Speaker 1: less exhausting for them, Like they didn't have to explain
Speaker 1: who Piro sans, this gang leader and ladies man out
Speaker 1: there was. I already knew, and I knew who all
Speaker 1: his friends were. I had maps drawn up in my
Speaker 1: office of how everybody was connected to each other and
Speaker 1: who everybody was. You mentioned that you think it's important
Speaker 1: for a journalist to listen without judgment. I want, what
Speaker 1: I'm wondering is how hard is that? How hard is
Speaker 1: it to listen to somebody describing maybe brutal acts and
Speaker 1: to withhold judgment. I don't think you mean with whole judgment. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: when you write your story, you can you tell your
Speaker 1: story and there can be some implicit judgment in that,
Speaker 1: But when you're sitting there, I take it you meant
Speaker 1: you have to withhold judgment to be an effective journalist
Speaker 1: to get the story. How hard is that to do? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean the story really pushed the boundaries of how
Speaker 1: much I was able to empathize with people. I felt
Speaker 1: it talking to gang members, and I also felt it
Speaker 1: talking to the police. I thought it was really important
Speaker 1: to be as empathetic as I could be. With both
Speaker 1: sides of the story here. So I talked to police
Speaker 1: homicide detectives who told me that when a kid like
Speaker 1: the fifteen year old I was talking about who ended
Speaker 1: up in the woods gets killed, they call it misdemeanor
Speaker 1: murder because I feel like he probably had it coming
Speaker 1: for some reason. He was probably going to end up
Speaker 1: dead no matter what. They would. Yeah, they would say
Speaker 1: things about people whose mothers I had spent time with,
Speaker 1: whose diaries I had read. In the end, I think
Speaker 1: I was able to understand why they were saying things
Speaker 1: like that. I think they just felt really frustrated by
Speaker 1: their inability to solve these crimes and stop these murders,
Speaker 1: and they were trying to protect themselves by coming in
Speaker 1: and just being very callous and with the gang members.
Speaker 1: They would tell me about violence that was so horrifying.
Speaker 1: I didn't put most of it in the stories, just
Speaker 1: because I think it would have distracted back. Yeah, some
Speaker 1: of the most perverse things people told me about doing
Speaker 1: I didn't put in there. I did try to get
Speaker 1: very high up whenever somebody told me that they had
Speaker 1: committed violence. Like the first story in the series starts
Speaker 1: with the main character killing a person in cold blood,
Speaker 1: and I didn't want to hide that, but some of
Speaker 1: the things they told me about doing it just felt
Speaker 1: like it would be gratuitous to put in there. It
Speaker 1: seems like such a delicate, delicate balance. I'm reminded a
Speaker 1: little bit of the novelist Don Winslow's written this Cartel trilogy.
Speaker 1: That is actually how I first learned about MS thirteen.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's these are novels, but they're they're well
Speaker 1: done novels. They're they're sort of very close to the
Speaker 1: John McCarry level when they're at their best. In the novels,
Speaker 1: very brutal act of violence that are, according to Winslow,
Speaker 1: based on real things that occurred, are described in very
Speaker 1: you know, clinical terms. And yet as Donald Trump began
Speaker 1: to speak about MS thirteen as this great danger, Winslow
Speaker 1: began to write public opinion pieces and op eds saying, look,
Speaker 1: you know, I know a lot about these guys, and
Speaker 1: what Trump is saying is unjustified and wrong, even though
Speaker 1: in fact the acts of violence are horrific. So there's
Speaker 1: this very complicated balance between acknowledging the terribleness of the
Speaker 1: things that MS thirteen does and not giving in to
Speaker 1: the temptation to demonize people who are themselves self demonizing, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, like Winslow says, there's a lot of different
Speaker 1: ways to be a terrible and basically evil organization. MS
Speaker 1: thirteen is horrible and indefensible in some very troubling ways,
Speaker 1: but not in all of the ways that Donald Trump
Speaker 1: would like to say. So it's an organization that commits
Speaker 1: horrible murder. It's not an organization that is organized across
Speaker 1: the country and invading peaceful suburbs in the way that
Speaker 1: politicians talk about. And you say that even though in
Speaker 1: your stories you just gbe a spike in murders in
Speaker 1: a peaceful Long Island suburbs. Right, there was a spike
Speaker 1: in violence in Long Island. But that's a spike that
Speaker 1: you see every couple of years, going back to two thousand,
Speaker 1: two thousand and one. It's not anything that really has
Speaker 1: it's it's nothing new. I mean, make it less shocking
Speaker 1: in some sense. I mean, it's a crime. I don't
Speaker 1: want to normalize murder spikes in anywhere, suburbs or inner city.
Speaker 1: Right when Chicago underwent you know, a big spike in
Speaker 1: gun violence in recent recent years. That's urban and it's
Speaker 1: happened occasionally in the past as well, but we don't
Speaker 1: want to normalize it by virtual the fact that it's
Speaker 1: that it's happened before. No, what I mean, really, the
Speaker 1: victims of MS thirteen violence are young Latino immigrants. There
Speaker 1: should be more effort to protect those people completely. But
Speaker 1: I think they would the victims of this gang, and
Speaker 1: the people who work most closely with the gang would
Speaker 1: tell you that having a national panic about MS thirteen
Speaker 1: legs used to our suburbs is not the way to
Speaker 1: really protect the victims. I want to sort of close
Speaker 1: by asking you about the imagination. About the imagination in
Speaker 1: both directions here. So on the one hand, there's the
Speaker 1: imagination of the MS thirteen members themselves. They're trying to
Speaker 1: create an imaginary universe where they are terrifying, where they
Speaker 1: are empowered, where they're capable of engaging in these acts
Speaker 1: of spectacular violence. And then somehow they did capture the
Speaker 1: imagination of a lot of people in the American public.
Speaker 1: They capture the imagination of a guy who was candidate
Speaker 1: for president United States and then got elected, and then
Speaker 1: suddenly there he is in Congress at the State of
Speaker 1: the Union address talking about them and how uniquely bad
Speaker 1: and dangerous they are. But there's some connection between the
Speaker 1: two imaginations. It's like the imagination of the gang members
Speaker 1: is one circle and the imagination of Donald Trump is
Speaker 1: another circle, and somehow they're merging together in this overlapping
Speaker 1: then diagram of imaginaries. First all, does that story make
Speaker 1: sense to you? Does that sound plausible as an account
Speaker 1: of what's going on? And if so, what are we
Speaker 1: to make of it? How should we think about this
Speaker 1: going forward? Totally? I mean it's like a showy gang
Speaker 1: meets a great showman and it's it's been a beautiful
Speaker 1: marriage for both of them. I think Trump has gotten
Speaker 1: lots of mileage out of this gang, and MS thirteen
Speaker 1: is also getting a lot of benefit. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is a gang that wants everybody to be scared of them.
Speaker 1: People are very scared right now, and they haven't had
Speaker 1: to do much to earn that. I think what gets
Speaker 1: lost is the victims. How are you going to fight
Speaker 1: a gang if you don't understand the gang? And right
Speaker 1: now there are so many myths being peddled about what
Speaker 1: MS thirteen is, by the gang and by national politicians,
Speaker 1: and who's losing there are young immigrants who are getting
Speaker 1: slaughtered and who are not being protected by local police. Hannah,
Speaker 1: I want to thank you not just for a great interview,
Speaker 1: but also for really doing work that manages simultaneously to
Speaker 1: tell the story as it's happening and as it has happened,
Speaker 1: and not to play down the violence while simultaneously not
Speaker 1: sensationalizing it. And if other people are criticizing you for
Speaker 1: that middle ground, let me be someone to say, good job.
Speaker 1: That's exactly the kind of work that's beneficial to I
Speaker 1: think to thinking about hard problems like this. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for joining us. Oh well, thank you. It
Speaker 1: is a tight ramp, and I appreciate you saying that,
Speaker 1: thank you for walking out with us. Making sense of
Speaker 1: MS thirteen really demands hard work because you have to
Speaker 1: keep two different ideas in your mind at the same time,
Speaker 1: and those things are intentional with each other. The first
Speaker 1: is that MS thirteen isn't just any gang. It's a
Speaker 1: particularly vicious and violent gang that focuses on violence for
Speaker 1: violence's sake and commits horrific acts not only here in
Speaker 1: the United States but in Central America. It's also a
Speaker 1: transnational gang. When that crosses borders and that sees itself
Speaker 1: as a nation on its own, and that makes it
Speaker 1: especially frightening. At the same time, you also have to
Speaker 1: keep in your mind that Donald Trump has, through his rhetoric,
Speaker 1: made MS thirteen into a much grander, bigger, and more
Speaker 1: significant threat than in fact may be in real life.
Speaker 1: He's used MS thirteen as a tool to emphasize the
Speaker 1: idea that we should close our borders, including closing our
Speaker 1: borders to people who are fleeing gangs like m S
Speaker 1: thirteen from Central America. What I took away from my
Speaker 1: conversation with Hannah is that it actually is possible if
Speaker 1: you're very careful and work hard to keep both of
Speaker 1: those ideas in mind simultaneously. She's not pulling any punches
Speaker 1: in describing the depth and the horror of violence that
Speaker 1: m S thirteen engages in. At the same time, she's
Speaker 1: an unrelenting critic of how the attempt to crack down
Speaker 1: on MS thirteen in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election
Speaker 1: has actually led to tragedy in the lives of ordinary
Speaker 1: people who were not guilty of anything, and made it
Speaker 1: harder in the long run to fight this horrific gang
Speaker 1: getting behind this story shows you that the imagination is
Speaker 1: an extraordinary thing. The imagination of MS thirteen has met
Speaker 1: the imagination of Donald Trump, and Hannah says. It's a
Speaker 1: beautiful marriage that served the interests of both sides in
Speaker 1: the long run. If we're going to fight MS thirteen
Speaker 1: and not go overboard, we need to disrupt that marriage.
Speaker 1: We need to disentangle those two imaginations. We need facts
Speaker 1: to understand what we should do about MS thirteen, not fantasies.
Speaker 1: Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our
Speaker 1: producer is Lydia Geane Coott, with engineering by Jason Gambrell
Speaker 1: and Jason Rostkowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme
Speaker 1: music is composed by Luis Gara. Special thanks to the
Speaker 1: Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm
Speaker 1: Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman.
Speaker 1: This is Deep Background.