US arrested 10,000 gang members in 2018: immigration agency

Miami, United States | AFP | The US this year arrested over 10,000 members of “transnational gangs,” its immigration enforcement agency announced Thursday — including over 2,000 members of MS-13, regularly cited as a threat by US President Donald Trump.

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said it also deported over 5,800 suspected gang members, up nine percent on 2017.

Immigration authorities also confiscated over 820 firearms and more than 2.7 tons of illegal drugs, ICE added in its statement.

Of those deported, more than 1,300 were affiliated with MS-13, which operates in the US and Central America.

Fighting the gang — full name Mara Salvatrucha — became a top priority for the US Justice Department last year.

Established among Salvadorans who fled war at home for Los Angeles in the 1980s, it is one of several gangs behind brutal violence in the so-called “Northern Triangle” of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.

It remains active in the US — but its approximately 10,000 members make up a fraction of the country’s 1.4 million active gang members, according to Jose Miguel Cruz, a research director at Florida International Unviersity’s Latin American and Caribbean Center.

“Trump is overstating the danger the gang poses here in the United States,” he wrote in a Washington Post column in January.