By Matthew Vadum -- Front Page Mag——Bio and Archives--August 3, 2017
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Together, we're going to restore safety to our streets and peace to our communities, and we're going to destroy the vile criminal cartel, MS-13, and many other gangs. But MS-13 is particularly violent. They don’t like shooting people because it's too quick, it's too fast … they like to knife them and cut them, and let them die slowly because that way it's more painful, and they enjoy watching that much more. These are animals.Since January 2016, “MS-13 gang members have brutally murdered 17 beautiful, young lives in this area on Long Island alone.” Gang members “kidnap, they extort, they rape and they rob,” the president said.
They prey on children. They shouldn’t be here. They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs. They slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives. They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful, quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields. They're animals.Trump declared that it is “the policy of this administration to dismantle, decimate and eradicate MS-13,” and praised law enforcement for “liberating our American towns.”
This is like I’d see in a movie: They're liberating the town, like in the old Wild West, right? We're liberating our towns. I never thought I’d be standing up here talking about liberating the towns on Long Island where I grew up, but that's what you’re doing.
Right now, we have less than 6,000 Enforcement and Removal Officers in ICE. This is not enough to protect a nation of more than 320 million people. It's essential that Congress fund another 10,000 ICE officers -- and we're asking for that -- so that we can eliminate MS-13 and root out the criminal cartels from our country.And Trump laid the blame for the rise of MS-13 where much of it belongs: on former President Obama. The Obama administration “enacted an open-door policy to illegal migrants from Central America. ‘Welcome in. Come in, please, please.’" Under Obama’s policies, “MS-13 surged into the country,” Trump said. “In the three years before I took office,” the president added, “more than 150,000 unaccompanied alien minors arrived at the border and were released all throughout our country into United States’ communities -- at a tremendous monetary cost to local taxpayers and also a great cost to life and safety.” Mara Salvatrucha, commonly called MS-13, reportedly operates in 42 states and in the District of Columbia, as well as Canada, Mexico, and Central America. Its motto is “kill, rape, control.” Although often described as a Salvadoran criminal organization, that doesn’t tell the whole story. MS-13 was founded by Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles in the 1980s who came to the U.S. after the various Central American civil wars of the period.
Many died or saw their loved ones killed in death squads, civilian massacres, beheadings, and in the crossfire. A reality often not talked about is the fact that many of the soldiers in the war were children. Using firearms, blunt objects or machetes, Ms-13 members have been known to leave their victims with their limbs severed, at times decapitating them as well; this kind of violence is a characteristic that distinguishes them from other gangs.The origin of the name Mara Salvatrucha is disputed, but Rivera reports that it “is a conglomeration, combining the name of a violent street gang in El Salvador called, La Mara or gang, with Salvatruchas, a term referring to members of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, which was a group of Salvadorian peasants trained as guerilla fighters,” Rivera writes. “The ‘13’ is believed to stand for the letter M, the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, but it [has] also been rumored to pay homage to a California prison gang, the Mexican Mafia.” Others say the “13” refers to the 13 seconds new initiates to the gang are supposedly beaten by existing members in a hazing ritual. No matter how despicable and loathsome MS-13 may be, there are plenty of activists on the Left who side with the group over America’s 45th president. Vox’s Dara Lind idiotically proclaimed Trump’s address to police as “the most chilling speech of his presidency,” and accused him of “explicitly encouraging police violence.”
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
Visit the Subversion Inc. Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter.