Trump’s MS-13 Miss
President Donald Trump blamed the Obama administration for allowing “bad MS 13 gangs to form in cities across U.S.” due to “weak illegal immigration policies.” The MS-13 gang was formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s and had spread across the country years before Barack Obama was elected president.
Trump made the claim in an early morning tweet April 18:
The weak illegal immigration policies of the Obama Admin. allowed bad MS 13 gangs to form in cities across U.S. We are removing them fast!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2017
Later that day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions also cited the MS-13 gang in remarks about efforts to combat transnational criminal organizations, claiming that the gang “now has more than 10,000 members in at least 40 states in this country – up significantly from just a few years ago.” But the FBI has been using the 10,000 estimate for years, as early as 2006.
It’s certainly possible that MS-13 membership has increased either recently or since 2006, but the Justice Department was unable to provide numbers showing that. Nora Scheland in the FBI’s national press office told us in an email that she had “no further data and no year-by-year data that I can provide” beyond the estimate of 10,000 “MS-13 members and associates.”
MS-13 History
Trump claimed that the Obama administration “allowed” MS-13 to “form
