Sheriff Vincent DeMarco of Suffolk County, New York, is blaming former President Obama’s unaccompanied minor program for the recent explosion of grisly homicides on Long Island. The town of Brentwood has been besieged by the vicious gang MS-13. Their weapons of choice are machetes and baseball bats. Their hallmarks: repeated slashes from a blade that leave victims nearly unrecognizable.
There were eleven murders of mostly young people during the 2016-2017 school year. It got so bad that parents were afraid to let their kids go to school and teens said that “any perceived slight to a gang member, especially a refusal to join, can mean death.”
After one high school warned parents not to let their kids wear anything “gang-affiliated,” gang members started deciding on a daily basis what colors were off-limits, leaving students to guess what not to wear.
“Kids are losing their childhoods,” said Jennifer Suarez, whose 15-year-old niece was beaten and hacked to death in the street last year. “You can see the stress on their faces as they get ready. It’s like, you know, they’re suiting up for battle.”
Sheriff DeMarco says that Obama’s misguided unaccompanied minor program provided the avenue for the notoriously brutal gang to infiltrate his community and other communities across the country.
Since Jan. 1, 2016, 17 of 45 — or a stunning 38 percent — of all murders in the county have been connected to MS-13, Police Commissioner Timothy Sini testified before a Senate panel earlier this month.
“These unaccompanied minors who are already MS-13 members in El Salvador have made their way to communities throughout the country, but Suffolk County has been extremely hard hit with this program in that 4,000 minors from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, a lot of them MS-13 members before they came are now in Suffolk County,” he said.
During the hearing, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) charged that the Obama’s administration knowingly allowed 16 MS-13 gang members to settle into the U.S. after apprehending them at the border in 2014. “CBP apprehended them, knew they were MS-13 gang members, and they processed and they disbursed them into our communities,” Johnson said in his opening statement as chairman of the committee.
Sheriff DeMarco told Stuart Varney on Fox Business Tuesday that since 2014, HHS and the Office of Refugee Resettlement have brought in 4,500 unaccompanied minors from the border into the town of Brentwood in Suffolk County.
DeMarco said that he brought the problem up with Attorney General Jeff Sessions when he recently visited the town.
“I don’t know if he was totally aware of the numbers and the intelligence that we have that MS-13 in El Salvador is exploiting the loopholes that we have in the program,” DeMarco said.
“But 80% of the sponsors of these children that are already in the United States, are in the United States illegally,” he added. “HHS is placing unaccompanied minors from Central America into families that are already here illegally. And there are no consequences when these families don’t make sure that those kids follow the rules of the program and part of the rules are that you have to go to immigration courts and keep up with hearings and these kids just get lost in the system.”
Asked what he thought about the scuffle on the Texas House floor Monday, DeMarco said, “I think it’s a sad state of affairs when a state government has to pass a law to force law enforcement to cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security.”
He added, “I think the people want local law enforcement to share intelligence with federal agencies.”
President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have vowed to “really go after” brutal criminal gangs like MS-13.
“We are putting MS-13 in jail and getting them the hell out of our country,” Trump told the Associated Press in April. “They are a bad group, and somebody said they are as bad as al-Qaida, which is a hell of a reference. … We are out in Long Island cleaning out the MS-13 scum.”
During his visit to Long Island in April, Sessions said: “The MS-13 mantra is kill rape and control, and so that should tell us enough about the kind of groups we confront. … Our motto is justice for victims and consequences for criminals.”
Addressing MS-15 directly, he added, “We are targeting you. We are coming after you.”
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