Imported MS-13 gang members have taken over part of a school on New York’s Long Island, GOP Rep. Peter King told Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly on Wednesday.
“We have a school in my district where one whole hallway is dedicated to MS-13,” King told Kelly. “It’s a no-go area unless you’re MS-13 … and most of those kids came in [to the United States legally] as unaccompanied minors,” he said at a hearing.
MS-13 members committed “17 murders in my district in the last year alone,” he said.
Kelly responded to King by noting that new border protections have slashed the northern flow of “unaccompanied alien children” by more than 70 percent. But he emphasized that MS-13 members game immigration rules to send their members into the United States.
“They’re trafficked up here through the network, using their families,” said Kelly, continuing:
They’re trafficked up here… the vast majority of people that come up from that part of the world are not bad people, but they are simple people, they are uneducated people as a general rule, coming up here for economic purposes. So you take a 16, 17-year-old that can’t speak English, can’t read or write, has got a 6th-grade education, and now you bring him to Islip, New York. How long he stays in the education system there before MS-13 just recruits him? … it is a huge problem … it is real cancer and getting worse.
MS-13 members have committed a series of murders on Long Island. The crimes occurred as the local population of youth migrants from Latin America more than doubled from 2015 to 2016. As of April 2017, over 200 MS-13 members lived on Long Island, according to the FBI.
On May, 15 simultaneous federal and local law enforcement raids in Los Angeles reportedly “decapitated” the gang. This year, over 398 gang members have been deported to El Salvador, compared to a total of 534 deportations to the Central American country in 2016.
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