Left-wing media outlets Vox and ProPublica are defending the MS-13 gang with the release of a video and links to its reporting on the L.A.-based El Salvadorian gang.
“We need to separate fact from fiction about MS-13,” the text accompanying the video posted on YouTube said.
The video draws on ProPublica’s Hannah Dreier’s stories about the gang, which Breitbart News has reported, including her description of MS-13 thugs as “Mighty Munchkins” and not reporting the gang’s role in grizzly murders and human and drug trafficking.
“So to hear Trump tell it, MS-13 is this shadowy gang that’s organized across continents with major plans to disrupt the security of the United States border, and what I’m actually seeing is that this gang is settling, basically, high school beefs,” ProPublica’s Hannah Dreier told NPR.
“One detective told me that he called them ‘Mighty Munchkins’ because these are kids who haven’t yet finished their growth spurts, but they team up together in the woods and wreak a lot of carnage,” Dreier said.
In the video, Dreier describes the alleged gang members she has been following on Long Island as regular kids who are “working after-school jobs, living with their parents. They get around Long Island on bicycles because they can’t afford cars.”
The video calls MS-13 “an American problem,” describing the gang that originally formed in Los Angeles as illegal aliens from El Salvador who had to protect themselves from other illegal aliens.
The video states that MS-13 is not highly organized, does not have a central leader, and has “no global ambitions.”
And yet, “MS-13 alarmism has persisted for decades,” the video narrator states.
The video concludes:
For any policy to work its worth, keeping the facts front and center, MS-13 is not invading the country. They’re neither a new phenomenon nor growing in number, but they have committed acts of horrific violence, mostly against other immigrants in specific communities. And that is still an American problem.
As Breitbart News has reported, MS-13 is, indeed, a problem in America:
In early 2018, for example, Ivan Alexis Pena-Rodriguez, 20; Yervin Josue Romero-Rivera, 21; and Miguel Angel Ayala-Rivera, 24, were all formally charged with first-degree assault, plus other assorted criminal counts in Montgomery County, Maryland. All are members of MS-13.
When police served a search warrant at a house near Albert Einstein High School, they found a 15-year-old girl “severely wounded and bloody,” according to WJLA.
On Aug. 1, 2017, the source said Pena-Rodriguez, Romero-Rivera, Ayala-Rivera, plus two other men, used a solid bat to beat the girl behind the single-family home along Valley View Avenue. The men reportedly took turns whacking the 15-year-old girl’s flailing body — 28 swings in total. Her injuries included an “indented” buttocks, discolored arms and legs, and visible bleeding from the neck down.
A second unnamed source would later tell cops that Ayala-Rivera (‘Noctorno’) ordered the backyard clubbing because he felt the victim was “not doing a good job as an MS-13 prostitute.” The same source revealed Ayala-Rivera (‘Noctorno’) raked in a lot of money by trafficking teenage girls to men of all ages.
A Center for Immigration Studies (CSI) report and map released in the wake of the horrific crimes contradicts ProPublica’s so-called investigative reporting about MS-13.
Some of the key findings of the CIS report:
• 506 MS-13 members arrested or charged with crimes that were reported in 22 states. The most cases were reported in California (92), Maryland (85), New York (80), and Virginia (63).
• MS-13 crimes are not primarily petty nuisance crimes; 207 MS-13 members were charged with murder. More than 100 were accused of conspiracy/racketeering, and dozens more for drug trafficking, sex trafficking, attempted murder, sexual assaults, and extortion.
• The median age of MS-13 gang members identified was 23, and suspects ranged in age from 14 to 57.
• The median age of their victims was 19, and victims ranged in age from 14 to 74. Sixty of the victims were below the age of 18, including 52 of the murder victims.
• 120 of the 506 MS-13 suspects in our case set arrived as UACs (Unaccompanied Alien Children), including 48 of the murder suspects.
• The location of these MS-13 crimes corresponds with locations of large numbers of UACs whom the federal government resettled into American communities.
ProPublica is funded in part by left-wing activists, including billionaire George Soros.
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