On Monday, President Donald Trump addressed the families and friends of police officers killed in the line of duty outside the Capitol building, lamenting the “unfair defamation and vilification” of our nation’s law enforcement.
Trump vowed to “restore law and order and justice for all Americans,” and promised that “MS-13 is going to be gone from our streets very soon,” Politico reports. MS-13, which began in Los Angeles in the 1980s, is the first street gang to be designated a “transnational criminal organization” by the United States.
Trump has previously blamed the rise of MS-13 on the Obama administration’s “weak” immigration policies, but the Department of Justice has so far been unable to provide evidence of an uptick in gang membership in the U.S. Further, studies suggest it’s deportations—not lax immigration policy—that strengthened the gang across Central America.
The president’s comments follow a memo released last week by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that encouraged federal prosecutors to seek stronger sentences against defendants, reversing recent trends toward criminal justice reform.
