Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Eric Hershberg: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): You’re talking about Abrego Garcia. Is that the one, yeah? He’s an illegal alien, MS-13 gang member, and foreign terrorist. This comes out of the State Department and very legitimate sources. I mean, I assume. I’m reading, I’m just giving you what they handed to me, but this was supposed to be certified stuff.
Hershberg: Well, Trump has made references to MS-13 for years with no knowledge of the details. And what he does in the excerpt that you shared a moment ago is a typical Trumpian gesture, which is saying, Well, I don’t know, but I’ve heard it said, or it is, they say. This is a classic conspiracy theory way of conveying disinformation. In this case, he attributes it to the State Department but qualifies that he doesn’t. He just assumes that the State Department has good intel that enables them to have reached this conclusion.
Hershberg: Yeah. Again, that indifference to the fortune of other people is a hallmark of Trump’s behavior in the presidency and, indeed, his behavior in the public arena for decades. He’s demagogued questions of crime. He’s demagogued questions of immigration. He’s demagogued questions of depictions of people who are unlike us, who are “invading” the country. This is his stock-in-trade.
Hershberg: Sure. MS-13 was a street gang established in the mid 1980s in the Los Angeles area where Salvadoran migrants—refugees from the Civil War of the ’80s—migrated to California and were vulnerable to violence from established street gangs. MS-13 arises as a response of that vulnerable community, and it becomes its own independent criminal street gang. As those folks are deported to El Salvador in the ’90s, the gang takes root in El Salvador and has became an extremely violent and extremely destructive force [there]. But at the same time, there were networks of MS-13 still on the West Coast, and there arose networks of MS-13 in metropolitan Washington, D.C., which of course is one of the principal destinations of Salvadoran migrants. We were never persuaded that this is a “transnational gang,” though that’s the label that it’s been given by the U.S. government, but it is a gang that has a presence in multiple locations.
Hershberg: Well, both things. The social role—gangs take on the role of governing entities in some locations where the state is absent. This is certainly characteristic in El Salvador, where the state doesn’t provide for security, doesn’t provide for order, doesn’t provide some kinds of basic social and community services. And the gangs like organized crime groups in many different settings take on some of these social functions. MS and the other Salvadoran gangs have tended to use highly performative extreme violence as a way of establishing both their identity and of asserting their influence. One of the things certainly that alarms us about gang presence here in the U.S.—and in El Salvador as well, where the gangs in fact were enormously destructive and enormously disruptive to people’s ability to live safe, everyday lives—is the degree to which gory, macabre violence has been a hallmark of MS-13. And that’s very real.
Hershberg: First of all, I don’t think that I’m aware of any research that would identify that clothing as somehow emblematic of MS-13. What I would say is that in our research, looking into the presence and the nature and organization activities of MS-13 in the greater Washington, D.C., area, one of the things that we found quite striking was the degree to which law enforcement officials were not able to correctly identify who was part of the gang and who was not. So the idea that this gang identification sheet is authoritative information—certainly based on our work several years ago, including in Prince George’s County, we would not have considered that a reliable source.
Hershberg: Yes. Well, one of the things that we did in the project was we would ask law enforcement officials to enable us to interview people who were detained under their jurisdiction and who were members of gangs. And we would find them that some of the people they referred us to were clearly, as best we could tell, not part of the gang.
Hershberg: Well, the general claim is plausible, but I wouldn’t.... I don’t see precisely why [we should rely on] an anonymous source whose information we have no basis for verifying. And we don’t see any other profile that would enable us to associate this individual with MS-13. We don’t have any information about particular criminal activity that this person is said to have carried out. We don’t have any—whether it’s robbery, whether it’s car theft or whatever it might be—that would associate him with a clique of MS-13 operating in Maryland.
Hershberg: The way that Barrio 18, or MS-13, operates in El Salvador is that they extort local businesses, self-employed corner stores, bodegas, bus drivers, and so on and so forth. And you have to pay or else you get torched. And what seems to have happened is that his mother didn’t pay. At that point, not only is she subject to violence, but anybody related to her is also subject to violence. And the fact that he fled is itself an act of defiance that is subject to retribution by the gang. It’s also the case that even if he weren’t a member of MS-13, if he lived in a territory that was governed by MS-13 then he automatically becomes a target of violence from Barrio. So there’s all sorts of reasons to treat credibly the basic narrative that led the immigration court to withhold the order of removal.
Hershberg: Well, I think one of the things we just don’t understand in this case is: What is the criminal activity that he’s associated with? If he were an active member of the gang, he would be involved in criminal activities. And there’s been no charge, as best I can tell, of his participation in any such activities. Recruitment into the gang typically happens during one’s teenage years. The gangs target young people who are directionless, who don’t have roots in their community, [who] often have broken families—and they offer a kind of family, they offer a community, they offer membership in something. So yes, typically, the entry into gang activity, gang networks happens during the teenage years. And yes, it would be rather unusual for somebody to first connect to the gang in their twenties.
Hershberg: Well, the facts don’t add up in any way, but I think they do in the sense that we know that for years Trump has demagogued the image of MS-13. This is the person who talks about migrants “poisoning the blood” of Americans. This is the person who talks about vermin, who talks about contamination. And there’s no loyalty here to facts or to decency or to civility. This is somebody who is an opportunist and who deploys fear of outsiders, who deploys resentment against migrants—and for whom, to be able to say, MS-13, MS-13, transnational gang, terrorist organization, is all just part of a demagogic toolkit.
Hershberg: Thanks very much. Thank you for your reporting.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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