Trump Exaggerates Record on MS-13

New York Times

By Linda Qiu

May 29, 2018

Trump Exaggerates Record on MS-13

WHAT WAS SAID

“We’re taking them out of the country by the thousands.”

— President Trump, speaking Tuesday night at a rally in Nashville

THE FACTS

This is exaggerated.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement does not break down deportations according to gang affiliation, a spokesman for the agency said. But based on the number of arrests alone, Mr. Trump’s estimate of “thousands” is impossible.

In the 2017 fiscal year — which began in October 2016 and ended in September 2017 — 796 members of MS-13, a transnational gang that has ties to El Salvador, were arrested, and 405 were arrested in the first quarter of the 2018 fiscal year, data that ICE provided to The New York Times shows.

In all, that’s about 1,200 MS-13 members, and it’s likely not all of them have been removed. The time between an arrest and deportation can vary greatly, and backlog has stalled the process. In 2017, the average wait time for a hearing where a judge may order deportation was 685 days, according to data from TRAC, a research institute at Syracuse University.

The number of MS-13 members who were arrested in the 2017 fiscal year was higher than the previous eight years, but ICE arrested more than 1,100 in the 2008 fiscal year and almost 1,300 in 2007. Those figures contradict Mr. Trump’s previous claims that “records” were set.

The agency removed a total of 5,936 gang members in the 2017 fiscal year, and 1,082 in the 2018 fiscal year through March. It is unclear how many belong to MS-13.

During the rally, Mr. Trump also reiterated many claims that The Times and others have previously debunked: that Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, supported MS-13 (she never said this), that illegal border crossings had declined 40 percent (they recently increased), and that tax cuts he signed into law last year were the largest in history (they rank 12th). He also incorrectly described other countries as not “sending their best” through the diversity visa program (applicants enter of their own volition), claimed construction had begun on his border wall (it hasn’t), and said that the suspect in the Manhattan truck attack in October had sponsored two dozen family members through “chain migration” (this is implausible).

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