Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman from the campaign trail to the State of the Union. Donald Trump has put the spotlight on one gang in particular, MS thirteen, or Mara Salvatrucha, a gang that originated in Los Angeles, spread to Central America and has come back for Trump. MS thirteen has become the centerpiece of an argument on closing borders and deportation. Today, we're going to try to get behind the story. We're going to ask what is MS thirteen, what kinds of violence has it actually perpetrated, and what should we think about that for the question of policy on immigration. We're also going to focus on the question of what happens when the government tries to wrack down on a gang like MS thirteen. To do that, we're joined today by Hannah Dryer. Hannah is a reporter for Pro Publica. She spent three years in Venezuela as correspondent for the AP, and she won the twenty nineteen Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for a fantastic series Trapped in Gangland. How the MS thirteen crackdown shattered immigrant lives. Hannah, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thank you. It's great to be here, Hannah. Maybe we can start with the most basic historical question, who or what is MS thirteen? Where do they come from? And what are they? MS thirteen is a funny criminal organization because it's really founded sort of between the US and Central America. So the first MS thirteen members were Central American immigrants and refugees in Los Angeles. These were people who were fleeing civil wars in their own countries and they banded together in LA to try to protect themselves from the other gangs that were already there. So this is south central LA in the nineteen eighties and then into the early nineteen nineties, and it's an American born gang exactly. So they were sort of these scrappy young immigrants in LA who were getting picked on and bullied, and they were punk rockers. The aesthetic of MS thirteen is still very nineteen eighties. It's like skinny black jeans and devil iconography. It's sort of this like punk rock or metal symbolism that they still use. And they grew into a gang, and then there was a wave of deportations in the nineteen nineties and a lot of hardcore MS thirteen members were sent back to Central America, and they're the gang really metastasized and became this hyper violent, terrible organization that we have today. And we're seeing a new generation of kids who are fleeing that violence coming back to the US. And those are really the MS their team members that we see committing the most murders and the most violence in the States today. Some of the writing that I've read about their early origins, about MS thirteen and even until today, emphasizes the idea of kids without parents. It emphasizes the idea that the first members of the gang were people who had fled Central America as teenagers, often without their parents. It emphasized that people who are crossing borders, whether they're being deported or whether they're coming across the border, are often doing without their parents. First of all, I'm wondering if you think that's accurate. And second of all, even if it was accurate historically, is it still accurate today at all? Yeah? I mean, I think it's a gang born out of dislocation in a lot of ways. The Civil Wars in the nineteen eighties and Central America are crucial. A lot of people who came over were coming over alone, and they also had seen a lot of violence in their own countries. So these are young people who had already been traumatized by civil wars, which is important to say the US how to roll in absolutely. And now we're seeing kids who are sometimes coming without their parents. Often they've been left behind in places like El Salvador and Honduras by their parents, and they sort of grow up without a strong family structure, and then they come to this country and they're reunited with their parents, but their parents are almost strangers to them, and usually they're working really hard. So these kids come and they're lonely. And what they've told me is that they feel like MS thirteen really becomes their family, and MS thirteen understands them in a way that their parents don't. And you know, they feel sometimes like their parents abandon them and the gang was there for them when they needed someone. So it's a gang that can function as a kind of surrogate family, and that has, in your word, from a moment ago, a commitment to hyper violence. So let's talk about that hyper violence for a moment, will try to be nonsensational about it, but just accurate and describe it as it is. What kinds of violence qualify in your mind as hyper right, So all gangs basically are out there committing violence. MS thirteen is unique, I think, and that it's committing violence for violence's own sake a lot of times. So it's not a gang that has huge enterprises. They're not doing a ton of human trafficking or drug dealing. They're basically too chaotic for that kind of big business. What they're mostly doing is spectacular violence, and it's calculated to be spectacular, so spectacular in the sense of it makes a spectacle. Everyone has to notice it exactly. People talk about it in the neighborhood. It terrorizes people. So it's usually violence committed with machetes, and MS thirteen will attack somebody in a big group, and this is partly to foster that sense of family in a sick way, and also meaning the attackers are exactly. So the attackers will, you know, surround somebody in a sugarcane field if you're in El Salvador, or surround somebody in the woods if you're in Long Island and run at them all at once with machetes, and the police who deal with these murders say often people look like they've been hit by a car. People are just completely destroyed by these attacks, and they'll cut off people's limbs. They'll leave people in these very disturbing tableaus with several bodies stacked together, and they'll also use baseball bats. Sometimes they'll use tree branches, and the violence is just very brutal. Do you have a theory about why the violence? I mean, we're accustomed to a kind of Godfather like myth of organized crime as a organized which this isn't, but be as sort of aimed at putting together, you know, real money. That does not seem to be the case at all for MS. Thirteen. It seems that the violence, as you said, exists to create some communal feeling about violence. I think that's one of the scariest things about the gang, And I'm wondering if you have a thought about why, why why the violence for the sake of violence? It's very biked into the culture of MS thirteen. So, going back to what we were saying about those nineteen eighties symbols, MS thirteen talks a lot about the devil and people off and say the devil is here with us, or the devil took me over, so I had to do it. And in fact they're the core gang symbol, right is a hand formed into the shape of an M, right, which because devil horns if you put it up, and it's the M for the MS thirteen if you put it down. So yeah, exactly, and so they an MS. Their team member would tell you, well, this is basically a satanic organization and the devil demands blood, and so that's why that will be their own self description completely. And if you had anybody actually say that to you, oh yeah, yeah, they say it's just like that. They say, oh, the devil took me. The devil was with us. And when they're trained into the gang, when they're first initiated, especially in Central America, they have to kill someone and in order to get into the gang, yeah, to be a real member. And somebody who was initiated in that way described it to me and said, the senior leader came, they went to a field together. There was a man who was tied up, and the senior leader said, the devil is here with us right now, the devil is inside you, you have to kill this man. That's very disturbing me. I was telling you this went on to say they, I mean they killed the person. Yeah, they all did. So the person who was telling me this doesn't know if he struck the fatal blow, but he definitely feels like he became a murderer that day. Yeah, which was I guess the point of the ritual. It's hard to know if that serves a social function. You sort of want to say it doesn't. But another thing that people who are part of this gang tell me is that they joined because they wanted to feel powerful, they wanted to be known, and they felt like they were always getting picked on by other people. And Central America is a very violent place, and there's these real histories of trauma there. I mean, there were these very intense civil wars, and I think people live in a sense of perpetual fear, and they rightly live like that. I mean, they are often in fear for their lives, and being part of this gang and especially this violence, I think temporarily makes these young men mostly feel invincible. And then the other part of this culture that's really important is that it's a very fatalistic culture. So MS thirteen is sort of satanic in some ways. But the people who get deep into the gang also tell you that they know that they're going to end up dead or in prison. That feeds into this culture of violence because people don't care if they get caught, and so you do get a lot of people, and sometimes they're really young, like fifteen and sixteen, who are willing to go commit these acts of violence and not cover any of it up because they're figuring they're going to be dead soon anyway. They're going to be in prison anyway. And that fits in with what you were saying about MS thirteen not being focused on money. You know, if you have if you're a young gang banger and you have the fantasy that you'll get rich and retire from the gang life, then you might have some limits to what you might be prepared to do. You have a long run goal. But if your view from day one is I'm going to die, my soul already belongs to the devil, then there's not as much pressure I would think to try to amass money that there's a kind of long termism to the idea of amassing money completely. These are not goal oriented people. And most of the MS their team members who I reported on on Long Island, we're working normal jobs. So they were in maybe high school during the day, and then they were a dishwasher, or they were working at a car repair shop, they were working at fast food restaurants, and they're going and they're working full shifts, and then they're getting off and going to the woods and being MS their team members, and then they're getting up early and going to high school. So nobody is getting rich from this gang. Really, there was a story that I read it. I think this may have come from one of your articles that described a major drug bust that was set up with an MS thirteen leader that never happened because the leader couldn't raise the gas money to get in his car to drive and actually make the buy that the cops were staking out. Yeah, I mean, this was something that I saw all the time doing this reporting. I had access to one MS thirteen members Facebook messages, so I read through two thousand pages of Facebook messages between this one member and the gang leaders, and so much of what they were talking about was who can get gas today? Do we have a car today? Can anybody afford gas? If not, are we going to use our bicycles to go and try to sell weed or anybody even have a bicycle that's working right now. It's like being in the head of a broke teenager who's trying to get to the mall, except their teenagers who are trying to go find people to hurt or sell drugs. So that almost states why this is so terrifying, namely that it's transnational and you're describing teenagers trying to get to the mall in Long Island, except that they're not just going to the mall, They're going to engage in acts of organized violence. And the transnational aspect of Mstarchen has been there from the start. Right, It's a US gang that then gets transferred to Central America and then makes its way back to the United States in various complicated ways. So I guess what I want to ask you about is why does this violence persist in the US. I understand that in the case of Central America, there are countries that have been traumatized by violence, their individuals who have been traumatized. It somehow seems maybe this is just bias on my part, It somehow seems more comprehensible in the wake of long, painful violence, civil war which exists not only in El Salvadora but in other Central American countries, that one would get a kind of extreme gang of this sort. But here it is functioning in not just in the United States, but in Long Island, a few miles from where we're sitting right now, and that's of course inherently terrifying. Why is the violence following the group here? So this is sort of the most controversial point about MS thirt. Some people, especially at the Department of Justice right now and probably in the Republican Party, would tell you that MS thirteen is being directed in the United States by people in El Salvador and other people, mostly people who do direct gang intervention. Maybe immigration advocates would tell you that actually there's very little organization and MS thirteen functions like autonomous franchises, and there's almost no communication with El Salvador. And it's hard to know what's true because both sides sort of have an interest in arguing for their version of how this gang is working, and the gang's not going to come out and tell you. So what I saw, at least on Long Island, there is some communication with El Salvador, especially when it comes to green lighting people. That's how the gang talks about deciding to kill someone. So I saw that there is communication when it comes to killing a fellow gang member or figuring out if a gang is a snitch or not, and that when it comes to other kinds of violence, like going after the girls who are trash talking you in the school hallway the other day, I didn't see that there was much communication. I mean, it's fascinating you are offering an account that it's potentially consistent with both stories, with the FBI story and with the gang intervention story. In other words, one could credibly say that there is some kind of coordination if before you kill a fellow gang member you have to get a green light from someone in Elsalvador. But at the same time, most of the activity is presumably not of that nature, and so in that sense, it would be disorganized and uncoordinated and happening at the local level, right. I mean, like with so many of these super polarizing issues, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. And as far as what we do about the violence that this gang is still perpetrating in this country, one thing I think is important to understand is that that violence isn't really growing. It sort of goes in cycles. So the gang has been the same size in this country for more than a decade at about ten thousand people, which is less than one percent of total gang members. And the violence that they commit is really insane. I mean, it grabs headlines. It's not like what other people are doing. But it's still less than one percent of gang murders. And what I saw is that it's really a local law enforcement issue. When law enforcement was able to take down this gang, it was mostly through the kind of sophisticated organized crime strategies that take down other kinds of gangs. So it wasn't about going to El Salvador and taking down like the head of MS thirteen. It was about figuring out who's in this gang in one town and finding reasons to arrest them, and then flipping them on each other and just sort of one by one, arresting everybody in the gang so that they weren't out on the streets committing murder and recruiting new people. Does that strike you as an approach that would address their root cause as well, though, or does it seem like it's more. In other words, you can imagine you need to join strategy. If in fact the gang is capable of sustaining itself at the number of ten thousand in the US, then it must be getting new members, and they're either American teenagers or teenagers who's come into the country, or some combination. Right. Well, I mean, I don't you would think that that's a simple strategy, and if it worked, then we just wouldn't have MS thirteen violence here. But it's not as simple as you would think. For one thing, this is a Spanish speaking gang and it's mostly composed of Latino people, and a lot of these small town police forces have very few Latino people who could infiltrate the gang and don't speak Spanish. So this is a phenomenon that we see all over the country, but it's very prevalent, for example, on Long Island, where you have large Latino populations that have come relatively recently in historical terms, and then you have police forces that are made up of the people who have been on Long Island for fifty or sixty years. Great so on Long Island during the height of an MS thirteen killing spree in twenty sixteen that was getting national headlines. Trump got very fixated on this nice spree. We're coming to him soon. The police force, which is one of the biggest police forces in the country, had three people who were certified to speak Spanish, and it's just very hard to see how a police force like that can effectively police this gang and protect the community from the gang. And what ended up happening on Long Island is the Long Island FBI Gang Task Force really beefed off its presence and brought in FBI agents who spoke Spanish and they were then able to pretty much dismantle the gang out there. And we haven't had a killing in almost a year. So it wasn't a pure local law enforce and effort. It was local law enforcement assisted by, in fact necessarily it sounds like assisted by the FBI, right, But I mean, why why was that necessary? You would think that a police force that is dealing with a lot of immigrant people. Some of the towns on Long Island are mostly immigrant, would be more equipped to deal with those kinds of problems, for sure. I mean, of course the police forces need to add, need to have lots of Spanish speaking officers, but I do wonder if I mean a small town police force isn't necessarily equipped to handle major gang violence. Yeah, So, I mean in this case, it worked pretty well. The FBI came in and they really cleaned house, and they did it by being on the ground in this community. And it had almost nothing to do with the border. And that's one thing that I hear a lot when people talk about MS thirteen. There's this idea that we just need to close the border or secure the border, and then we'll be able to get rid of this gang. And I think that really ignores the fact that the gang was founded in the US and most of the people who I've spoken with who are in the gang now were recruited in the US. So the typical situation that I saw was people would come over from Central America, land in one of these towns like the suburbs of New York or the suburbs of Virginia or LA and not have a strong support system and get recruited in an American high school or at an American McDonald's where they were hanging out after school. So closing the border doesn't do a lot to solve that. And FBI task forces also don't really help with that. I think that's something we need a different kind of program for. So there's an anthropologist called Tom Ward who wrote a book that's based on I think about a decade of field work, fourteen years of field work. He says inside of some parts of MS thirteen and it's periphery, and he called the book Gangs Without Borders to emphasize the transnational nature of the gang, that it goes across borders. And then the opening paragraph of the book when you open it up, is an apology for the title, which is very rare. You know when you write, when you write a book, you don't usually want to have to apologize for the title of first thing out of the box. And he says, you know, I don't want you to think, in hearing this title, that we're talking about something like an international terrorist organization. On the other hand, I am trying to show you that the nature of moving between country has been part of or significant to the experience of MS thirteen, and I want to use that balance to try to ask about this this point of the border closing. Clearly we're thinking of this when we hear it because of Donald Trump. Trump maybe he was influenced by the fact that he's from Queens, which is part of Long Island, and is aware of what's going on in the Long Island world. And then this spike of murders in Long Island that you described from MS thirteen happened around the time that he was running for president, and he made this a centerpiece of his rhetoric. And since part of his run of the presence he was to emphasize closing the border and the dangers of immigrants crossing the border, and particularly of Central American immigrants crossing the borders, it was sort of like a cause made to order for him. What is the danger associated with thinking of border closings as something that could reduce or cut down on MS thirteen? You've made the case that it wouldn't work. But what's the danger associated with saying, well, let's try Why don't we try to do more work of deporting gang members if they're not US citizens and trying to stop gang members from coming in. Yeah, I mean, I do think the fact that Trump is from Queens has a ton to do with how focused he's been on this gang. It's funny, there have been all of these there's been all this violence on Long Island, and there's also been all this MS thirteen violence in the suburbs of DC, but Trump is so much more focused on what's going on up in New York, even though he's technically closer to what's going on like Virginia and Maryland, so those psychologically, he's very much a product of the Long Island milia completely. One danger of focusing on immigration enforcement when you're thinking about how to get rid of MS thirteen is that the same people who you need to be helping you dismantle this gang, the same people who would be your informants, are the people who might be targeted by harsher immigration enforcement. So I saw this happen a few times on Long Island, where young teenage boys who are involved with the gang or adjacent to the gang when kid had been attacked by the gang, were turned into FBI informants and started working with police in the FBI to try to bring down the kids who were torturing them, the gang members who were in their community. And after a few months they were turned over themselves to Ice for deportation. And so one informant was locked up with the same people who he'd been informing on and they knew that he had been an informant and they started threatening his life. That gets around if the people who try to help law enforcement end up being arrested for deportation. People know that, and they're much less likely to go to detectives and help them. And this is a gang that's composed of Latino teenagers, so it's already going to be hard for US law enforcement to infiltrate it. And so when you don't protect informants, that can really destroy an investigation. And I had detectives from the FBI Gang Task Force and local police complaining to me about this. Is it that the minute you start thinking about deportations, you're inevitably going to alienate the people who might work with the government to fight the gang. Or is it that the government, ice and others just do it badly? In your fascinating and rich reporting, often it seemed as though it was the incompetence of the enforcement system that was causing the problems. You know that someone who was helping the FBI would get on a list and then someone would bureacratically say well, now they're on the list and we can't get them off. The list, and then that would lead to a deportation. I mean, I'm over characterizing it, but you know what I'm talking about. And then when I read that, my instinct was to say, well, they have to do it better. They have to be more careful and make sure that if someone is helping the government, that person doesn't get deported and doesn't get put into these categories. So that would be an argument not so much for taking this out of the deportation and border's frame as for staying in that frame, but doing it in a much more sophisticated and successful way. Or the alternative view I guess would be that no, the minute you go into that frame at all, you're going to alienate people and you're not going to be able to fight the gang. Do you have an instinct between those versions? Yeah, I mean, in some ways it's above my pay grade, Like I have the nice job of being able to critique policy and I don't have to make it. But I do think that some people need to be deported. I don't think anybody would disagree that some of these really hardcore MS thirteen killers who've stuck into this country illegally and are doing lots of damage here shouldn't be protected at all. Some of these people are to me, they really seem irredeemable, and I'm glad that law enforcement gets them off of the streets. What I saw a lot of in the first two years of the Trump administration was sort of a rush to get more MS thirteen arrests. There was I make the numbers as it were, right, right, So there is a pressure internally to get those numbers up, and there was also pressure to get the proportion of criminal arrests versus administrative arrests up. That's a little tricky to understand. Basically, you can arrest somebody just for being an immigrant here without papers, or you can arrest somebody because they've committed a crime and they're here without papers. Yes, so the Trump administration wanted to say they were going after more what they call criminal aliens, which, by the way, to be fair, is also a continuation of the Obama administration's policy. I mean, the Obama aministration really emphasized that it was going to arrest large, large numbers of undocumented people and support them. They just said they would focus on people who had committed crimes, and in fact, that's one of the reasons that many immigration out of it gates were very before Donald Trump were very angry at Barack Obama because he deported. His administration deported much much higher percentages and much much higher raw numbers of undocumented people than prior administrations, including the Bush administration. Yeah, I mean, now we're deep in the weeds of im gratian coverage. But that's a really key thing because Obama was going after Okay, shows called deep back, but we gotta go deep Okay, great, So here you have Obama, he's mostly going after criminal immigrants. Trump comes in. He just wants bigger deportation numbers, so they start going after non criminal immigrants. They start going after anybody they can find, basically, and so the numbers get very skewed. Suddenly it looks like they're not arresting any criminals because they're arresting so many of the other kind of people who haven't committed crimes, who have to all the way also be detained by the way, So there's actually a literal space issue right right, and resources, I mean, ICE agents are like running around arresting anybody they can find. And so the idea was if they start tagging more people as MS their team members. That's going to make the numbers look a lot better. Suddenly you're going to have more criminal immigrant arrests, which is what you want. What I saw on Long Island was suddenly almost anything getting adjacent could get you tagged as an MS thirteen member in ICE's eyes. So what happened was there was this Operation Matador initiative, and that was a program designed specifically to find MS thirteen members around New York State and arrest them for deportation. So in the spring of twenty seventeen, people started to get tagged as gang members for being in the same park as gang members or wearing blue Nike sneakers. I wrote about one kid who drew a devil in his school notebook and was tagged as a gang member for that reason, and because that's a symbol of the gang. Well, right, so that longle of the gang it also happened to be his high school mascot. People started staying home from school, they started staying inside. These immigrant communities are very close knit, and words spread very quickly that anybody is being tagged as a gang member right now. And what the people who lived in these places told me that at first they thought, oh, that kid seemed fine, but I guess he must have been a gang member because he just got arrested. And people were hopeful at first because they were very scared of this gang, and then they started to realize no, a lot of these arrests are basically pretexts. Ice touted this as a wonderful initiative to rid the community of MS thirteen and finally arrest criminal immigrants, but in reality, a lot of those people were eventually let go because they had nothing to do with the gang. What has it been like for you to talk to I guess mostly teenagers. It sounds like who are who have been either purple to the gang or in the gang? How do you what prepared you to go in and actually talk to people and hear these hear these things? I mean, I felt very unprepared. I spoke fine Spanish. I learned a lot of gang slag over the course of this reporting. Like when you text message with these kids, they write in this almost incomprehensible language. I had to make myself a glossary, but I had been reported in all teenagers just not that is very true. They're also very into snapchat, which I didn't understand before I started this reporting, But that doesn't quite get to the human level. I mean, how did you get kids to open up to you. I think it probably goes back to how isolated kids are who joined this gang. The people who I talked to told me that they felt very lonely and like nobody understood them. Their own parents were absent or didn't want to admit maybe what had happened with this gang and their kids on Long Island or back home in El Salvador. And so some of the people I talked to when I first started speaking with them, they just sort of I would ask them one question and they would just go I would ask one question, they would talk for an hour. I think they really wanted somebody to understand what was happening with them and listen to them without judgment, which I think is something that journalists always need to do by other adults in their lives, like teachers or their parents. The police wouldn't do with them. And once I started talking to a couple of kids, they started introducing me to their friends. I started understanding how people were networked to each other out there, and so then I was able to talk to them in a way that I think was probably less exhausting for them, Like they didn't have to explain who Piro sans, this gang leader and ladies man out there was. I already knew, and I knew who all his friends were. I had maps drawn up in my office of how everybody was connected to each other and who everybody was. You mentioned that you think it's important for a journalist to listen without judgment. I want, what I'm wondering is how hard is that? How hard is it to listen to somebody describing maybe brutal acts and to withhold judgment. I don't think you mean with whole judgment. Ultimately, when you write your story, you can you tell your story and there can be some implicit judgment in that, But when you're sitting there, I take it you meant you have to withhold judgment to be an effective journalist to get the story. How hard is that to do? Yeah? I mean the story really pushed the boundaries of how much I was able to empathize with people. I felt it talking to gang members, and I also felt it talking to the police. I thought it was really important to be as empathetic as I could be. With both sides of the story here. So I talked to police homicide detectives who told me that when a kid like the fifteen year old I was talking about who ended up in the woods gets killed, they call it misdemeanor murder because I feel like he probably had it coming for some reason. He was probably going to end up dead no matter what. They would. Yeah, they would say things about people whose mothers I had spent time with, whose diaries I had read. In the end, I think I was able to understand why they were saying things like that. I think they just felt really frustrated by their inability to solve these crimes and stop these murders, and they were trying to protect themselves by coming in and just being very callous and with the gang members. They would tell me about violence that was so horrifying. I didn't put most of it in the stories, just because I think it would have distracted back. Yeah, some of the most perverse things people told me about doing I didn't put in there. I did try to get very high up whenever somebody told me that they had committed violence. Like the first story in the series starts with the main character killing a person in cold blood, and I didn't want to hide that, but some of the things they told me about doing it just felt like it would be gratuitous to put in there. It seems like such a delicate, delicate balance. I'm reminded a little bit of the novelist Don Winslow's written this Cartel trilogy. That is actually how I first learned about MS thirteen. I mean, it's these are novels, but they're they're well done novels. They're they're sort of very close to the John McCarry level when they're at their best. In the novels, very brutal act of violence that are, according to Winslow, based on real things that occurred, are described in very you know, clinical terms. And yet as Donald Trump began to speak about MS thirteen as this great danger, Winslow began to write public opinion pieces and op eds saying, look, you know, I know a lot about these guys, and what Trump is saying is unjustified and wrong, even though in fact the acts of violence are horrific. So there's this very complicated balance between acknowledging the terribleness of the things that MS thirteen does and not giving in to the temptation to demonize people who are themselves self demonizing, right. I mean, like Winslow says, there's a lot of different ways to be a terrible and basically evil organization. MS thirteen is horrible and indefensible in some very troubling ways, but not in all of the ways that Donald Trump would like to say. So it's an organization that commits horrible murder. It's not an organization that is organized across the country and invading peaceful suburbs in the way that politicians talk about. And you say that even though in your stories you just gbe a spike in murders in a peaceful Long Island suburbs. Right, there was a spike in violence in Long Island. But that's a spike that you see every couple of years, going back to two thousand, two thousand and one. It's not anything that really has it's it's nothing new. I mean, make it less shocking in some sense. I mean, it's a crime. I don't want to normalize murder spikes in anywhere, suburbs or inner city. Right when Chicago underwent you know, a big spike in gun violence in recent recent years. That's urban and it's happened occasionally in the past as well, but we don't want to normalize it by virtual the fact that it's that it's happened before. No, what I mean, really, the victims of MS thirteen violence are young Latino immigrants. There should be more effort to protect those people completely. But I think they would the victims of this gang, and the people who work most closely with the gang would tell you that having a national panic about MS thirteen legs used to our suburbs is not the way to really protect the victims. I want to sort of close by asking you about the imagination. About the imagination in both directions here. So on the one hand, there's the imagination of the MS thirteen members themselves. They're trying to create an imaginary universe where they are terrifying, where they are empowered, where they're capable of engaging in these acts of spectacular violence. And then somehow they did capture the imagination of a lot of people in the American public. They capture the imagination of a guy who was candidate for president United States and then got elected, and then suddenly there he is in Congress at the State of the Union address talking about them and how uniquely bad and dangerous they are. But there's some connection between the two imaginations. It's like the imagination of the gang members is one circle and the imagination of Donald Trump is another circle, and somehow they're merging together in this overlapping then diagram of imaginaries. First all, does that story make sense to you? Does that sound plausible as an account of what's going on? And if so, what are we to make of it? How should we think about this going forward? Totally? I mean it's like a showy gang meets a great showman and it's it's been a beautiful marriage for both of them. I think Trump has gotten lots of mileage out of this gang, and MS thirteen is also getting a lot of benefit. I mean, this is a gang that wants everybody to be scared of them. People are very scared right now, and they haven't had to do much to earn that. I think what gets lost is the victims. How are you going to fight a gang if you don't understand the gang? And right now there are so many myths being peddled about what MS thirteen is, by the gang and by national politicians, and who's losing there are young immigrants who are getting slaughtered and who are not being protected by local police. Hannah, I want to thank you not just for a great interview, but also for really doing work that manages simultaneously to tell the story as it's happening and as it has happened, and not to play down the violence while simultaneously not sensationalizing it. And if other people are criticizing you for that middle ground, let me be someone to say, good job. That's exactly the kind of work that's beneficial to I think to thinking about hard problems like this. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh well, thank you. It is a tight ramp, and I appreciate you saying that, thank you for walking out with us. Making sense of MS thirteen really demands hard work because you have to keep two different ideas in your mind at the same time, and those things are intentional with each other. The first is that MS thirteen isn't just any gang. It's a particularly vicious and violent gang that focuses on violence for violence's sake and commits horrific acts not only here in the United States but in Central America. It's also a transnational gang. When that crosses borders and that sees itself as a nation on its own, and that makes it especially frightening. At the same time, you also have to keep in your mind that Donald Trump has, through his rhetoric, made MS thirteen into a much grander, bigger, and more significant threat than in fact may be in real life. He's used MS thirteen as a tool to emphasize the idea that we should close our borders, including closing our borders to people who are fleeing gangs like m S thirteen from Central America. What I took away from my conversation with Hannah is that it actually is possible if you're very careful and work hard to keep both of those ideas in mind simultaneously. She's not pulling any punches in describing the depth and the horror of violence that m S thirteen engages in. At the same time, she's an unrelenting critic of how the attempt to crack down on MS thirteen in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election has actually led to tragedy in the lives of ordinary people who were not guilty of anything, and made it harder in the long run to fight this horrific gang getting behind this story shows you that the imagination is an extraordinary thing. The imagination of MS thirteen has met the imagination of Donald Trump, and Hannah says. It's a beautiful marriage that served the interests of both sides in the long run. If we're going to fight MS thirteen and not go overboard, we need to disrupt that marriage. We need to disentangle those two imaginations. We need facts to understand what we should do about MS thirteen, not fantasies. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Geane Coott, with engineering by Jason Gambrell and Jason Rostkowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Gara. Special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is Deep Background.

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explored the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman from the campaign trail to the State of the Union. Donald Trump has put the spotlight on one gang in particular, MS thirteen, or Mara Salvatrucha, a gang that originated in Los Angeles, spread to Central America and has come back for Trump. MS thirteen has become the centerpiece of an argument on closing borders and deportation. Today, we're going to try to get behind the story. We're going to ask what is MS thirteen, what kinds of violence has it actually perpetrated, and what should we think about that for the question of policy on immigration. We're also going to focus on the question of what happens when the government tries to wrack down on a gang like MS thirteen. To do that, we're joined today by Hannah Dryer. Hannah is a reporter for Pro Publica. She spent three years in Venezuela as correspondent for the AP, and she won the twenty nineteen Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for a fantastic series Trapped in Gangland. How the MS thirteen crackdown shattered immigrant lives. Hannah, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thank you. It's great to be here, Hannah. Maybe we can start with the most basic historical question, who or what is MS thirteen? Where do they come from? And what are they? MS thirteen is a funny criminal organization because it's really founded sort of between the US and Central America. So the first MS thirteen members were Central American immigrants and refugees in Los Angeles. These were people who were fleeing civil wars in their own countries and they banded together in LA to try to protect themselves from the other gangs that were already there. So this is south central LA in the nineteen eighties and then into the early nineteen nineties, and it's an American born gang exactly. So they were sort of these scrappy young immigrants in LA who were getting picked on and bullied, and they were punk rockers. The aesthetic of MS thirteen is still very nineteen eighties. It's like skinny black jeans and devil iconography. It's sort of this like punk rock or metal symbolism that they still use. And they grew into a gang, and then there was a wave of deportations in the nineteen nineties and a lot of hardcore MS thirteen members were sent back to Central America, and they're the gang really metastasized and became this hyper violent, terrible organization that we have today. And we're seeing a new generation of kids who are fleeing that violence coming back to the US. And those are really the MS their team members that we see committing the most murders and the most violence in the States today. Some of the writing that I've read about their early origins, about MS thirteen and even until today, emphasizes the idea of kids without parents. It emphasizes the idea that the first members of the gang were people who had fled Central America as teenagers, often without their parents. It emphasized that people who are crossing borders, whether they're being deported or whether they're coming across the border, are often doing without their parents. First of all, I'm wondering if you think that's accurate. And second of all, even if it was accurate historically, is it still accurate today at all? Yeah? I mean, I think it's a gang born out of dislocation in a lot of ways. The Civil Wars in the nineteen eighties and Central America are crucial. A lot of people who came over were coming over alone, and they also had seen a lot of violence in their own countries. So these are young people who had already been traumatized by civil wars, which is important to say the US how to roll in absolutely. And now we're seeing kids who are sometimes coming without their parents. Often they've been left behind in places like El Salvador and Honduras by their parents, and they sort of grow up without a strong family structure, and then they come to this country and they're reunited with their parents, but their parents are almost strangers to them, and usually they're working really hard. So these kids come and they're lonely. And what they've told me is that they feel like MS thirteen really becomes their family, and MS thirteen understands them in a way that their parents don't. And you know, they feel sometimes like their parents abandon them and the gang was there for them when they needed someone. So it's a gang that can function as a kind of surrogate family, and that has, in your word, from a moment ago, a commitment to hyper violence. So let's talk about that hyper violence for a moment, will try to be nonsensational about it, but just accurate and describe it as it is. What kinds of violence qualify in your mind as hyper right, So all gangs basically are out there committing violence. MS thirteen is unique, I think, and that it's committing violence for violence's own sake a lot of times. So it's not a gang that has huge enterprises. They're not doing a ton of human trafficking or drug dealing. They're basically too chaotic for that kind of big business. What they're mostly doing is spectacular violence, and it's calculated to be spectacular, so spectacular in the sense of it makes a spectacle. Everyone has to notice it exactly. People talk about it in the neighborhood. It terrorizes people. So it's usually violence committed with machetes, and MS thirteen will attack somebody in a big group, and this is partly to foster that sense of family in a sick way, and also meaning the attackers are exactly. So the attackers will, you know, surround somebody in a sugarcane field if you're in El Salvador, or surround somebody in the woods if you're in Long Island and run at them all at once with machetes, and the police who deal with these murders say often people look like they've been hit by a car. People are just completely destroyed by these attacks, and they'll cut off people's limbs. They'll leave people in these very disturbing tableaus with several bodies stacked together, and they'll also use baseball bats. Sometimes they'll use tree branches, and the violence is just very brutal. Do you have a theory about why the violence? I mean, we're accustomed to a kind of Godfather like myth of organized crime as a organized which this isn't, but be as sort of aimed at putting together, you know, real money. That does not seem to be the case at all for MS. Thirteen. It seems that the violence, as you said, exists to create some communal feeling about violence. I think that's one of the scariest things about the gang, And I'm wondering if you have a thought about why, why why the violence for the sake of violence? It's very biked into the culture of MS thirteen. So, going back to what we were saying about those nineteen eighties symbols, MS thirteen talks a lot about the devil and people off and say the devil is here with us, or the devil took me over, so I had to do it. And in fact they're the core gang symbol, right is a hand formed into the shape of an M, right, which because devil horns if you put it up, and it's the M for the MS thirteen if you put it down. So yeah, exactly, and so they an MS. Their team member would tell you, well, this is basically a satanic organization and the devil demands blood, and so that's why that will be their own self description completely. And if you had anybody actually say that to you, oh yeah, yeah, they say it's just like that. They say, oh, the devil took me. The devil was with us. And when they're trained into the gang, when they're first initiated, especially in Central America, they have to kill someone and in order to get into the gang, yeah, to be a real member. And somebody who was initiated in that way described it to me and said, the senior leader came, they went to a field together. There was a man who was tied up, and the senior leader said, the devil is here with us right now, the devil is inside you, you have to kill this man. That's very disturbing me. I was telling you this went on to say they, I mean they killed the person. Yeah, they all did. So the person who was telling me this doesn't know if he struck the fatal blow, but he definitely feels like he became a murderer that day. Yeah, which was I guess the point of the ritual. It's hard to know if that serves a social function. You sort of want to say it doesn't. But another thing that people who are part of this gang tell me is that they joined because they wanted to feel powerful, they wanted to be known, and they felt like they were always getting picked on by other people. And Central America is a very violent place, and there's these real histories of trauma there. I mean, there were these very intense civil wars, and I think people live in a sense of perpetual fear, and they rightly live like that. I mean, they are often in fear for their lives, and being part of this gang and especially this violence, I think temporarily makes these young men mostly feel invincible. And then the other part of this culture that's really important is that it's a very fatalistic culture. So MS thirteen is sort of satanic in some ways. But the people who get deep into the gang also tell you that they know that they're going to end up dead or in prison. That feeds into this culture of violence because people don't care if they get caught, and so you do get a lot of people, and sometimes they're really young, like fifteen and sixteen, who are willing to go commit these acts of violence and not cover any of it up because they're figuring they're going to be dead soon anyway. They're going to be in prison anyway. And that fits in with what you were saying about MS thirteen not being focused on money. You know, if you have if you're a young gang banger and you have the fantasy that you'll get rich and retire from the gang life, then you might have some limits to what you might be prepared to do. You have a long run goal. But if your view from day one is I'm going to die, my soul already belongs to the devil, then there's not as much pressure I would think to try to amass money that there's a kind of long termism to the idea of amassing money completely. These are not goal oriented people. And most of the MS their team members who I reported on on Long Island, we're working normal jobs. So they were in maybe high school during the day, and then they were a dishwasher, or they were working at a car repair shop, they were working at fast food restaurants, and they're going and they're working full shifts, and then they're getting off and going to the woods and being MS their team members, and then they're getting up early and going to high school. So nobody is getting rich from this gang. Really, there was a story that I read it. I think this may have come from one of your articles that described a major drug bust that was set up with an MS thirteen leader that never happened because the leader couldn't raise the gas money to get in his car to drive and actually make the buy that the cops were staking out. Yeah, I mean, this was something that I saw all the time doing this reporting. I had access to one MS thirteen members Facebook messages, so I read through two thousand pages of Facebook messages between this one member and the gang leaders, and so much of what they were talking about was who can get gas today? Do we have a car today? Can anybody afford gas? If not, are we going to use our bicycles to go and try to sell weed or anybody even have a bicycle that's working right now. It's like being in the head of a broke teenager who's trying to get to the mall, except their teenagers who are trying to go find people to hurt or sell drugs. So that almost states why this is so terrifying, namely that it's transnational and you're describing teenagers trying to get to the mall in Long Island, except that they're not just going to the mall, They're going to engage in acts of organized violence. And the transnational aspect of Mstarchen has been there from the start. Right, It's a US gang that then gets transferred to Central America and then makes its way back to the United States in various complicated ways. So I guess what I want to ask you about is why does this violence persist in the US. I understand that in the case of Central America, there are countries that have been traumatized by violence, their individuals who have been traumatized. It somehow seems maybe this is just bias on my part, It somehow seems more comprehensible in the wake of long, painful violence, civil war which exists not only in El Salvadora but in other Central American countries, that one would get a kind of extreme gang of this sort. But here it is functioning in not just in the United States, but in Long Island, a few miles from where we're sitting right now, and that's of course inherently terrifying. Why is the violence following the group here? So this is sort of the most controversial point about MS thirt. Some people, especially at the Department of Justice right now and probably in the Republican Party, would tell you that MS thirteen is being directed in the United States by people in El Salvador and other people, mostly people who do direct gang intervention. Maybe immigration advocates would tell you that actually there's very little organization and MS thirteen functions like autonomous franchises, and there's almost no communication with El Salvador. And it's hard to know what's true because both sides sort of have an interest in arguing for their version of how this gang is working, and the gang's not going to come out and tell you. So what I saw, at least on Long Island, there is some communication with El Salvador, especially when it comes to green lighting people. That's how the gang talks about deciding to kill someone. So I saw that there is communication when it comes to killing a fellow gang member or figuring out if a gang is a snitch or not, and that when it comes to other kinds of violence, like going after the girls who are trash talking you in the school hallway the other day, I didn't see that there was much communication. I mean, it's fascinating you are offering an account that it's potentially consistent with both stories, with the FBI story and with the gang intervention story. In other words, one could credibly say that there is some kind of coordination if before you kill a fellow gang member you have to get a green light from someone in Elsalvador. But at the same time, most of the activity is presumably not of that nature, and so in that sense, it would be disorganized and uncoordinated and happening at the local level, right. I mean, like with so many of these super polarizing issues, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. And as far as what we do about the violence that this gang is still perpetrating in this country, one thing I think is important to understand is that that violence isn't really growing. It sort of goes in cycles. So the gang has been the same size in this country for more than a decade at about ten thousand people, which is less than one percent of total gang members. And the violence that they commit is really insane. I mean, it grabs headlines. It's not like what other people are doing. But it's still less than one percent of gang murders. And what I saw is that it's really a local law enforcement issue. When law enforcement was able to take down this gang, it was mostly through the kind of sophisticated organized crime strategies that take down other kinds of gangs. So it wasn't about going to El Salvador and taking down like the head of MS thirteen. It was about figuring out who's in this gang in one town and finding reasons to arrest them, and then flipping them on each other and just sort of one by one, arresting everybody in the gang so that they weren't out on the streets committing murder and recruiting new people. Does that strike you as an approach that would address their root cause as well, though, or does it seem like it's more. In other words, you can imagine you need to join strategy. If in fact the gang is capable of sustaining itself at the number of ten thousand in the US, then it must be getting new members, and they're either American teenagers or teenagers who's come into the country, or some combination. Right. Well, I mean, I don't you would think that that's a simple strategy, and if it worked, then we just wouldn't have MS thirteen violence here. But it's not as simple as you would think. For one thing, this is a Spanish speaking gang and it's mostly composed of Latino people, and a lot of these small town police forces have very few Latino people who could infiltrate the gang and don't speak Spanish. So this is a phenomenon that we see all over the country, but it's very prevalent, for example, on Long Island, where you have large Latino populations that have come relatively recently in historical terms, and then you have police forces that are made up of the people who have been on Long Island for fifty or sixty years. Great so on Long Island during the height of an MS thirteen killing spree in twenty sixteen that was getting national headlines. Trump got very fixated on this nice spree. We're coming to him soon. The police force, which is one of the biggest police forces in the country, had three people who were certified to speak Spanish, and it's just very hard to see how a police force like that can effectively police this gang and protect the community from the gang. And what ended up happening on Long Island is the Long Island FBI Gang Task Force really beefed off its presence and brought in FBI agents who spoke Spanish and they were then able to pretty much dismantle the gang out there. And we haven't had a killing in almost a year. So it wasn't a pure local law enforce and effort. It was local law enforcement assisted by, in fact necessarily it sounds like assisted by the FBI, right, But I mean, why why was that necessary? You would think that a police force that is dealing with a lot of immigrant people. Some of the towns on Long Island are mostly immigrant, would be more equipped to deal with those kinds of problems, for sure. I mean, of course the police forces need to add, need to have lots of Spanish speaking officers, but I do wonder if I mean a small town police force isn't necessarily equipped to handle major gang violence. Yeah, So, I mean in this case, it worked pretty well. The FBI came in and they really cleaned house, and they did it by being on the ground in this community. And it had almost nothing to do with the border. And that's one thing that I hear a lot when people talk about MS thirteen. There's this idea that we just need to close the border or secure the border, and then we'll be able to get rid of this gang. And I think that really ignores the fact that the gang was founded in the US and most of the people who I've spoken with who are in the gang now were recruited in the US. So the typical situation that I saw was people would come over from Central America, land in one of these towns like the suburbs of New York or the suburbs of Virginia or LA and not have a strong support system and get recruited in an American high school or at an American McDonald's where they were hanging out after school. So closing the border doesn't do a lot to solve that. And FBI task forces also don't really help with that. I think that's something we need a different kind of program for. So there's an anthropologist called Tom Ward who wrote a book that's based on I think about a decade of field work, fourteen years of field work. He says inside of some parts of MS thirteen and it's periphery, and he called the book Gangs Without Borders to emphasize the transnational nature of the gang, that it goes across borders. And then the opening paragraph of the book when you open it up, is an apology for the title, which is very rare. You know when you write, when you write a book, you don't usually want to have to apologize for the title of first thing out of the box. And he says, you know, I don't want you to think, in hearing this title, that we're talking about something like an international terrorist organization. On the other hand, I am trying to show you that the nature of moving between country has been part of or significant to the experience of MS thirteen, and I want to use that balance to try to ask about this this point of the border closing. Clearly we're thinking of this when we hear it because of Donald Trump. Trump maybe he was influenced by the fact that he's from Queens, which is part of Long Island, and is aware of what's going on in the Long Island world. And then this spike of murders in Long Island that you described from MS thirteen happened around the time that he was running for president, and he made this a centerpiece of his rhetoric. And since part of his run of the presence he was to emphasize closing the border and the dangers of immigrants crossing the border, and particularly of Central American immigrants crossing the borders, it was sort of like a cause made to order for him. What is the danger associated with thinking of border closings as something that could reduce or cut down on MS thirteen? You've made the case that it wouldn't work. But what's the danger associated with saying, well, let's try Why don't we try to do more work of deporting gang members if they're not US citizens and trying to stop gang members from coming in. Yeah, I mean, I do think the fact that Trump is from Queens has a ton to do with how focused he's been on this gang. It's funny, there have been all of these there's been all this violence on Long Island, and there's also been all this MS thirteen violence in the suburbs of DC, but Trump is so much more focused on what's going on up in New York, even though he's technically closer to what's going on like Virginia and Maryland, so those psychologically, he's very much a product of the Long Island milia completely. One danger of focusing on immigration enforcement when you're thinking about how to get rid of MS thirteen is that the same people who you need to be helping you dismantle this gang, the same people who would be your informants, are the people who might be targeted by harsher immigration enforcement. So I saw this happen a few times on Long Island, where young teenage boys who are involved with the gang or adjacent to the gang when kid had been attacked by the gang, were turned into FBI informants and started working with police in the FBI to try to bring down the kids who were torturing them, the gang members who were in their community. And after a few months they were turned over themselves to Ice for deportation. And so one informant was locked up with the same people who he'd been informing on and they knew that he had been an informant and they started threatening his life. That gets around if the people who try to help law enforcement end up being arrested for deportation. People know that, and they're much less likely to go to detectives and help them. And this is a gang that's composed of Latino teenagers, so it's already going to be hard for US law enforcement to infiltrate it. And so when you don't protect informants, that can really destroy an investigation. And I had detectives from the FBI Gang Task Force and local police complaining to me about this. Is it that the minute you start thinking about deportations, you're inevitably going to alienate the people who might work with the government to fight the gang. Or is it that the government, ice and others just do it badly? In your fascinating and rich reporting, often it seemed as though it was the incompetence of the enforcement system that was causing the problems. You know that someone who was helping the FBI would get on a list and then someone would bureacratically say well, now they're on the list and we can't get them off. The list, and then that would lead to a deportation. I mean, I'm over characterizing it, but you know what I'm talking about. And then when I read that, my instinct was to say, well, they have to do it better. They have to be more careful and make sure that if someone is helping the government, that person doesn't get deported and doesn't get put into these categories. So that would be an argument not so much for taking this out of the deportation and border's frame as for staying in that frame, but doing it in a much more sophisticated and successful way. Or the alternative view I guess would be that no, the minute you go into that frame at all, you're going to alienate people and you're not going to be able to fight the gang. Do you have an instinct between those versions? Yeah, I mean, in some ways it's above my pay grade, Like I have the nice job of being able to critique policy and I don't have to make it. But I do think that some people need to be deported. I don't think anybody would disagree that some of these really hardcore MS thirteen killers who've stuck into this country illegally and are doing lots of damage here shouldn't be protected at all. Some of these people are to me, they really seem irredeemable, and I'm glad that law enforcement gets them off of the streets. What I saw a lot of in the first two years of the Trump administration was sort of a rush to get more MS thirteen arrests. There was I make the numbers as it were, right, right, So there is a pressure internally to get those numbers up, and there was also pressure to get the proportion of criminal arrests versus administrative arrests up. That's a little tricky to understand. Basically, you can arrest somebody just for being an immigrant here without papers, or you can arrest somebody because they've committed a crime and they're here without papers. Yes, so the Trump administration wanted to say they were going after more what they call criminal aliens, which, by the way, to be fair, is also a continuation of the Obama administration's policy. I mean, the Obama aministration really emphasized that it was going to arrest large, large numbers of undocumented people and support them. They just said they would focus on people who had committed crimes, and in fact, that's one of the reasons that many immigration out of it gates were very before Donald Trump were very angry at Barack Obama because he deported. His administration deported much much higher percentages and much much higher raw numbers of undocumented people than prior administrations, including the Bush administration. Yeah, I mean, now we're deep in the weeds of im gratian coverage. But that's a really key thing because Obama was going after Okay, shows called deep back, but we gotta go deep Okay, great, So here you have Obama, he's mostly going after criminal immigrants. Trump comes in. He just wants bigger deportation numbers, so they start going after non criminal immigrants. They start going after anybody they can find, basically, and so the numbers get very skewed. Suddenly it looks like they're not arresting any criminals because they're arresting so many of the other kind of people who haven't committed crimes, who have to all the way also be detained by the way, So there's actually a literal space issue right right, and resources, I mean, ICE agents are like running around arresting anybody they can find. And so the idea was if they start tagging more people as MS their team members. That's going to make the numbers look a lot better. Suddenly you're going to have more criminal immigrant arrests, which is what you want. What I saw on Long Island was suddenly almost anything getting adjacent could get you tagged as an MS thirteen member in ICE's eyes. So what happened was there was this Operation Matador initiative, and that was a program designed specifically to find MS thirteen members around New York State and arrest them for deportation. So in the spring of twenty seventeen, people started to get tagged as gang members for being in the same park as gang members or wearing blue Nike sneakers. I wrote about one kid who drew a devil in his school notebook and was tagged as a gang member for that reason, and because that's a symbol of the gang. Well, right, so that longle of the gang it also happened to be his high school mascot. People started staying home from school, they started staying inside. These immigrant communities are very close knit, and words spread very quickly that anybody is being tagged as a gang member right now. And what the people who lived in these places told me that at first they thought, oh, that kid seemed fine, but I guess he must have been a gang member because he just got arrested. And people were hopeful at first because they were very scared of this gang, and then they started to realize no, a lot of these arrests are basically pretexts. Ice touted this as a wonderful initiative to rid the community of MS thirteen and finally arrest criminal immigrants, but in reality, a lot of those people were eventually let go because they had nothing to do with the gang. What has it been like for you to talk to I guess mostly teenagers. It sounds like who are who have been either purple to the gang or in the gang? How do you what prepared you to go in and actually talk to people and hear these hear these things? I mean, I felt very unprepared. I spoke fine Spanish. I learned a lot of gang slag over the course of this reporting. Like when you text message with these kids, they write in this almost incomprehensible language. I had to make myself a glossary, but I had been reported in all teenagers just not that is very true. They're also very into snapchat, which I didn't understand before I started this reporting, But that doesn't quite get to the human level. I mean, how did you get kids to open up to you. I think it probably goes back to how isolated kids are who joined this gang. The people who I talked to told me that they felt very lonely and like nobody understood them. Their own parents were absent or didn't want to admit maybe what had happened with this gang and their kids on Long Island or back home in El Salvador. And so some of the people I talked to when I first started speaking with them, they just sort of I would ask them one question and they would just go I would ask one question, they would talk for an hour. I think they really wanted somebody to understand what was happening with them and listen to them without judgment, which I think is something that journalists always need to do by other adults in their lives, like teachers or their parents. The police wouldn't do with them. And once I started talking to a couple of kids, they started introducing me to their friends. I started understanding how people were networked to each other out there, and so then I was able to talk to them in a way that I think was probably less exhausting for them, Like they didn't have to explain who Piro sans, this gang leader and ladies man out there was. I already knew, and I knew who all his friends were. I had maps drawn up in my office of how everybody was connected to each other and who everybody was. You mentioned that you think it's important for a journalist to listen without judgment. I want, what I'm wondering is how hard is that? How hard is it to listen to somebody describing maybe brutal acts and to withhold judgment. I don't think you mean with whole judgment. Ultimately, when you write your story, you can you tell your story and there can be some implicit judgment in that, But when you're sitting there, I take it you meant you have to withhold judgment to be an effective journalist to get the story. How hard is that to do? Yeah? I mean the story really pushed the boundaries of how much I was able to empathize with people. I felt it talking to gang members, and I also felt it talking to the police. I thought it was really important to be as empathetic as I could be. With both sides of the story here. So I talked to police homicide detectives who told me that when a kid like the fifteen year old I was talking about who ended up in the woods gets killed, they call it misdemeanor murder because I feel like he probably had it coming for some reason. He was probably going to end up dead no matter what. They would. Yeah, they would say things about people whose mothers I had spent time with, whose diaries I had read. In the end, I think I was able to understand why they were saying things like that. I think they just felt really frustrated by their inability to solve these crimes and stop these murders, and they were trying to protect themselves by coming in and just being very callous and with the gang members. They would tell me about violence that was so horrifying. I didn't put most of it in the stories, just because I think it would have distracted back. Yeah, some of the most perverse things people told me about doing I didn't put in there. I did try to get very high up whenever somebody told me that they had committed violence. Like the first story in the series starts with the main character killing a person in cold blood, and I didn't want to hide that, but some of the things they told me about doing it just felt like it would be gratuitous to put in there. It seems like such a delicate, delicate balance. I'm reminded a little bit of the novelist Don Winslow's written this Cartel trilogy. That is actually how I first learned about MS thirteen. I mean, it's these are novels, but they're they're well done novels. They're they're sort of very close to the John McCarry level when they're at their best. In the novels, very brutal act of violence that are, according to Winslow, based on real things that occurred, are described in very you know, clinical terms. And yet as Donald Trump began to speak about MS thirteen as this great danger, Winslow began to write public opinion pieces and op eds saying, look, you know, I know a lot about these guys, and what Trump is saying is unjustified and wrong, even though in fact the acts of violence are horrific. So there's this very complicated balance between acknowledging the terribleness of the things that MS thirteen does and not giving in to the temptation to demonize people who are themselves self demonizing, right. I mean, like Winslow says, there's a lot of different ways to be a terrible and basically evil organization. MS thirteen is horrible and indefensible in some very troubling ways, but not in all of the ways that Donald Trump would like to say. So it's an organization that commits horrible murder. It's not an organization that is organized across the country and invading peaceful suburbs in the way that politicians talk about. And you say that even though in your stories you just gbe a spike in murders in a peaceful Long Island suburbs. Right, there was a spike in violence in Long Island. But that's a spike that you see every couple of years, going back to two thousand, two thousand and one. It's not anything that really has it's it's nothing new. I mean, make it less shocking in some sense. I mean, it's a crime. I don't want to normalize murder spikes in anywhere, suburbs or inner city. Right when Chicago underwent you know, a big spike in gun violence in recent recent years. That's urban and it's happened occasionally in the past as well, but we don't want to normalize it by virtual the fact that it's that it's happened before. No, what I mean, really, the victims of MS thirteen violence are young Latino immigrants. There should be more effort to protect those people completely. But I think they would the victims of this gang, and the people who work most closely with the gang would tell you that having a national panic about MS thirteen legs used to our suburbs is not the way to really protect the victims. I want to sort of close by asking you about the imagination. About the imagination in both directions here. So on the one hand, there's the imagination of the MS thirteen members themselves. They're trying to create an imaginary universe where they are terrifying, where they are empowered, where they're capable of engaging in these acts of spectacular violence. And then somehow they did capture the imagination of a lot of people in the American public. They capture the imagination of a guy who was candidate for president United States and then got elected, and then suddenly there he is in Congress at the State of the Union address talking about them and how uniquely bad and dangerous they are. But there's some connection between the two imaginations. It's like the imagination of the gang members is one circle and the imagination of Donald Trump is another circle, and somehow they're merging together in this overlapping then diagram of imaginaries. First all, does that story make sense to you? Does that sound plausible as an account of what's going on? And if so, what are we to make of it? How should we think about this going forward? Totally? I mean it's like a showy gang meets a great showman and it's it's been a beautiful marriage for both of them. I think Trump has gotten lots of mileage out of this gang, and MS thirteen is also getting a lot of benefit. I mean, this is a gang that wants everybody to be scared of them. People are very scared right now, and they haven't had to do much to earn that. I think what gets lost is the victims. How are you going to fight a gang if you don't understand the gang? And right now there are so many myths being peddled about what MS thirteen is, by the gang and by national politicians, and who's losing there are young immigrants who are getting slaughtered and who are not being protected by local police. Hannah, I want to thank you not just for a great interview, but also for really doing work that manages simultaneously to tell the story as it's happening and as it has happened, and not to play down the violence while simultaneously not sensationalizing it. And if other people are criticizing you for that middle ground, let me be someone to say, good job. That's exactly the kind of work that's beneficial to I think to thinking about hard problems like this. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh well, thank you. It is a tight ramp, and I appreciate you saying that, thank you for walking out with us. Making sense of MS thirteen really demands hard work because you have to keep two different ideas in your mind at the same time, and those things are intentional with each other. The first is that MS thirteen isn't just any gang. It's a particularly vicious and violent gang that focuses on violence for violence's sake and commits horrific acts not only here in the United States but in Central America. It's also a transnational gang. When that crosses borders and that sees itself as a nation on its own, and that makes it especially frightening. At the same time, you also have to keep in your mind that Donald Trump has, through his rhetoric, made MS thirteen into a much grander, bigger, and more significant threat than in fact may be in real life. He's used MS thirteen as a tool to emphasize the idea that we should close our borders, including closing our borders to people who are fleeing gangs like m S thirteen from Central America. What I took away from my conversation with Hannah is that it actually is possible if you're very careful and work hard to keep both of those ideas in mind simultaneously. She's not pulling any punches in describing the depth and the horror of violence that m S thirteen engages in. At the same time, she's an unrelenting critic of how the attempt to crack down on MS thirteen in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election has actually led to tragedy in the lives of ordinary people who were not guilty of anything, and made it harder in the long run to fight this horrific gang getting behind this story shows you that the imagination is an extraordinary thing. The imagination of MS thirteen has met the imagination of Donald Trump, and Hannah says. It's a beautiful marriage that served the interests of both sides in the long run. If we're going to fight MS thirteen and not go overboard, we need to disrupt that marriage. We need to disentangle those two imaginations. We need facts to understand what we should do about MS thirteen, not fantasies. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Lydia Geane Coott, with engineering by Jason Gambrell and Jason Rostkowski. Our showrunner is Sophie mckibbon. Our theme music is composed by Luis Gara. Special thanks to the Pushkin Brass, Malcolm Gladwell, Jacob Weisberg, and Mia Lobel. I'm Noah Feldman. You can follow me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. This is Deep Background.