Tag Archives: gang violence

In New York, Trump to use gang violence to press for deportations

A makeshift memorial stands outside a park, where bodies of four men were found on April 13, in Central Islip, New York, U.S., April 28, 2017. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

By Roberta Rampton and Mica Rosenberg

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – President Donald Trump will travel on Friday to a New York community shocked by a recent spate of graphic gang murders to highlight his efforts to stop illegal immigration and boost deportations.

Trump’s trip to Long Island gives the president an opportunity to showcase some progress on his agenda even as other legislative efforts flounder – and some respite from the chaos of a nasty power struggle among his senior staff that blew up on Thursday.

On Friday, Trump will highlight his administration’s push to deport members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, better known as MS-13, the existence of which his White House blames on lax enforcement of illegal immigration from Central America.

“It’s going to be a very forceful message about just how menacing this threat is, and just how much pain is inflicted on American communities,” a senior administration official told reporters ahead of the trip.

Trump’s visit comes as his Attorney General Jeff Sessions traveled to El Salvador to highlight progress on the gang crack-down.

The gang took root in Los Angeles in the 1980s in neighborhoods populated with immigrants from El Salvador who had fled civil war. The Justice Department has said MS-13 now has more than 10,000 members across the United States.

On Long Island – not far from the New York City borough of Queens, where Trump grew up – MS-13 was behind the murders of two teenage girls in a suburban neighborhood last September, and four young men in a park in April.

There have been 17 murders on Long Island tied to the gang since January 2016, the Suffolk County Police Department has said.

Under Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has targeted the gang, deporting more than 2,700 criminal gang members in fiscal 2017, up from 2,057 in the whole of the previous fiscal year, the White House has said.

“We are throwing MS-13 the hell out of here so fast,” Trump said earlier this week at a rally in Ohio.

Trump made concerns about illegal immigration a centerpiece of his campaign. One of his first actions in office was to scrap Obama-era guidelines that prioritized convicted criminals for deportations.

His administration is now taking a harder line on Central American youth who have crossed the border illegally without guardians – a group that law enforcement has said has been targeted for recruitment by MS-13.

Immigration agents plan to target teenagers who are suspected gang members, even if they are not charged with any crime, according to a memo seen by Reuters.

But civil rights groups say police and immigration agents have unfairly targeted some teenagers.

“We received complaints in recent weeks from terrified parents on Long Island that teens have already been detained on the thinnest of rationales, such as wearing a basketball jersey,” said Sebastian Krueger from the New York Civil Liberties Union.

There have been at least two lawsuits filed by people claiming they were mistakenly included in gang databases and then targeted for deportation, said Paromita Shah, from the National Immigration Project at the National Lawyers Guild.

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton and Mica Rosenberg; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)

Chicago’s gang violence catches highway drivers in crossfire

Mother cries for her son who was shot on the highway

By Timothy Mclaughlin

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Jonathan Ortiz and other members of his rap group, No Nights Off, stepped onto the stage at Chicago’s House of Blues in mid-September for a concert they hoped would propel their young, promising careers.

Less than two weeks later, the 22-year-old Ortiz, who forebodingly rapped under the stage name “John Doe,” was fatally shot as he drove on an expressway in Chicago. His girlfriend Alexis Garcia also got a bullet lodged in her back.

Ortiz and Garcia were victims of the 38th shooting on Chicago-area expressways in 2016, a record-high number for a city stung by a murder rate not seen in two decades.

“It is overwhelming that this is the reality in Chicago, that you can drive on the expressway now and get shot at,” said Tanue David, a family support specialist with the outreach group Chicago Survivors, who is working with the Ortiz family.

Officials say gang violence is increasingly spilling over onto Chicago’s expressways, with innocent drivers sometimes caught in the crossfire, while the state police force is shrinking.

The Illinois State Police, which has jurisdiction over the expressways, blamed gang warfare for the increased highway shoot-outs in 2016 that pose “an extreme danger to the motoring public.”

Ortiz was shot on Interstate 290, one of five expressways within city limits where shootings took place.

PERSISTENT INCREASE

Ortiz and Garcia were shot on the morning of Sept. 29 while Ortiz drove her SUV not far from his mother’s home.

Chicago police said Ortiz had no criminal record and several family members and friends said he was not affiliated with a gang. He and Garcia met three years ago on the shores of Lake Michigan.

“He was calm, that’s how I knew that God took him fast,” Garcia, who grew up in a suburb of Chicago, said of the moments after Ortiz was shot.

In 2011 and 2012, there were nine shootings on city expressways, according to state police, which had no data prior to that.

That number jumped to 16 in 2013 and 19 in 2014. It nearly doubled the next year to 37 and climbed again in 2016 to 47. Three shootings last year were fatal.

The rise in highway shootings came as Chicago suffered a broader surge in violence that saw 762 people murdered in 2016, a 57 percent increase from 2015, and the highest number since 1996.

The number drew the attention of President-elect Donald Trump, who said that Chicago’s mayor must ask for U.S. government help if the city fails to reduce its murder rate. [nL1N1ES0LX]

Chicago police cite a number of factors, including splintering gang structures and police drawing back from confrontation out of fear of increased scrutiny for their actions.

Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson has vehemently blamed lax regulations for gun repeat offenders. “The people committing these crimes think the consequences for their actions are a joke,” he said last month.

DIFFICULT CRIME SCENES, DEPLETED RESOURCES

State police launched the Chicago Expressway Anti-violence Surge in February 2016 after the seventh freeway shooting, deploying aircraft, undercover officers and unmarked vehicles.

But the shooting numbers remained high and arrests were made in only one of last year’s expressway shootings. Uncooperative victims and expansive crime scenes hamper efforts to solve the cases, state police said.

Political gridlock in Springfield is also a factor, said Joe Moon, president of the Illinois Troopers Lodge 41 Fraternal Order of Police, the union representing state troopers.

Feuding between Republican Governor Bruce Rauner and Democrats who control the legislature has kept the state without a full operating budget since July 2015. That meant no cadet hires in 2015 and 2016, and 2017 remains in limbo as well, state police said. [nL1N1DF1XU]

Since 2000, the number of sworn officers has declined steadily to just over 1,600 from around 2,100, Moon said.

State police said the budget impasse had no impact on the force’s work. Governor Rauner’s spokeswoman, Catherine Kelly, declined to comment beyond what state police said.

At a December vigil, friends and family gathered by a roadside memorial of flowers and photos as one of Ortiz’s songs thumped from a nearby sports car.

“Chicago I beg of you … this needs to stop,” Ortiz’s friend Sharee Washington, 29, said. “You are destroying people.”

(Reporting by Timothy Mclaughlin in Chicago; Editing by David Gregorio)

Victims of Gang Violence in Central America flee home to survive

By Anastasia Moloney

BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Children and women whose husbands were killed in front of them are among the growing numbers of people fleeing gang violence in Central America, the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) said, as it urged governments to do more to identify and protect refugees.

Every year, gang violence drives tens of thousands of people from their homes in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala – countries with the world’s highest murder rates.

Most head to the United States in the hope of refuge and a better life.

UNHCR said the number of refugees and asylum seekers from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras reached 109,800 in 2015 – a more than five-fold increase over the past three years.

“People who saw husbands shot in front of their eyes. People who don’t want their children to be drawn into gangs. It’s a very strong system of repression and exploitation imposed by organized criminal groups that makes violence a key reason why people flee,” said Volker Turk, UNHCR’s assistant high commissioner for protection.

“They flee extremely precarious situations. The only way for people to save their lives is to flee,” Turk told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the start of a conference in Costa Rica on Central America’s forced displacement problem.

UNHCR said more than 14,600 Hondurans applied for refugee status worldwide in 2015, nearly double the figure in 2014.

The Honduran capital Tegucigalpa and the country’s industrial city of San Pedro Sula have the highest murder rates outside a war zone, UNHCR said last month.

“Some see it as only a migration problem, others see it is a refugee problem. It is both. We increasingly need to see this as a forced displacement issue,” Turk said by telephone on Wednesday.

“It’s growing in numbers, in scope and complexity.”

“UTTER DESPAIR”

Rights groups says governments in Central America have either downplayed or been slow to recognize that violence is the main reason why people are fleeing their homes.

Instead governments tend to list people seeking to be reunited with relatives already living in the United States, poverty and the lack of jobs as the key drivers of migration.

The flow of Central American migrants heading to the United States came under the spotlight in 2014 when nearly 70,000 children traveling alone were caught crossing the U.S. border with Mexico, more than double the number apprehended in 2012.

The children were mostly from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.

“One of the features of this particular situation is the fact that there are many more children on the move, unaccompanied minors, which is usually an indication of a survival mechanism, of utter despair,” Turk said.

He said the problem was being neglected as the world’s attention focused on hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees from North Africa, and war-torn countries like Syria and Iraq, who have been crossing the Mediterranean into Europe.

Turk called on Mexico and other Latin American countries through which migrants and asylum seekers are likely to pass, to strengthen their asylum services.

“We need to make sure asylum systems, including integration measures are robust, comprehensive and are appropriately equipped so that people who have fled violence have the option to stay in the first country they arrive in,” he said.

(Reporting by Anastasia Moloney, Editing by Katie Nguyen.; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Mexico, U.S. Canada to launch heroin fight at Three Amigos Summit

Paulo Carreno, Mexican deputy foreign minister in charge of North America, speaks during an interview in Mexico City

By Dave Graham and Ana Isabel Martinez

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico, the United States and Canada will unveil a plan to combat increased opium poppy cultivation and heroin use across North America at a summit later this month, a senior Mexican official said on Thursday.

Leaders of the three nations are due to meet in Ottawa on June 29, amid growing concern about the rising North American death toll from opioids such as heroin and fentanyl, and a surge in poppy cultivation in Mexico by violent drug gangs.

In a phone call last month, U.S. President Barack Obama and his Mexican counterpart Enrique Pena Nieto agreed to intensify the fight against heroin production, and government officials say the problem has been under discussion for months.

Paulo Carreno, Mexican deputy foreign minister in charge of North America, said in an interview that Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was also committed to the plan due to be launched at the so-called Three Amigos summit later this month.

“This isn’t just about destroying (plantations), it’s about finding solutions for people forced to cultivate poppies, and there will be an important announcement in this context at the summit on a new cooperation plan between the three countries to deal with problems that obviously concerns us all,” he said.

Carreno declined to offer details but said additional resources would devoted to all parts of the problem.

“To combating it, to eradicating it, but also to reducing demand significantly and addressing the social aspect,” he said.

Pena Nieto took office in December 2012 pledging to bring Mexico’s drug cartels to heel, but sickening gang violence has been a blight on his administration and cultivation of opium poppies used to make heroin has surged.

Between 2012 and 2015, the area under poppy cultivation in Mexico, which officials say is the most important supplier of heroin to the United States, rose from 10,500 hectares to 28,000 hectares, according to figures published by the White House.

At the same time, fatal heroin overdoses in the United States have risen steeply, with some 10,574 deaths reported in 2014, a rise of 26 percent from the previous year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That figure is six times higher than the total in 2001, the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse says.

“Right now there’s a lot of concern here in the United States because we are suffering from a major, major heroin epidemic,” said Mike Vigil, a former head of global operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

A large part of the Mexican increase in cultivation has been in the violent southwestern state of Guerrero, where 43 trainee teachers were abducted by a drug gang and corrupt police in September 2014, then murdered, according to the government.

To cut gang violence, Guerrero’s governor has floated the idea of regulating poppy production for medicinal purposes, an option which the Mexican government has studied.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one senior Mexican official said the United States was prepared to offer Mexico more material support to tackle heroin production.

However, a U.S. official said the two sides were still discussing which measures to adopt. One subject under discussion is finding alternative crops for opium poppy farmers to grow.

(Reporting by Dave Graham; Editing by Bernard Orr)