Few dispute the violent menace that MS-13 is to pockets of communities across the United States. Its members yield machetes, kill with abandon and terrorize — for the most part — immigrant communities.

But law enforcement officials at local, state and federal levels describe the Trump administration’s hard-charging campaign against MS-13 as out of proportion with the threat.

President Trump has seized on the gang’s brutality and violence to symbolize the risks of illegal immigration.

Not all members of MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, are illegal immigrants. Nor does the gang survive on the global trafficking of drugs, guns or people.

Police and prosecutors in areas where MS-13 is most active said the heightened focus on the gang has come at the expense of fighting more widespread threats to the United States, particularly opioids and human trafficking.

At a meeting with Mr. Sessions last March, Chuck Rosenberg, then the acting head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said it made little sense to focus on MS-13 over more dangerous organizations. He refused to commit more resources to combating the gang, according to two people familiar with the private meeting. Mr. Rosenberg has since left the Trump administration.

“MS-13 is certainly a threat, just not the one the president is making it out to be,” said Tom Manger, the police chief in Montgomery County, Md., a Washington suburb where the gang has one of its largest concentrations. Police there dealt with only four MS-13-related police incidents last year — but a total of five homicides — compared with zero in 2013.

“They are a local public safety threat, but they are not a national security threat,” Chief Manger said.

Formed in central Los Angeles by Salvadoran refugees fleeing a civil war in the 1980s, the gang is believed to have 10,000 members in 40 states, according to the F.B.I. — but predominantly in just three metropolitan areas: Los Angeles, Long Island in New York and the region outside Washington. Most of its 30,000 other members live in Central America or Mexico, according to authorities.

In his State of the Union speech in January, Mr. Trump said MS-13 members exploited immigration laws to move to Long Island and, ultimately, kill Kayla Cuevas, 16, and Nisa Mickens, 15. The girls were beaten with baseball bats and sliced by machetes in a suburban cul-de-sac near an elementary school parking lot in September 2016.

Mr. Trump brought their parents to the speech and asked them to stand, as if to exhibit the reason for his immigration crackdown.

MS-13 operates in loose local cliques, sowing fear and violence. It is not a sophisticated global drug cartel, and many gang members are destitute.

Interviews with dozens of law enforcement and intelligence officials, and a review of documents, indicate that the gang dabbles in small-time drug dealing, gun sales, prostitution and extortion, with some members receiving just enough money to get by.

In one case, the suspected leader of one the largest MS-13 cliques in Maryland recently canceled a drug deal because he did not have enough money to pay for gas to drive to the drop-off point, according to a law enforcement official in the state.

The Trump administration is not the first to target MS-13.

President George W. Bush set up an F.B.I. task force to target MS-13 in 2004, and created the National Gang Intelligence Center in 2005. MS-13 became the first street gang to be designated by the government as a transnational criminal organization when President Barack Obama did so in 2012.

Mr. Sessions has compared MS-13 to Colombian drug cartels and the Mafia. The gang is now a top target of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, which has historically focused on major drug traffickers and money launderers with its annual $500 million budget. The department’s budget proposal for next year also requests $400,000 for a “sensitive investigative unit” to address transnational threats from El Salvador.

The United States and foreign allies have issued charges against 4,000 members of MS-13, Mr. Sessions said earlier this month. In December, he announced 40 new assistant United States attorney positions across the country to fight MS-13 and other gangs, including two on Long Island and three in Maryland.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has compared MS-13 to Colombian drug cartels and the Mafia.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

One official at a United States attorney’s office, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he was troubled by new pressure to prosecute MS-13 cases, given skyrocketing opioid crimes and a growing national human trafficking problem.

Even so, the number of federal prosecutions against MS-13 in the United States is limited. Only 11 cases were brought between October 2016 and September 2017, according to data provided by the Justice Department. Since then, prosecutors have opened another 13 cases.

This week, Mr. Sessions told state attorneys general he wanted to work with them in local prosecutions against MS-13. “We’re coming after MS-13. We want to hammer them,” he said on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigators arrested 796 suspected members of MS-13 last year, up from 429 in 2016. The agency said it also deported about 5,300 suspected members of all gangs over that same period of time, up from 2,000. Over a three-month span last fall, an I.C.E. operation dubbed “Raging Bull,” swept up 214 MS-13 members nationwide and arrested an additional 53 in El Salvador.

In New York, F.B.I. agents are arresting members of Trinitario, a Dominican gang, but characterizing them as MS-13 members to inflate their numbers to meet expectations, according to a senior state law enforcement official and a senior F.B.I. official, both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity.

A $500,000 Justice Department grant promised in October to fight gang violence and gun crime in Suffolk County, N.Y., targeted not only MS-13 but also the Bloods and Crips in its crime analysis. The Long Island county, which applied for the grant, was one of 14 awarded for a total of $3.375 million. Officials say they have not yet received the grant.

People gathered at a memorial for Nisa Mickens, 15, who was beaten with baseball bats and sliced by machetes by members of MS-13 in a cul-de-sac near an elementary school on Long Island in September 2016.Heather Walsh for The New York Times

Timothy D. Sini, the Suffolk County district attorney and former police commissioner, said MS-13 “constitutes a significant public safety threat” and was responsible for 17 murders in 15 months in that area of Long Island.

“With that said,” Mr. Sini said, “the No. 1 public health and safety issue facing Suffolk County, as in other communities, is the drug epidemic. And this drug epidemic is a moving target.” He said opioid overdoses killed more than 300 people in Suffolk County last year, compared with six deaths linked to MS-13.

A two-year uptick in violent activity converged with the arrival of more than 4,700 school-age minors in Suffolk County since 2013. Many of the children were fleeing gang violence in their native El Salvador or Honduras, and, after entering the country, most often applied for asylum, or the protection known as Special Immigrant Juvenile Status.

Last March, federal authorities charged 13 young adults — including four accused of involvement in the killings of Kayla Cuevas and Nisa Mickens — linked to MS-13 with racketeering and other crimes in Suffolk County. Of the 13, 10 were unauthorized immigrants, federal prosecutors said. Seven had come to the country as unaccompanied minors.

The Trump administration has repeatedly sought to show that immigration programs it is trying to eliminate have allowed MS-13 and other gangs to flourish. It has singled out the nation’s diversity lottery system, immigration programs to allow unaccompanied minors to cross the border and deportation protections for people who were brought illegally to the United States as children.

Yet the latest numbers do not bear that out. According to Border Patrol apprehension statistics published in December, the number of MS-13 members caught at the border actually declined to 228 in 2017, from 437 in 2014.

Some law enforcement officials privately fear that the Trump administration’s push to eradicate crime by deporting illegal immigrants could backfire.

Immigrants in communities where MS-13 is the strongest may be reluctant to come forward with information to help investigations, fearing deportation themselves. Some fear the government will use MS-13 cases to identify the gang members’ relatives and deport them. And MS-13’s victims are overwhelmingly immigrants themselves.

“The administration is using MS-13 in Willy Horton-esque campaign ads and as cover to make a boogeyman out of immigration,” said Kevin de León, a California state senator. “It is using MS-13 as a pretext to go after hardworking immigrants.”

Ron Nixon and Katie Benner reported from Washington and Liz Robbins from New York. Michael S. Schmidt and Adam Goldman contributed reporting from Washington.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35512888)

Just a chill, fratty local public safety threat that happens to be a threat to localities across the nation.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35512913)

Well, that's a relief.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35513218)

and it's only when they are returned to their home country that they increase crime.

here they do not commit crime, unless by "crime" you include violent crime against vulnerable immigrants (which we in the MSM consider a "crime" only when white people do it).

hope that clears it all up.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35514568)

Meanwhile, the KKK only has 8000 members nationwide

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35514521)

Yeah cuz we do nothing about opioids.

Faggot.

And “hunan trafficking” is literally illegal immigration. Jfc I hate these lying fucking kikes in the media.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35514698)

---

“The administration is using MS-13 in Willy Horton-esque campaign ads and as cover to make a boogeyman out of immigration,” said Kevin de León, a California state senator. “It is using MS-13 as a pretext to go after hardworking immigrants.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35514921)

The guys who worked on that ad admitted that they sought out a black dude that would scare the crap out of white women. That program (no doubt a shitty one) resulted in the release of a bunch of guys who went on to murder or commit violent crimes. Most of them were white. Lee Atwater would later regret his role in creating and releasing the ad.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35521190)

what possible better issue to vote on than whether the government will stop people from raping and killing you or nah

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35521274)

What makes the Willie Horton incident so awful is that he was already a murderer, but the government let him out anyway. That is very, very different than letting out a carjacker who then goes on to murder somebody. It is patently absurd that a murderer doing life was ever given the opportunity to just walk out of prison and never come back. OUT the (i) Massachusetts non-black murderer, (ii) who was released on furlough, (iii) while on furlough did a criminal act as bad as Willie Horton or worse (iv) prior to the Willie Horton ad being aired. Was there even one?

Secondly: Let's assume for the sake of argument that you can identify a similar white bad actor that the ad "should" have featured as some sort of bizarre reverse affirmative action.

Even if that's true, the bad moral actors here are, in order, Willie Horton, everybody involved with the decision to give him a free pass out of prison, and in a distant, DISTANT third place the guy who made an ad informing the public about those bad acts. Yet every time this is mentioned, libs are mad about the ad and indifferent to the complete failure of government that caused a murderer to go free (at best negligently) and terrorize law abiding citizens.

And, by the way, Dukakis is DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for this failure of governance. Allowing first degree murderers to be furloughed was a drafting error in the furlough bill. The legislature sent a bill to his desk to patch the hole and make murderers ineligible. He vetoed it, putting murderer interests ahead of everybody else's: https://books.google.com/books?id=GL80BQR6pk0C&pg=PA222&lpg=PA222&dq=%22cut+the+heart+out+of+efforts+at+inmate+rehabilitation.%22&source=bl&ots=ea0mA5Vk-v&sig=MnRefbs0TLGXjppp7o4CdLO4d_w&hl=en&sa=X&ei=CPtrVY-iE5O1oQTkrICgAw&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22cut%20the%20heart%20out%20of%20efforts%20at%20inmate%20rehabilitation.%22&f=false

The Horton attack was completely valid. That this complete failure was ever even nominated for the Presidency is laughable. As much as the left likes to lambast Trump for policy bloopers, none of them are on the level of "Hey, maybe we should let murderers go for the weekend and hope they come back."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35521326)

Once it became a controversy, Dukakis's press secretary literally responded with: "Don’t forget that Mr. Horton had nine previous successful furloughs." (Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/opinion/14douthat.html )

Where do you even start with that statement?

But all of this is down the memory hole. As far as libs are concerned, the commercial should have never been made because Horton is black.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35533720)

He needs to grow a beard.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35528754)

HOLY FUCK.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35537665)

tctp supporting De Leon ONLY makes sense as one mexican supporting another

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35537693)

Just leave them alone, you monsters!

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3907196&forum_id=2#35527253)