Child Border Surge Includes Mara Salvatrucha Gang Elements

Investor’s Business Daily

Immigration: Border Patrol sources say some of the thousands of “children” flowing across the Texas frontier are Mara Salvatrucha’s gangster enforcers. It figures: No one benefits more from Obama’s open-door policies.

At the Murrieta town hall meeting last week, hundreds of illegals in Mexican soccer jerseys protesting the town’s refusal to take busloads of illegal immigrants had an odd man among them, wearing a suit with a sign around his neck saying he was an illegal.  

“I asked him why he didn’t have papers and he said he didn’t need them because he brought people across without papers. He was there to see if anyone needed his services,” recalled Murrieta resident Amanda Mitchell, who spoke with IBD at Murrieta’s Border Patrol camp vigil Sunday. “So you’re a coyote, a human trafficker!” she replied. After that, she said, he refused to talk.

The incident is but one sign of the criminal element among the 52,000 unaccompanied children who’ve flooded our unpoliced Texas border amid teary media reports about their hard plight back in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. But behind the glurge is the hard reality that among these illegals there are gangs that profit from this misery. And they are a threat to the U.S.

Illegal immigrants pay each smuggler $7,000 a head to cross over. The more who cross, the more who profit.

Border Patrol sources have leaked to Townhall.com that MS13 (Mara Salvatrucha) graffiti has been left on Border Patrol holding-tank walls and that actual gang members have been found among the thousands of illegals now surging across the border.

“We have six minors in Nogales who have admitted to killing and doing grievous bodily injuries. One admitted to killing as young as 8 years old,” an agent told Townhall.com’s Katie Pavlich. “They are being held for placement in the U.S.”

MS13 is “one of the foremost players in (El Salvador’s) thriving human-trafficking industry,” according to InsightCrime, a respected website. The U.S. Southern Command estimates the gang — originally formed in Los Angeles — has 70,000 members.

The transnational criminal organization not only makes millions from smuggling illegals, its cash has bought tentacles into Central American governments that ship illegals and rely on them for remittances.

Ground zero is El Salvador, which has shipped as much as a third of its population to the U.S. and relies on their remittances for 16% of the nation’s GDP.

This year, El Salvador elected Salvador Sanchez Ceren, an aging FMLN guerrilla commander, as its president, despite evidence of his closeness to these gangs.

“Sanchez Ceren and his allies are from the party’s toughest elements, and some have direct ties to drug traffickers and the government of Venezuela,” warned former deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams in the Washington Post in January.

He has refused to sign a truce among his country’s rival gangs, driving a new cycle of violence this year.

Yet the U.S. coddles him and promises aid, just as domestic Democrats dangle amnesty to illegals here. It’s enabling the very gangs whose strength now grows with every illegal border crossing.

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