Gang Activity Now a Focus for Immigration Agents

By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: December 9, 2010

When Walter Alberto Torres, a Salvadoran immigrant and a gang member, confessed in October 2009 that he had unsuccessfully plotted the assassination of an immigration agent in New York City, the admission touched off more than just his prosecution.

In the ensuing weeks, immigration authorities, working with other law enforcement agencies, conducted raids on suspected hide-outs of Mr. Torres’s gang, La Mara Salvatrucha 13, an international network of violent cliques with a growing presence in New York City and its suburbs.

And that offensive — intended in part, officials said, to signal that the government would not tolerate attacks on its officers — was only the beginning for the New York office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In the months since, agents in the office’s investigative division have expanded their dragnet far beyond La Mara Salvatrucha and across the region, from Ulster County in the Hudson Valley to eastern Long Island.

From October 2009 through September, they arrested 285 suspects they said were gang members or close associates — a record for the office and a fivefold increase from the previous fiscal year.

The surge, which has unfolded with little public notice, began with the arrival of James T. Hayes Jr., who became special agent in charge of the investigations division several weeks before Mr. Torres confessed to the murder plot.

Mr. Hayes, 37, said that while the threat to an agent had fired up his team, the arrests also reflected a new emphasis for the investigative unit. When he assumed the job, he said, he reviewed the office’s recent moves against gangs — it had made 57 such arrests in the previous fiscal year — and concluded that his team could be doing far more.
He added 3 agents to a force that now numbers 11, “and really gave them a mandate, not just to look at individual gang members but to look at these street gangs as criminal organizations and to use all our tools to disrupt and dismantle them,â€