Taking Back the Streets: ICE and Local Law Enforcement Target Immigrant Gangs

By Jessica Vaughan, Jon Feere
September 2008
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Immigration law enforcement has been a key ingredient contributing to the success of criminal gang suppression efforts in many jurisdictions across the United States. Since 2005, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested more than 8,000 gangsters from more than 700 different gangs as part of a special initiative known as Operation Community Shield. This effort has produced incalculable public safety benefits for American communities, despite being criticized periodically by immigrant and civil liberties advocates that are consistently opposed to all immigration law enforcement.

Local governments and law enforcement agencies that shun involvement in immigration law enforcement are missing an opportunity to protect their communities from criminal immigrant gang activity. Policymakers should take further steps to institutionalize partnerships between state and local law enforcement agencies and ICE in order to address gang and other crime problems with a connection to immigration.

Immigrant gangs1 are considered a unique public safety threat due to their members’ propensity for violence and their involvement in transnational crime. The latest national gang threat assessment noted that Hispanic gang membership has been growing, especially in the Northeast and the South, and that areas with new immigrant populations are especially vulnerable to gang activity. 2 A large share of the immigrant gangsters in the most notorious gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), Surenos-13, and 18th Street are illegal aliens. Their illegal status means they are especially vulnerable to law enforcement, and local authorities should take advantage of the immigration tools available in order to disrupt criminal gang activity, remove gang members from American communities, and deter their return. Once explained, these measures find much support, especially in immigrant communities where gang crime is rampant.

This report describes the exceptional public safety problems posed by immigrant gangs and looks at how one jurisdiction, Virginia, has used immigration law enforcement tools successfully to check their further proliferation. The authors conducted extensive research on immigrant gang characteristics and activities, analyzed arrest data from Operation Community Shield (OCS), and interviewed dozens of federal, state, and local law enforcement officers around the country who are involved in gang suppression. They were assisted by consultants with federal law enforcement experience and by research interns. 3 This report is a product of a larger study on immigrant gangs in Virginia (forthcoming), supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Among the findings:

•The growth of transnational gangs has been a dangerous side effect of our failure to control the U.S.-Mexico border and our tolerance for high levels of illegal immigration.
•Transnational immigrant gangs are spreading out across the United States, in suburban and rural areas as well as in established urban street gang environments. We found MS-13 activity in 48 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
•The aliens arrested under Operation Community Shield collectively represent a significant menace to the public. The vast majority (80 percent) have committed serious crimes in addition to immigration violations, and a large number (40 percent) have violent criminal histories (See Table 3).
•ICE gang arrests have occurred nationwide, with the largest numbers made by the offices in San Diego, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Dallas (see Table 1). Some jurisdictions with serious gang problems had just a few OCS arrests, such as Phoenix, with only 81 arrests, and Houston, with 84 arrests. Los Angeles, the gang capital of the nation, had fewer than 300 arrests. These same jurisdictions also had controversial “sanctuaryâ€