The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 21 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump’s case for leaving Kilmar Abrego Garcia to rot in an El Salvadoran prison continues to collapse. We just had a conservative appeals court judge tear into the administration, pronouncing the denial of basic due process to this man “shocking.” But today we’re going to focus on a particular aspect of Trump’s argument—the claim that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang and therefore a dangerous criminal. You can’t overstate how central this is to the administration’s case. It’s the primary rationale for refusing to bring him back from El Salvador in the first place. So we’re talking about all of this with someone who has done deep research into MS-13: Eric Hershberg, a professor of government at American University and a leading contributor to a major report for insight crime on the MS-13 gang. Eric, thanks for coming on.
Eric Hershberg: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: Let’s start with Trump. Just to catch people up, when Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran, was first detained in 2019 in the United States, he was identified by a Maryland police officer as a member of MS-13 based on very thin evidence. He was subsequently given withholding of removal status, barring his removal to El Salvador—but that’s exactly what the administration did illegally in March. Speaking to reporters, here’s what Trump just said.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): You’re talking about Abrego Garcia. Is that the one, yeah? He’s an illegal alien, MS-13 gang member, and foreign terrorist. This comes out of the State Department and very legitimate sources. I mean, I assume. I’m reading, I’m just giving you what they handed to me, but this was supposed to be certified stuff.
Sargent: Eric, note that Trump says here that he’s been handed this information. It’s plainly obvious that he has no understanding whatsoever of the details. Your thoughts on this?
Hershberg: Well, Trump has made references to MS-13 for years with no knowledge of the details. And what he does in the excerpt that you shared a moment ago is a typical Trumpian gesture, which is saying, Well, I don’t know, but I’ve heard it said, or it is, they say. This is a classic conspiracy theory way of conveying disinformation. In this case, he attributes it to the State Department but qualifies that he doesn’t. He just assumes that the State Department has good intel that enables them to have reached this conclusion.
Sargent: Yeah. What he’s referring to there, and this is a guess because who the hell knows what’s going through his head, is this idea that MS-13 has been designated a terrorist organization. I don’t believe the State Department has commented specifically on this particular case of Abrego Garcia, so it makes the whole thing even more absurd. He says he was just handed this information. He says, Yeah, it’s probably accurate, right? I think it’s credible. That really shows me that this is someone who is not thinking even slightly about the details, even though he’s making this enormous life and death decision about this man.
Hershberg: Yeah. Again, that indifference to the fortune of other people is a hallmark of Trump’s behavior in the presidency and, indeed, his behavior in the public arena for decades. He’s demagogued questions of crime. He’s demagogued questions of immigration. He’s demagogued questions of depictions of people who are unlike us, who are “invading” the country. This is his stock-in-trade.
Sargent: Very well said. Let’s back up a bit. Can you give us a very brief overview of what MS-13 is, and what it’s doing in Maryland?
Hershberg: Sure. MS-13 was a street gang established in the mid 1980s in the Los Angeles area where Salvadoran migrants—refugees from the Civil War of the ’80s—migrated to California and were vulnerable to violence from established street gangs. MS-13 arises as a response of that vulnerable community, and it becomes its own independent criminal street gang. As those folks are deported to El Salvador in the ’90s, the gang takes root in El Salvador and has became an extremely violent and extremely destructive force [there]. But at the same time, there were networks of MS-13 still on the West Coast, and there arose networks of MS-13 in metropolitan Washington, D.C., which of course is one of the principal destinations of Salvadoran migrants. We were never persuaded that this is a “transnational gang,” though that’s the label that it’s been given by the U.S. government, but it is a gang that has a presence in multiple locations.
Sargent: Right. And we should probably clarify that they are capable of horrific violence and so forth. They also have a social role as well. Can you talk about those two dual things very briefly?
Hershberg: Well, both things. The social role—gangs take on the role of governing entities in some locations where the state is absent. This is certainly characteristic in El Salvador, where the state doesn’t provide for security, doesn’t provide for order, doesn’t provide some kinds of basic social and community services. And the gangs like organized crime groups in many different settings take on some of these social functions. MS and the other Salvadoran gangs have tended to use highly performative extreme violence as a way of establishing both their identity and of asserting their influence. One of the things certainly that alarms us about gang presence here in the U.S.—and in El Salvador as well, where the gangs in fact were enormously destructive and enormously disruptive to people’s ability to live safe, everyday lives—is the degree to which gory, macabre violence has been a hallmark of MS-13. And that’s very real.
Sargent: So let’s drill down into the specifics. Trump claimed he was actually handed something. If so, what it would have been is the Gang Field Interview Sheet filled out by a Prince George’s County cop when Abrego Garcia was detained in 2019. As we reported at The New Republic, that cop was subsequently suspended and indicted for serious misconduct. But put that aside for a sec, the Gang Field Interview Sheet makes two key claims tying him to MS-13; we’re going to go through both of them slowly. The first one is that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie with imagery of rolls of money with the eyes, ears, and mouth of the presidents on the bills covered. It’s a little cryptic from the report what that exactly means, but Eric, is this clothing necessarily indicative of membership in MS-13? And what do you make of this description of the imagery?
Hershberg: First of all, I don’t think that I’m aware of any research that would identify that clothing as somehow emblematic of MS-13. What I would say is that in our research, looking into the presence and the nature and organization activities of MS-13 in the greater Washington, D.C., area, one of the things that we found quite striking was the degree to which law enforcement officials were not able to correctly identify who was part of the gang and who was not. So the idea that this gang identification sheet is authoritative information—certainly based on our work several years ago, including in Prince George’s County, we would not have considered that a reliable source.
Sargent: Eric, can you tell us a little more about the work that you did in P.G. County and D.C. metro area, and what it said about the difficulty that authorities have in identifying members of the gang?
Hershberg: Yes. Well, one of the things that we did in the project was we would ask law enforcement officials to enable us to interview people who were detained under their jurisdiction and who were members of gangs. And we would find them that some of the people they referred us to were clearly, as best we could tell, not part of the gang.
Sargent: It just seems like this whole enterprise is really deeply flawed—and for understandable reasons. This is complicated stuff. These are complex social phenomena we’re talking about here. The second claim in the Maryland cop’s Gang Field Interview Sheet that’s supposed to tie Abrego Garcia to MS-13 is the claim that a confidential source said that he’s a member of the Westerns clique. His lawyers point out that this operates primarily in New York, where he never lived. Eric, what do you make of this assertion? Would you place much stock in this confidential source, and is the general claim credible?
Hershberg: Well, the general claim is plausible, but I wouldn’t…. I don’t see precisely why [we should rely on] an anonymous source whose information we have no basis for verifying. And we don’t see any other profile that would enable us to associate this individual with MS-13. We don’t have any information about particular criminal activity that this person is said to have carried out. We don’t have any—whether it’s robbery, whether it’s car theft or whatever it might be—that would associate him with a clique of MS-13 operating in Maryland.
Sargent: The whole thing that makes this so ridiculous, which you just put your finger on, is that he was never charged with—let alone convicted of—any crime related to gang activity or any crime at all. I want to bring up another aspect of all this. One of the reasons Abrego Garcia received withholding of removal status in 2019 is because he feared that if he were sent back to El Salvador, he’d face harm from the Barrio 18 gang, which had threatened his family with death in attempting to extort his mother over her pupusa business. I’ve heard this described as supposed evidence that he was in MS-13, and that this is why he feared a rival gang. But Eric, my understanding is that a threat like this doesn’t have to do with membership in a rival gang. It’s more that Barrio 18 is threatening him for not doing their bidding in territory they’ve marked as theirs, similar to how gangs carved up territory in The Godfather—if you remember all the chieftains sitting around saying who’s going to have what. Can you talk about this?
Hershberg: The way that Barrio 18, or MS-13, operates in El Salvador is that they extort local businesses, self-employed corner stores, bodegas, bus drivers, and so on and so forth. And you have to pay or else you get torched. And what seems to have happened is that his mother didn’t pay. At that point, not only is she subject to violence, but anybody related to her is also subject to violence. And the fact that he fled is itself an act of defiance that is subject to retribution by the gang. It’s also the case that even if he weren’t a member of MS-13, if he lived in a territory that was governed by MS-13 then he automatically becomes a target of violence from Barrio. So there’s all sorts of reasons to treat credibly the basic narrative that led the immigration court to withhold the order of removal.
Sargent: Speaking of this broader narrative, my understanding of the way MS-13 functions is that to bring people in, you’re usually getting teenagers, right? Not people in their twenties. So the whole narrative that the Trump administration is spinning makes you wonder: Why didn’t Abrego Garcia get drawn into gang activity earlier when he was a teenager? He would have been more vulnerable. He arrived in the U.S. at the age of 16. If he had been drawn into MS-13 as a teenager, there’d be a paper trail, there’d be a record of gang activity. There’s none of that. Am I right about this? Is it likely that he’d be pulled in in his twenties?
Hershberg: Well, I think one of the things we just don’t understand in this case is: What is the criminal activity that he’s associated with? If he were an active member of the gang, he would be involved in criminal activities. And there’s been no charge, as best I can tell, of his participation in any such activities. Recruitment into the gang typically happens during one’s teenage years. The gangs target young people who are directionless, who don’t have roots in their community, [who] often have broken families—and they offer a kind of family, they offer a community, they offer membership in something. So yes, typically, the entry into gang activity, gang networks happens during the teenage years. And yes, it would be rather unusual for somebody to first connect to the gang in their twenties.
Sargent: Right. Putting it all together, a lot of what we actually know about MS-13 and Abrego Garcia’s specific overall trajectory casts even more doubt on the claim that Trump is making, which, again, he is basing on something that he said was handed to him. Is that about the size of things? The facts just don’t add up in any way, do they?
Hershberg: Well, the facts don’t add up in any way, but I think they do in the sense that we know that for years Trump has demagogued the image of MS-13. This is the person who talks about migrants “poisoning the blood” of Americans. This is the person who talks about vermin, who talks about contamination. And there’s no loyalty here to facts or to decency or to civility. This is somebody who is an opportunist and who deploys fear of outsiders, who deploys resentment against migrants—and for whom, to be able to say, MS-13, MS-13, transnational gang, terrorist organization, is all just part of a demagogic toolkit.
Sargent: Eric Hershberg, thank you so much for coming on with us. This was super enlightening.
Hershberg: Thanks very much. Thank you for your reporting.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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