Honestly...
I'm NOT surprised at this...
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the alleged top MS-13 gang member who was arrested early Thursday morning in Virginia had likely been in the United States for over a decade.
Bondi made the revelation in an interview on "The Ingraham Angle" after 24-year-old Henry Josue Villatoro Santos, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, was taken into custody by federal agents.
"We believe he was recruited in middle school — in middle school!" the former Florida attorney general said.
Full article, HERE from Fox News.
When I lived in Arlington in the early 2000s, it was 'known' that there were hispanic gangs that lived in northern Virginia. Since I lived inside the beltway, I knew there was a section a couple of blocks from where I lived in Arlington that 'we' didn't go into for safety reasons. Under Warner and Kaine as governors, nothing was done to clean them up, and local LEOs were 'told' to ignore the problems unless people got killed.
I was pretty sure, thanks to LEO contacts, that at least a few MS-13 types lived behind us and they hung out and ran a park off Glebe road behind the Safeway grocery store. I also knew there were robberies that took place in that area that weren't ever investigated, and no officers patrolled that area at night.
We shot IDPA at a gun range in Woodbridge, and the owner was an instructor with the Capital Police. He was always cautioning us to make sure we were armed when we left at night, and made sure the parking lot lights were routinely 'fixed' when they mysteriously went out... Also, a number of the folks that shot there were LEOs, and they would usually bring their work rides when shooting, even if they were in civilian clothes, which 'might' have kept any incidents from happening at his place.
And yes, even in the early 2000s, MS-13 was using machetes to take out folks in northern Virginia! At least those got investigated... but seldom solved.
And yet the people on the left/Dems want to keep them here. Makes absolutely NO sense to me!
It unfortunately makes a lot of sense, from a certain point of view.
Specifically, what need is there for, say, a police force if there is no crime? What need is there for a government if there are no problems that the populace needs to have addressed as a group?
Given that, a way for an entity (individual, or organization) to keep itself in power, is to acknowledge the problem (preferably while blaming it on someone else), promise to fix it, make a great show of doing things that look like they're doing something ... but leave the root of the problem in place.
It's the government version of planned obsolescence.
This is just more of the standard lefty play book. (And it is coming out of the oldest sections of that book.) They create, direct, subsidize, or hinder the solving, of a group of criminals and troublemakers. Always in ways that encourage the problems created to get larger, more widespread, and affecting as many people as possible.
Then "promise" to solve the issue, if people would just give them the power to ignore any annoying limits on their authority. (Which I realized as I wrote this, is exactly what Palpatine did in parts 1-3 of Star Wars.)