CNN interviewed MS-13 gang members and allowed them to blame President Trump for making them “stronger” despite his aggressive crackdown on the gang.
According to the gang members interviewed by CNN in a segment aired Friday, Trump’s illegal immigration policies make illegal immigrants wary of reporting MS-13 violence to the police for fear of being deported, thus making MS-13 “stronger.”
“This gang might actually be getting stronger,” Poppy Harlow teased the report. “Why? The Trump administration’s own policies.”
“We sat down with two MS-13 gang members,” Dan Lieberman, who led the report, said. “And all of them sort of described a situation where the level of fear among immigrants is so high that its actually emboldening the gang.”
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What the CNN report hardly mentions is that Trump has specifically instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to target illegal immigrants that are members of criminal gangs — and seems to be delivering on that order.
In May, a law enforcement task force took out 21 of the most dangerous members of the gang in a Los Angeles raid. The United States has also been working closely with El Salvador to combat the MS-13 threat, and upon Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ arrival to the country yesterday, the Central American nation announced that it had brought charges against 113 gang members.
The day before, El Salvador charged another 593 gang members, many of which were a part of MS-13.
The CNN report ventured into sympathetic territory when they allowed the MS-13 gang members to complain that if they murder someone and get caught, they will be taken away from their families.
“Murders from MS-13 don’t only hurt one family, but hurt both,” one gang member said. “If you get caught, your family’s never gonna see you again.”
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After the interviews with the gang members aired, CNN host John Berman reiterated that illegal immigrants are afraid to come forward with knowledge on MS-13 because they fear being deported.
“That’s why it’s so scary, so nuanced,” Lieberman said.
At the very end of the segment, Lieberman read a statement from a senior Trump administration official, who asserted, “The reality is that we are removing MS-13 and other criminal gang members in very large numbers and they are hurting.”
CNN only read the statement and didn’t attempt to flesh it out or give it any credibility like they did the earlier comments from the MS-13 gang members.
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CNN also chose not to acknowledge that a weakening of immigration policy — which would supposedly make illegal immigrants feel more comfortable going to the police — could also affect the ability of the administration to remove those violent gang members from the country.