U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said Thursday it arrested more than 10,000 known or suspected gang members in fiscal year 2018 but said that’s a slight decrease from the prior year.
In the fiscal year ending in September, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations and Enforcement Removal Operations teams arrested 10,250 people on gang charges. That’s down slightly from the 10,935 arrested the year before.
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But while the number dropped, ICE said a larger percentage of those arrested were known or suspected MS-13 gang members.
Twenty-one percent of those arrested in 2018 were Mara Salvatrucha members, compared with 17 percent the year before.
Trump instructed ICE to target members of MS-13 at the beginning of his administration. The gang has about 100,000 members between El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and about 10,000 are in the U.S.
In 2012, the Treasury Department declared MS-13 a transnational criminal organization.
ICE determines if a person in the country illegally is a gang member by looking him or her up in federal law enforcement databases, interviews with the person in custody, and intelligence from local police and sheriffs departments.
ICE arrested a total of 158,000 people illegally in the U.S. in fiscal 2018.
