MANASSAS, Virginia — Top Department of Justice officials revealed Thursday they arrested the alleged East Coast leader of the MS-13 gang, a transnational criminal group notorious for engaging in violence and drug trafficking.
“Early this morning, one of the top leaders of MS-13 was apprehended,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said at the FBI field office in Manassas. “Right here in Virginia, living half an hour outside of Washington, D.C. He is an illegal alien from El Salvador, and he will not be living in our country much longer.”
The suspect was 24 years old and allegedly one of the country’s top three operatives of the gang. Officials said they arrested him in a neighborhood in Dale City, but they could not provide further details at this stage, including his name, the charges he could face, and where he was being detained.
“Anything you can associate with MS-13, he was the leader over it, all of the violent crimes,” Bondi said. “He was recruited at a very early age.”
Appearing alongside FBI Director Kash Patel, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), and DOJ officials from the Eastern District of Virginia, Bondi used the arrest to showcase the newly established Virginia Homeland Security Task Force, which is the first of its kind in any state. The task force is an effort between state and federal law enforcement to tackle transnational organized crime and immigration enforcement.
Since its inception, the task force has identified 575 targets in Virginia and arrested 342 of them, “many of them with illegal status,” interim U.S. Attorney Erik Siebert said. He said 81 had “gang or transnational crime affiliation.”
Under Trump, the DOJ has shifted its priorities to hyperfocus on immigration enforcement and drug crimes, a pillar of Trump’s campaign and a response to the Biden administration seeing historic surges of illegal migration.
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Part of the crackdown recently involved Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act for another transnational gang, Tren de Aragua. The administration said within hours of the invocation of the wartime deportation law that it abruptly deported more than 250 alleged Venezuelan Tren de Aragua members to a Salvadoran prison. The American Civil Liberties Union sued over the move, saying some gang members were given no due process before they were shipped out of the country and that some may not have been members of the gang. The lawsuit remains pending.
The department recently said in the first two months of the administration, prosecutors across the country brought criminal cases against more than 6,600 illegal immigrants, nearly half of which were in Arizona.
