It was a bit of social media copy that first went viral when conservatives flagged it as an example of media malfeasance. It then went viral again when the left used to tar and feather conservatives for being insufficiently wise as to the terminology used by law enforcement officialdom to describe gang members.

So, here’s a fact-check to put it to rest once and for all: Can MS-13 really be referred to as a “clique?”

That was the question people were asking themselves when ABC News found itself in the center of a maelstrom regarding its social media copy on a report regarding the sentencing of a leader of a cell in the transnational criminal cartel for eight murders, including high school students.

From the Associated Press article as published by ABC News:

The leader of an MS-13 clique in the suburbs of New York City faces sentencing Wednesday in a federal racketeering case involving eight murders, including the 2016 killings of two high school girls that focused the nation’s attention on the violent Central American street gang.

Alexi Saenz pleaded guilty last year for his role in ordering and approving the killings as well as other crimes during a rash of bloody violence that prompted President Donald Trump to make several visits to Long Island and call for the death penalty for Saenz and other gang members during his first term in the White House.

Saenz’s lawyers are seeking a sentence of 45 years behind bars, but prosecutors want the judge to impose the maximum sentence of 70 years.

Saenz’s case is important inasmuch as the case was one of the first to put the gang on most people’s radar. Mara Salvatrucha, best known by its acronym, has been around since the 1980s, when it was founded in Los Angeles — but it was only in the 2010s that it rose to prominence and fueled the campaigns of candidates who focused on border security as a primary issue.

MS-13 has been in the news recently because President Donald Trump has ordered the gang to be labeled a terrorist organization and its members deported from the United States under expedited circumstances.

The leader of an MS-13 clique in the suburbs of New York City faces sentencing Wednesday in a federal racketeering case involving eight murders, including the 2016 killings of two high school girls that focused the nation’s attention on the violent gang. https://t.co/T3p6jtqHVB

— ABC News (@ABC) July 2, 2025

And while that background was important, that wasn’t what most people were reacting to on social media:

Of all the propaganda you’ve pushed over the years, describing a gang that murders children as a fun “clique” is a new low.

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) July 2, 2025

A clique? pic.twitter.com/v2wLSx1zm0

— Kyle Beckley (@Kyle_Beckley) July 2, 2025

WHO is writing this fraudulent description of a murderous gang? WHY are they presenting this murderous gang as benign as a group of girls going to a dance? This gang member is being sentenced for 8 MURDERS! A “clique?” Do they need a dictionary in that newsroom or a brain.

— Anjullyn (@Anjullyn) July 2, 2025

However, others made sure to point out that aacckkkkshully, the use of the term “clique” was technically correct and the term “violent gang” was used elsewhere in the copy:

For anyone wondering, an MS-13 clique is a sub-gang of MS-13. The name of the entire criminal organization is MS-13, and then there are smaller gangs under the MS-13 umbrella, called cliques.

Believe it or not, ABC did actually use the proper terminology in this tweet. pic.twitter.com/vS9vKlJyTC

— ✨⃤djcalligraphy (@DJcalligraphy) July 2, 2025

ABC News likely used “clique” to describe an MS-13 subgroup because it’s a standard term in gang research and law enforcement, accurately reflecting the gang’s structure of semi-autonomous units, as seen in legal documents and sources like Wikipedia. It clarifies the scope of the…

— Grok (@grok) July 2, 2025

It is true that this is a term that’s used in the law enforcement community to describe gang cells, and not necessarily just under Democratic administrations. For instance, from Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, March 3:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI apprehended an illegal Salvadoran alien charged in his home country with possession of firearm, extorsion and terrorist affiliation when officers arrested David Alejandro Orellana-Aleman, 27, in Hyattsville, Maryland, Feb. 27.

Orellana is a high-ranking leader in the MS-13 transnational terrorist organization and controlled the operation of MS-13 cliques in the United States, Mexico, and Europe. [Emphasis ours.]

However, it’s worth noting this isn’t a term that’s used in common parlance; few if any who aren’t in law enforcement use the term, and it’s an impediment to accurate understanding of the issue.

For example: I’d argue — in fact, I’m almost sure of the fact — that more people know that the collective noun for a group of a birds from the genus Corvus is “a murder of crows.” However, even with the number of people who know that factoid, I’d be strongly averse to writing social media copy for a story that said, say, “a murder of birds has a community on edge” if an unusually large influx of crows were terrorizing a community. The only reason I’d do such a thing, in fact, is if I wanted to inhibit people’s understanding of the story in order to effectuate a certain result.

In this case, the result ABC News would effectuate by using “MS-13 clique” instead of “cell of the MS-13 gang” is obvious: They remove the word “gang” from the description of those arrested for crimes that were committed because of their gang affiliation. This posed against the backdrop of Trump’s war on MS-13 — designating it a terror group — makes the decision to include the term a value-loaded linguistic proposition.

Moreover, it’s worth noting that even when ICE uses the term in media releases, it generally does so after mentioning that MS-13 is a gang or terrorist organization, not before. Here, the “clique” is foregrounded by the language ABC News used — setting the tone by substituting a term not widely used by most lay readers for “gang cells.”

Something can be technically correct and still be awfully misleading. That being said, the AP’s reporting and ABC News’ decision to use the term in its social media copy isn’t factually incorrect. As for whether it was done to achieve a sanitizing effect, that’s left up to the readers — but it’s worth noting that the response seems to speak for itself.

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