Despite what alleged gang member Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s attorney is arguing in court, there is evidence of MS-13 “Western clique” activity in and around Washington, D.C.

Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who was living illegally in southern Maryland near the nation’s capital, is accused of belonging to the Western clique of MS-13. His current immigration lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, is disputing that he was ever a member of MS-13 and has bolstered that argument in court filings by claiming that the Western clique operates only in New York, where he says Abrego Garcia has never lived.

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For years, Abrego Garcia was residing unlawfully in Prince George’s County, Maryland, a suburb of the Washington, D.C., area, before the Trump administration mistakenly sent him to El Salvador. Abrego Garcia previously won a withholding of removal order protecting him from being deported back to his home country because he had, with the help of an activist attorney, successfully claimed “fear of future persecution” by Barrio 18, the Salvadoran rival gang of MS-13.

The strength of the evidence tying Abrego Garcia to MS-13 has become central to the politically-charged court battle over his detention in a Salvadoran prison. Democrats have claimed that little connects Abrego Garcia, a father of three, to the violent gang, while Republicans have highlighted the numerous forms of evidence submitted to courts by the Department of Homeland Security and the fact that an immigration judge and an appeals board found that evidence credible in 2019.

MS-13’s prevailing dominance in the DC area

Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, is a violent, transnational street gang comprised of loosely affiliated “cliques” across the United States. Each clique, such as the Western cell, controls certain territory, or “turf.” In 2004, law enforcement reportedly identified 13 different cliques in Maryland’s Montgomery County, another District of Columbia suburb.

Formed among Central American refugees fleeing from civil conflict in El Salvador, the criminal organization first set up shop in southern California, a drug distribution hot spot, in the 1980s, per a Journal of Gang Research profile on MS-13’s origins. At the time, Salvadoran youth, who were often targets of the Mexican Mafia, had banded together to protect themselves against existing Hispanic gangs there. They then called themselves “Salvatrucha,” or street-tough Salvadorans.

Eventually, MS-13 expanded to a slew of states in the U.S. Some members settled in neighborhoods surrounding D.C., where they established a large, lasting presence around the nation’s capital, according to a Department of Justice fact sheet. By 1995, the Washington Metroplex was home to approximately 250,000 illegal Salvadoran immigrants, making the D.C. area the second-largest Salvadoran population outside of El Salvador. Today, MS-13 continues to recruit migrants from the gang-torn country.

Aggressive defense strategy

In a federal complaint filed late last month against the Trump administration, Sandoval-Moshenberg asserted that MS-13’s Western clique only operates out of Brentwood, a Long Island hamlet in New York, a state that the defense notes Abrego Garcia “has never lived in.”

Sandoval-Moshenberg cited the DOJ and the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, appearing to reference the 2011 execution-style murder of Ricardo Ceron, a Western clique member, in Long Island by the Brentwood Locos Salvatruchas clique.

Ceron’s killers were federally prosecuted, and the U.S. attorney’s office published a pair of press releases publicizing the criminal proceedings at the time. The releases do not indicate that the DOJ said the Western clique’s operations are limited to New York. However, they simply say that a Western clique member was once killed in Brentwood, his hometown, per a Suffolk County Police Department press statement.

One wide-ranging Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act indictment of MS-13 members in D.C. from 2011 references the Western clique, according to court records research conducted by D.C. lawyer Will Chamberlain, who serves as senior counsel at the conservative Article III Project.

The sprawling 42-page federal indictment, which the Washington Examiner has examined in full, mentions that the Western clique was one of six major MS-13 arms operating in the D.C. metropolitan area.

As the indictment explained, “MS-13 was organized in the District of Columbia and elsewhere in ‘cliques,’ that is, smaller groups operating in a specific city or region … In the District of Columbia and surrounding metropolitan jurisdictions, these cliques included Sailors (SLSW), Normandy (NLS), Peajes, Western (WLS), Uniones (ULS), and Fultons.”

InSight Crime, a think tank investigating organized crime, published a 2015 piece referencing a Maryland-based “Western Locos” clique. Reporting on the same D.C. court RICO case, InSight Crime mentioned a conference call among “representatives from the Uniones, Normandie, and Western Locos cliques in Maryland” that took place sometime in November 2009, “to refocus attention on the Maryland and Washington region.” These were three of the six MS-13 cells that had “consolidated in Washington,” InSight Crime noted, echoing the FBI’s findings.

For further indication of MS-13’s foothold in the D.C. area, the 2019 police report on Abrego Garcia’s gang affiliation also mentions a task force specifically assembled to gather intelligence on MS-13. The existence of this Gang Unit MS-13 Intelligence Squad within the Prince George’s County police force likely means there was, at the time, an alarming amount of MS-13 activity in the area, said Bill Shipley, a former federal prosecutor who had dealt with gangs in California, in a legal analysis on Substack.

“The fact that Prince Georges County has an MS-13 Gang Unit is highly suggestive of the fact that Prince Georges County has an MS-13 gang problem,” Shipley wrote. The level of MS-13 activity in the area was so concerning, Shipley suggested, that it required “an entire Gang Unit with its own Intelligence Squad dedicated to identifying and investigating MS-13 members.”

It is unclear whether the MS-13 intelligence unit is still in operation. PGPD did not respond to an inquiry asking about the squad’s status.

A general Gang Unit was active as of 2022, according to an annual PGPD crime statistics report. During that year, there were 28 gang-related felony arrests, 42 misdemeanor arrests, nine gangs identified, and 19 dismantled, PGPD reported. The crimes ranged from firearms possession to homicide.

PGPD currently has a Gang Task Force Tip Line.

Abrego Garcia’s MS-13 membership allegations

In 2019, “a past proven and reliable” informant told Prince George’s County Police Department officers that Abrego Garcia was “an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique,” according to a gang field interview sheet, which was used to collect intelligence on suspected gang affiliates. He had the rank of “Chequeo” and moniker of “Chele,” the confidential source said. A judge during Abrego Garcia’s deportation proceedings later found the MS-13 membership claim “trustworthy,” and the Bureau of Immigration Appeals ultimately upheld the finding.

This gang registry record was generated in response to Abrego Garcia’s apprehension, alongside two other known MS-13 members with respective ranks and nicknames, while he was loitering at a Home Depot parking lot in Hyattsville, apparently looking for labor work.

DHS REVEALS EVIDENCE SUPPORTING ABREGO GARCIA’S MS-13 TIES

According to the police report, Abrego Garcia was wearing a hoodie allegedly bearing symbols that signified gang affiliation: rolls of cash, with the eyes, ears, and mouths of the U.S. presidents covered. Authorities said this meant “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” an MS-13 motto affirming allegiance to a code of silence.

Abrego Garcia also sported a Chicago Bulls hat. Wearing this signaled that one is a member “in good standing” with the MS-13, the police statements said. MS-13 has adopted devil horns as a hand sign since some of its founders were Satan worshippers and said they committed crimes at the behest of “The Beast,” according to a Washington Post article on the gang’s Satanic history. “[A]t some point, the Chicago Bulls logo with the horns became a stand-in of sorts for the MS-13’s devil horns symbol,” journalist Steven Dudley, who has spent a decade studying MS-13 for the investigative non-profit InSight Crime, told the BBC.