How the MS-13 gang flourishes seven blocks from the White House

Michael E. Miller and Dan Morse report for the Washington Post on how

MS-13 menaces a community seven miles from the White House.

It took Abigail Bautista less than a month of living in Langley Park to learn that her new neighborhood in Maryland had its own set of laws, written not in statutes but in gang graffiti and blood.

...She had heard of the international street gang growing up in Central America, where MS-13, as it’s known, controls cities through brutality and corruption. But she had lived for the better part of a decade in the United States without crossing its path.

Now, she realized, she’d unwittingly moved into MS-13 territory a mere seven miles from the White House.

...most of the gang’s victims are not Americans but undocumented immigrants like Bautista. And when it comes to the gang’s infamous motto of “kill, rape, control,” it’s the third — enforced daily through extortion and intimidation — that defines life for some immigrants in places such as Langley Park.

...most of the gang’s victims are not Americans but undocumented immigrants like Bautista. And when it comes to the gang’s infamous motto of “kill, rape, control,” it’s the third — enforced daily through extortion and intimidation — that defines life for some immigrants in places such as Langley Park.

...But by the time Bautista arrived five years ago, MS-13 was on the rebound, fueled by fresh recruits from an unprecedented wave of almost 200,000 unaccompanied minors from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

...The recruits became Bautista’s tormentors. Every Friday, a young gang member would find her pushing her cart full of shoes and clothes. She was given street names of MS-13 members to use as passwords so other cliques, or factions, of MS-13 would leave her alone. Bautista, who worked as a maid at a hotel until she was fired for being undocumented, said she had no choice but to pay the gang.

Street vendors such as Bautista are part of a vast underground economy in Langley Park. Some undocumented families raise chickens in illicit coops in their kitchens. People often sublet parts of their apartments, cordoning areas off with sheets.

When Prince George’s County cracked down on food trucks in the neighborhood 10 years ago, many simply moved their businesses inside the apartment buildings. These illegal establishments are prime targets for extortion by MS-13, according to police. As soon as the gang learns of them, members demand money and threaten violence.

MS-13’s prostitution and drug operations in Langley Park are also profitable.

Read much more here.