Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

From 2016 to May 2017, authorities in Suffolk County attributed seventeen killings to MS-13. The county’s police department identified at least eighty-nine gang members who were undocumented immigrants; thirty-nine had been placed with family on Long Island by the federal government. These numbers were a minuscule portion of the local immigrant population, which was statistically far more law-abiding than American citizens. There were half a million immigrants on Long Island, and about sixty thousand Salvadorans in Suffolk County. The most expansive estimates made by the Suffolk County Police Department put the gang’s membership at around four hundred people. Gruesome gang killings magnified a sense of alarm that did not match the actual threat.