Justice Dept. describes man arrested on gun charges as top MS-13 leader
Federal authorities on Thursday announced the arrest of a Salvadoran man they described as one of the top three MS-13 gang leaders in the United States.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the suspect oversaw the gang's East Coast operations. But court records unsealed later that day — which identified the man as Henrry Josue Villatoro Santos, 24 — made only scant reference to his alleged gang ties and did not accuse him of any specific gang-related activity. Instead, Villatoro Santos was charged with being in the country illegally while possessing a gun.
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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
The LA riots could destroy Donald Trump's presidency
We're only a few days into the anti-riot crackdowns in Los Angeles by various armed government enforcers and already there are lives at stake. No, not the lives of the hundreds of protestors out on the streets across America's second-largest city, but the political lives – or at least longevity – of some of the highest-profile personalities to emerge during president Trump's second turn in the White House. There's Los Angeles mayor, Karen Bass, already weakened by her disastrous performance during last year's wildfire chaos and now even more compromised by the optics of incompetence as her city erupts yet again. And, of course, California governor Gavin Newsom, whose unbridled presidential ambitions could take a fatal hit if his state does not return to law and order – and fast. The riots are a test for Kristi Noem, the US secretary of Homeland Security, aka 'ICE Barbie' – who made waves when she toured a Salvadoran mega prison in March sporting a $50,000 Rolex. Her hardline anti-migrant stance has made her a close Trump confidant – but can it stand up to the ire of the masses she helped mobilise by her often cruel migrant deportation sprees? But the most consequential political life at stake here is that of Donald Trump himself – whose ultra-adversarial, bully-like tactics have yet to be tested as they are right now in California. There has never been anything quite like the anti-ICE protests during either of Trump's terms. The Women's Marches and BLM protests of his first administration may have, at times, turned rowdy and chaotic – but their violence was never directed at the White House like it is right now. This moment is different. Very different. For one thing, the conflict in Los Angeles is a direct response to Trump's hardline policies – in this case the illegal migrant crackdown – and are being mounted by those personally impacted, rather than virtue-signalling college kids motivated by 'privilege guilt.' The riots also come after 18 months of anti-Israel protests that have been some of the most violent protests in modern US history. America's radical Left has not only perfected aggressive adversarialism since Hamas' October 7 attacks – it's normalised it. And now it has even further weaponised this disregard for civility on what could be a far larger scale. Back in 2020, the National Guard were deployed to merely help support local law enforcement efforts when the BLM riots turned critical, and the Left was practically apoplectic. This time, the National Guard are Trump's main characters – and the Marines could be the White House's next course of action. This is a level of pushback practically without precedent – risky and uncertain amid an atmosphere of anti-Trumpism whose long-anticipated #resistance has finally materialised. Now unleashed, the California protesters could prove the ultimate – and most unanticipated – foils to a Trump White House whose run of nearly unchallenged luck looks like it is coming to an end. For many illegal migrants facing deportation, the spectre of arrest or even death rivals the potential violence awaiting in their home nations. These are people with literally nothing to lose – and thanks to Joe Biden there are millions of them existing along America's fringes. These are not the college-educated agitators who fuelled BLM in 2020 and 'Save Gaza' more recently – with middle class families and aspirational futures at stake. Fuelled by governor Newsom's surprising anti-Trump resolve – on Sunday he dared Trump's henchmen to arrest him – the protests could very well continue deep into the week, or even weeks; arrests, injuries or even deaths be damned. Trump has staked his legacy and the future of Maga on an uncompromising commitment to his ideals – and an end to illegal migration has been at the top since he branded Mexicans as 'rapists' on the very first day of his very first campaign a decade ago. Now those Mexicans are brandishing their nation's flag as they finally seek retribution. The past weekend's violence was practically inevitable – even if no one clearly saw it coming. With America already up in flames over Gaza – and the left always salivating at the prospect of an even more spectacular intersectional cause célèbre – the mayhem could easily spread beyond California in the coming days. The #resistance has finally arrived and it's far bloodier than anyone could have anticipated. It may still be early in Trump 2.0, but the Los Angeles riots could easily emerge as its most defining moment. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
2 hours ago
Under Patel, FBI heightens focus on violent crime, illegal immigration. Other threats abound, too
WASHINGTON -- FOR MOVEMENT AT 12:01 A.M. ON MONDAY JUNE 9TH When the FBI arrested an accused leader of the MS-13 gang, Kash Patel was there to announce the case, trumpeting it as a step toward returning "our communities to safety.' Weeks later, when the Justice Department announced the seizure of $510 million in illegal narcotics bound for the U.S, the FBI director joined other law enforcement leaders in front of a Coast Guard ship in Florida and stacks of intercepted drugs to highlight the haul. His presence was meant to signal the premium the FBI is placing on combating violent crime, drug trafficking and illegal immigration, concerns that have leapfrogged up the agenda in what current and former law enforcement officials say amounts to a rethinking of priorities and mission at a time when the country is also confronting increasingly sophisticated national security threats from abroad. A revised FBI priority list on its website places 'Crush Violent Crime' at the top, bringing the bureau into alignment with the vision of President Donald Trump, who has made a crackdown on illegal immigration, cartels and transnational gangs a cornerstone of his administration. Patel has said he wants to 'get back to the basics.' His deputy, Dan Bongino, says the FBI is returning to 'its roots.' Patel says the FBI remains focused on some of the same concerns, including China, that have dominated headlines in recent years, and the bureau said in a statement that its commitment to investigating international and domestic terrorism has not changed. That intensifying threat was laid bare over the past month by a spate of violent acts, most recently a Molotov cocktail attack on a Colorado crowd by an Egyptian man who authorities say overstayed his visa and yelled 'Free Palestine.' 'The FBI continuously analyzes the threat landscape and allocates resources and personnel in alignment with that analysis and the investigative needs of the Bureau,' the FBI said in a statement. 'We make adjustments and changes based on many factors and remain flexible as various needs arise.' Signs of restructuring abound. The Justice Department has disbanded an FBI-led task force on foreign influence and the bureau has moved to dissolve a key public corruption squad in its Washington field office, people familiar with the matter have told The Associated Press. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has proposed steep budget cuts for the FBI, and there's been significant turnover in leadership ranks as some veteran agents with years of experience have been pushed from their positions. Some former officials are concerned the stepped-up focus on violent crime and immigration — areas already core to the mission of agencies including the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — risks deflecting attention from some of the complicated criminal and national security threats for which the bureau has long borne primary if not exclusive responsibility for investigating. 'If you're looking down five feet in front of you, looking for gang members and I would say lower-level criminals, you're going to miss some of the more sophisticated strategic issues that may be already present or emerging,' said Chris Piehota, who retired from the FBI in 2020 as an executive assistant director. Enforcement of immigration laws has long been the principal jurisdiction of immigration agents tasked with arresting people in the U.S. illegally along with border agents who police points of entry. Since Trump's inauguration, the FBI has assumed greater responsibility for that work, saying it's made over 10,000 immigration-related arrests. Patel has highlighted the arrests on social media, doubling down on the administration's promise to prioritize immigration enforcement. Agents have been dispatched to visit migrant children who crossed the U.S-Mexico border without parents in what officials say is an effort to ensure their safety. Field offices have been directed to commit manpower to immigration enforcement. The Justice Department has instructed the FBI to review files for information about those illegally in the U.S. and provide it to the Department of Homeland Security unless doing so would compromise an investigation. And photos on the FBI's Instagram account depict agents with covered faces and tactical gear alongside detained subjects, with a caption saying the FBI is 'ramping up' efforts with immigration agents to locate 'dangerous criminals.' 'We're giving you about five minutes to cooperate,' Bongino said on Fox News about illegal immigrants. 'If you're here illegally, five minutes, you're out.' That's a rhetorical shift from prior leadership. Though Patel's direct predecessor, Christopher Wray, warned about the flow of fentanyl through the southern border and the possibility migrants determined to commit terrorism could illegally cross through, he did not characterize immigration enforcement as core to the FBI's mission. There's precedent for the FBI to rearrange priorities to meet evolving threats, though for the past two decades countering terrorism has remained a constant atop the agenda. Then-Director Robert Mueller transformed the FBI after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks into a national security, intelligence-gathering agency. Agents were reassigned from investigations into drugs, violent crime and white-collar fraud to fight terrorism. In a top 10 priority list from 2002, protecting the U.S. from terrorism was first. Fighting violent crime was near the bottom, above only supporting law enforcement partners and technology upgrades. The FBI's new list of priorities places 'Crush Violent Crime' as a top pillar alongside 'Defend the Homeland," though FBI leaders have also sought to stress that counterterrorism remains the bureau's principal mandate. Wray often said he was hard-pressed to think of a time when the FBI was facing so many elevated threats at once. At the time of his departure last January, the FBI was grappling with elevated terrorism concerns; Iranian assassination plots on U.S. soil; Chinese spying and hacking of Americans' cell phones; ransomware attacks against hospitals; and Russian influence operations aimed at sowing disinformation. Testifying before lawmakers last month, Patel took care to note the surge in terrorism threats following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas and a Chinese espionage threat he said had yielded investigations in each of the bureau's offices. But the accomplishments he dwelled on first concerned efforts to 'take dangerous criminals off our streets,' including the arrests of three suspects on the 'Ten Most Wanted' list, and large drug seizures. Rounding out the priority list are two newcomers: 'Rebuild Public Trust' and 'Fierce Organizational Accountability.' Those reflect claims amplified by Patel and Bongino that the bureau had become politicized through its years of investigations of Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago home was searched by agents for classified documents in 2022. Close allies of Trump, both men have committed to disclose files from past investigations, including into Russian election interference and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, that have fueled grievances against the bureau. They've also pledged to examine matters that have captivated attention in conservative circles, like the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade. Employees have spent hours poring over documents from the sex trafficking case against financier Jeffrey Epstein, a favorite subject of conspiracy theorists, to prepare them for release. Patel had forecast his interest in rejiggering priorities long before becoming director, including by saying that if he ran the bureau, he would 'let good cops be good cops' and push agents into the field. A critic as a House Republican staffer of the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation, which he calls an example of politicized law enforcement, he had said that he would support breaking off the FBI's 'intel shops' to focus on crime-fighting. James Gagliano, a retired FBI supervisor, said he would like to see more specific information about the new priorities but was heartened by an enhanced violent crime focus so long as other initiatives weren't abandoned. 'Mission priorities change,' Gagliano said. 'The threat matrix changes. You've got to constantly get out in front of that.' The Trump administration has touted several terrorism successes, including the arrests of a suspected participant in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport that killed 13 American servicemembers and of an ex-Michigan National Guard member on charges of plotting a military base attack on behalf of the Islamic State. But the administration is also employing a broad definition of what it believes constitutes terrorism. FBI and Justice Department officials see the fight against transnational gangs as part of their counterterrorism mandate, taking advantage of the Trump administration's designation of the violent street gangs MS-13 and Tren de Aragua as foreign terrorist organizations to bring terrorism-related charges against defendants, including a Venezuelan man suspected of being a high-ranking TdA member and a Utah father-son suspected of providing material support to a Mexican cartel — a charge typically used for cases involving groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaida. A former Justice Department terrorism prosecutor, Patel has called the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces — interagency units in the bureau's 55 field offices — as 'shining examples' of its mission. Those task forces spent years pursuing suspects in the Capitol riot but have now been enlisted to track down cartel members, he has said. After an Egyptian man whose work authorization in the U.S. had expired was arrested on charges of using a homemade flamethrower and Molotov cocktails to attack a group drawing attention to Israeli hostages in Gaza, administration officials held up the case as proof of their philosophy that immigration enforcement is tantamount to protecting national security. The FBI says its domestic terrorism investigations continue uninterrupted, though Patel at times has discussed the threat in different terms than Wray, who led the bureau as it investigated the Capitol riot and who cited it as evidence of the dangers of homegrown extremists. At hearings last month, Patel pointed to a string of arsons and vandalism acts at Tesla dealerships as domestic terrorism acts that commanded the FBI's resources and attention. As it reconfigures its resources, the FBI has moved to reassign some agents focused on domestic terrorism to a new task force set up to investigate the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and its aftermath, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss personnel moves. One national security concern Patel has preached continuity on in public is the threat from China, which he said in a recent Fox News interview keeps him up at night. Wray often called China the gravest long-term threat to national security, and when he stepped aside in January the FBI was contending with an espionage operation that gave officials in Beijing access to private texts and phone conversations of an unknown number of Americans. There are signs of a broader national security realignment. A task force tracking foreign influence, like Russia's attempts to interfere in American democracy, was disbanded and the Justice Department has scaled back criminal enforcement of a statute requiring registration of U.S. lobbying on behalf of foreign entities. All of that concerns retired FBI supervisor Frank Montoya, a longtime counterintelligence official who says fentanyl and drug cartels are not 'existential' threats in the same way Russia and China are. When it comes to complicated, interagency espionage work, the FBI, he said, has always 'been the glue that made it all work.' Patel makes no apologies for priorities he says come from the White House. 'President Trump has set some priorities out in a new focus for federal law enforcement,' he has said. 'The FBI has heard those directions, and we are determined to deliver on our crime-fighting and national security mission with renewed vigor.'
New York Post
7 hours ago
- New York Post
Miranda Devine: Foreign flags fly in LA anti-ICE riots — vindicating Donald Trump and leaving Dems with no moral standing
The minute the foreign flags came out in the violent anti-ICE protests in LA over the weekend, that's when Donald Trump won the moral high ground. An iconic image showing a masked man on a motorcycle circling a burning car while holding aloft a giant Mexican flag against a backdrop of black acrid smoke and a row of police cars captured the mood. It was the 'Summer of Love' all over again — and America has had a gutful. The president could not have asked for a better advertisement for his tough border policies. He always said that the millions of illegal aliens who swarmed over the border under Joe Biden was an invasion, and here were the invaders making his point for him. Advertisement As a result, the Democrats have no moral standing. They are moored in no man's land, owning Biden's invasion and the violent masked agitators waving any flag but America's. They own the arson and looting and attacks on police and federal agents. They own the funding mechanisms for the rent-a-riots that are traced back to their donors and their corrupt donations platform, ACT Blue. Now that Elon Musk has gone, their street muscle has moved from torching Tesla dealerships to trying to block deportations. Click here to subscribe to Miranda Devine's Pod Force One Podcast Dems pick losing battle Their poster boy is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the illegal alien gangbanger they tried to repackage as harmless 'Maryland Man' and transform into their latest George Floyd martyr. Too bad. Advertisement Their lawfare might have gotten him un-deported from El Salvador, and back on US soil. But now we see more clearly who he is, and the Trump administration's decision to deport him looks even more justified. The Department of Justice has charged him with human trafficking of thousands of illegal aliens, including children and MS-13 gang members. Federal prosectors allege he is an MS-13 member, too, and 'participated in violent crime, including murder,' trafficked children, firearms, and narcotics and 'abused' women under his control. Attorney General Pam Bondi outlined disturbing additional allegations last week which are being investigated, that he 'solicited nude photographs and videos of a minor [and] played a role in the murder of a rival gang member's mother. [He] is a danger to our community. This is the ditch Democrats have chosen to die in. As federal agents were being attacked by violent mobs throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails, slashing tires and setting vehicles alight, Mayor Karen Bass sided with the criminals: 'As mayor of a proud city of immigrants . . . I am deeply angered' by ICE officers' actions, she said in a statement. 'We will not stand for this.' Advertisement Presumably under her orders, the LAPD waited two hours before assisting beleaguered ICE agents Friday, sending the now-familiar Democrat signal to the rioters to do their worst. We saw the same in 2020, from Kenosha to Seattle. So President Trump mobilized the National Guard the next day. 'These Radical Left protests, by instigators and often paid troublemakers, will NOT BE TOLERATED,' he said on Truth Social. Advertisement 'If Governor Gavin Newscum [Newsom], of California, and Mayor Karen Bass, of Los Angeles, can't do their jobs, which everyone knows they can't, then the Federal Government will step in and solve the problem, RIOTS & LOOTERS, the way it should be solved!!!' Trump has learned the lesson of 2020 and no longer has to deal with turncoats in his own administration. This time, despite the complicity of California authorities, the rioters are facing overwhelming resistance. Trump is not about to let the city that is due to host the FIFA World Cup next year and the 2028 Olympics descend into chaos. He has 'zero tolerance' border czar Tom Homan and unflinching Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem backing him. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is prepared to bring in Marines from nearby Camp Pendleton. Treasurer Secretary Scott Bessent pounded Newsom on Sunday, accusing him of 'threatening to commit criminal tax evasion' and warning of dire consequences. The Trump Cabinet is united and energized. Don presses forward 'You're going to see some very strong law and order,' the president told reporters Sunday en route to Camp David to meet with generals and admirals about 'a very major subject.' The riots were top of mind: 'If we see danger to our country and to our citizens, we'll be very, very strong in terms of law and order.' He was particularly disgusted by the tactic of protesters spitting in the face of federal officers. 'I have a little statement: 'They spit, we hit.' . . . Nobody's going to spit on our police officers. Nobody's going to spit on our military, which they do as a common thing. They get up and they start spitting in their face. That happens, they get hit very hard . . . We're going to have troops everywhere. We're not going to let our country get torn apart.' Advertisement He also warned, 'If officials stand in the way of law and order . . . they will face charges.' Law and order is what voters chose in November, and their good sense has been vindicated ever since. Now, a majority of Americans think the country is on the right track for the first time in Rasmussen polling history. Under Biden, in November 2024, the numbers were reversed. Only 26% said the country was on the right track, while 63% said wrong track. Trump is moving ahead relentlessly, dragging in investment trillions, trying to end two wars, bullying and schmoozing foreign leaders, bending Congress to his will, bulldozing every obstacle in his path, including the unfortunate Musk, while enthusiastically planning a new White House ballroom. Advertisement Despite the pace of change, his job approval is as high or higher than most of his predecessors at the same point. A clue to why Trump's popularity is defying gravity comes from a fly-on-the-wall documentary series, 'Art of the Surge,' about his historic return to the White House. It's now in its second season and has been snapped up by Fox Nation, which began streaming it Wednesday night. The project has been a labor of love for Tucker Carlson's former longtime producing partner, Justin Wells, who has been shadowing Trump for almost a year. From the Butler, Pa., assassination attempt to the opening scene of Season Two, in which Trump learns how to cook French fries at McDonald's, Wells secured historic behind-the-scenes access that no candidate, let alone a president, has ever granted. But Trump is an open book, the most accessible president in history. Advertisement The result might have been disastrous for his image, but he is such a showman and so good at relating to people that even the most Trump-deranged viewer would have to grudgingly admit he has charisma. And that is the problem for Democrats. They have no ideas except to keep demonizing Trump, and the country has stopped listening.
