The Best and Brightest

by WARNER TODD HUSTON25 Feb 2018

A teen girl who is in the U.S. illegally and disappeared from Kentucky in December was discovered in South Carolina being held as a sex slave by another illegal immigrant, police say.
Police in Saluda County, South Carolina, discovered the girl confined in the bedroom of 24-year-old Florencio Gomez Saiche after a tipster told authorities that the 16-year-old missing teen was being held there, WIS Channel 10 reported.

Investigators said that the kidnapped girl had been able to contact family members through social media apps when her kidnapper was not looking or was out of the home.

Police say that they have suspicions that the teen never tried to contact police about her whereabouts because she is also an illegal alien.

When police confronted Saiche about the missing girl, he denied knowing her. But a search of his mobile home proved the lie to the claim.

“During the investigation, [officers] heard someone else in the residence,” said Saluda County Sheriff John C. Perry. “So, they did a protective sweep of the residence to find out and sure enough located the victim. He used intimidation factors, you know, because of the status of our victim.”

The sheriff’s office noted that illegals often prey on other illegals using their immigration status against them as a way to keep victims from reporting crimes to authorities.

Saiche was jailed without bond and charged with kidnapping and first-degree criminal sexual conduct.

Prosecutors in Montgomery County, Maryland, charged a known MS-13 leader for ordering the beating of a 15-year-old girl with a baseball bat who had been forced into prostitution. Two other Salvadoran nationals are also named in the case.
Law enforcement officials said that Miguel Angel “Noctorno” Ayala-Rivera, a 24-year-old MS-13 member who illegally entered the U.S. from El Salvador, ordered his fellow gang members to beat a 15-year-old girl with a baseball bat. “Noctorno” reportedly pimped out the victim along with other underage girls, the Daily Mail reported from Montgomery County court records.

Police have also charged Yervin Josue Romero-Rivera, a 21-year-old illegal immigrant, and 20-year-old Alexis Pena-Rodriguez in the case.

According to a law enforcement source, “Nocturno” and his two fellow MS-13 members dragged the teenage girl into the backyard of their Kensington, Maryland, hideout. “Noctorno” and four other men took turns beating her with a baseball bat, the news outlet reported. She received a total of 28 blows on various locations on her body. Records indicate she suffered an “indented” buttocks, discolored arms and legs, and visible bleeding from her neck-down.

Court records state that a second source told police that “Noctorno” ordered her beating because she was “not doing a good job as an MS-13 prostitute.”

Police uncovered the beating of the teenage sex trafficking victim while investigating the gang members following their arrest for an alleged series of armed robberies in Maryland and Washington, DC. They reportedly stormed into numerous check cashing stores armed with handguns and would demand cash. Records indicate the men would often conceal their faces.

Police recovered a modified TEC-9 pistol in the front seat of a van the men were driving following an alleged robbery in Silver Spring, Maryland. The arrest followed a high-speed pursuit where one of the suspects died after being struck by a police car as he attempted to flee on foot.

Breitbart Texas reached out to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for more information about the suspects’ immigration history. No response was immediately available.

WJLA ABC7 in Washington, DC, reported that MS-13 violence has increased substantially over the past five years. This period coincides with the influx of Central American Unaccompanied Alien Children and Family Unit aliens first reported by Breitbart Texas editor-in-chief, Brandon Darby.

During an international sweep of MS-13 gang members in November 2017, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Tom Homan stated that almost one-third of the 214 U.S.-based MS-13 gang members arrested during Operation Raging Bull had entered the U.S. as Unaccompanied Alien Children, Breitbart News’ Ian Mason reported.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw also attributed the increase in MS-13 gang violence in Texas to the influx of Unaccompanied Alien Children, Breitbart Texas reported. Their comments came during the announcement of a gang task force operation in Houston that Abbott said would make the city “hostile territory for gangs.”

The violent MS-13 gang, which was nearly eradicated by the Bush administration, has been able to rebuild its ranks on the backs of illegal immigrant recruits, according to a new think tank report Wednesday.

Nearly a quarter of MS-13 gang members arrested or charged with crimes since 2012 came to the U.S. as part of the Obama-era surge of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC), including a staggering number who have faced murder charges, according to the Center for Immigration Studies, which looked at 506 cases.

Jessica Vaughan, the report’s author, said the Bush administration used immigration laws to go after even low-level MS-13 affiliates, and worked closely with local police — even in sanctuary cities — to try to target gang members.

The Obama administration changed the focus away from rank-and-file illegal immigrants and toward trying to make big cases, hoping to make major conspiracy cases instead.

The result was a collapse in enforcement.

“ICE officers were no longer permitted to arrest and remove foreign gang members until they had been convicted of major crimes. Gang arrests by ICE plummeted from about 4,600 in 2012 to about 1,580 in 2014,” Ms. Vaughan wrote.

She said those changes came just as the gangs were getting an influx of new members thanks to the surge of UAC that began in 2012 and was in full bloom by 2014, drawing tens of thousands of young males from Central America into the U.S. That’s the key recruiting pool for MS-13.

“According to local gang investigators, these gangs have been aggressively recruiting recently arrived Central American children as young as 10 years old,” she wrote.

Ms. Vaughan said sanctuary cities are feeding the problem by creating a no-questions-asked environment, of which the gangs are aware.

President Trump has elevated the issue of MS-13 this year, including inviting to the State of the Union address a top-level Homeland Security investigator and the parents of two teenage girls who were victims of a gang attack.

And at a roundtable discussion at the White House earlier this month Homeland Security officials said merely being in a gang isn’t designated as a reason to immediately deport or exclude someone from entering the U.S.

“When they come to our border, I have to let them in,” said Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. “I cannot keep them out by virtue of them being in a gang. Once we catch them and detain them, I cannot remove them by virtue of them being in a gang.”

Yet cracking down on MS-13 was mostly absent from the recent Senate debate on immigration, where the focus was on legalizing illegal immigrant Dreamers — some of whom came as part of the same UAC surge that has also fueled MS-13.

Among Republicans, there’s a consensus that combating MS-13 is worthy.

GOP lawmakers from Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada to Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York have proposed giving the federal government more tools.

Mr. Heller introduced an amendment during last week’s Senate debate to allow for fast deportation of gang members. The proposal never received a vote.

Mr. Zeldin’s plan would allow the government to revoke citizenship of anyone found to be involved with gangs either before or within 10 years after becoming a citizen.

Immigrant-rights groups blasted Mr. Zeldin for the proposal Tuesday.

“This bill is shameless political posturing,” said Steven Choi, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “It will actually cripple public safety, while demonizing Long Island’s thousands of hard-working immigrants.”

He said Homeland Security uses “arbitrary criteria” to calculate gang affiliation, opening the door to deportations without firm public safety reasons.

Immigrant-rights groups are fighting a case in Washington state where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested and tried to deport a young man here under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals deportation amnesty. ICE said the man had a gang tattoo and gave indications of past gang activity.

The man says the tattoo has no gang significance and he did not affiliate with the gang authorities charged.