While the NYPD declined to provide figures regarding the presence of gang members in the city, its former Gang Unit commander, Lou Savelli, estimates there are some 2,500 Mexican and Central American gang members throughout the five boroughs. Arrested gang members are classified not by nationality but by gang affiliation, and both the MS-13 and the 18th Street gangs have a presence in Mexico, Savelli said.
According to Savelli, who worked on gang enforcement for the NYPD from 1996 to 2001 and now leads the East Coast Gang Investigators Association, the Mexican and Central American gangs are concentrated in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush and Sunset Park neighborhoods; the Upper West Side and East Harlem in Manhattan; Queens’ Jackson Heights; the South Bronx; and the Richmond Terrace section of Staten Island. They engage mostly in drug trafficking, he said.
“The NYPD has been very aggressive with gangs, and gang members are very careful with being overt about who they are. In other cities gang members are not afraid of the police. In New York, they are,” he said.
Joel says his nephew is anxious about his approaching asylum hearing, which is scheduled for mid-December.
”He asks me what I think will happen and I tell him that it is up to the judge and the lawyer. But that he will need to accept the decision,” Joel said.
Asylum claims like Daniel’s are unlikely to wane. In fact, attorneys say the volume is growing because immigrants –and their lawyers– are recognizing the viability of the gang-persecution argument.
Meanwhile, news reports of renegade recruits or recent U.S. deportees killed by the gangs in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador – which are often criticized as sensationalist – lend some credibility to attorneys’ claims that their clients will be killed if asylum is denied.
“Asylum law is weird because terrible things happen to people," says Washington lawyer Jeffrey Corsetti, who authored a Georgetown Immigration Law Journal article last year titled, “Marked for Death: the Maras of Central America and Those Who Flee Their Wrath.”
"The more instances of people deported and then brutally killed, the harder it is for immigration judges to resist the argument that [a petitioner] won’t be killed in a similar fashion,” Corsetti said.
Daniel, an evangelical Christian, says he is not nervous about his fate. “I am leaving it in the hands of God. Only he knows what is best for me,” he said.
Daniel Sierra Cruz is a pseudonym used to protect the subject's identity.
