The teen told police that he was at the restaurant when six of his classmates from Huntington High School entered and began glaring at him. The victim and his friend left but three of the gang members followed them. The trio was armed with bats and knives.
An altercation broke out in a parking lot and the victim was stabbed by Ramon Arevalo Lopez, 19, police told WABC. The 16-year-old was later rushed to a hospital with nonlife-threatening injuries. The three gang members fled the scene but were soon caught by the police.
Lopez had been picked up by the Department of Homeland Security in October 2017 after entering the United States illegally on Dec. 8, 2016, police said. But a federal judge ordered him released from custody in June 2018. According to The Intercept, authorities had identified Lopez as a likely gang member but the federal judge, Robert Sweet, 96 (appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1978), claimed that the government was breaking the law by holding Lopez.
Ramon Arevalo Lopez arrived in the United States when he was 17 after fleeing gang violence in his native El Salvador. As is procedure when minors enter the country unaccompanied, the Border Patrol turned him over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which then released him to the custody of his mother in New York while his civil immigration case moved through the courts.
For nearly 10 months, Lopez lived with his mother and older brother on Long Island, where more than 8,000 unaccompanied minors like him have been resettled since 2014. He filed for asylum, enrolled in high school, and appeared for all his court hearings.
Then, last October, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up at his home, detained him, and sent him to the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, where he spent eight months living among the jail’s general population before being released earlier this month.
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| Jimmy Carter appointed Judge Robert Sweet in 1978. |
Activist Judges have increasingly pushed back against ICE’s allegations, and like Lopez, dozens of youth accused of being affiliated with gangs have recently been released, sometimes after months in detention. But Robert Sweet, the 95-year-old federal judge who ordered Lopez’s release, didn’t stop there: He issued a scathing, 46-page ruling rebuking the government’s abuse of due process and taking pains to obliterate, one by one, any arguments that Justice Department lawyers might make in response.
“Ours is a government of laws, not of men,” Sweet wrote in the ruling, quoting John Adams. Then, quoting Thomas Jefferson, he stressed that the law “secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law.”
Arevalo Lopez “made admissions” to committing the stabbing, Suffolk District Attorney Timothy Sini told Newsday. However, Lopez’s attorney Jason Bassett said his client isn’t an MS-13 member nor did he commit the stabbing. “By all accounts, he’s a gentle and unassuming young man who’s not a MS-13 member,” Bassett said. “He’s an innocent young man. We’re going to fight these charges vigorously.”
The two other suspects were identified as Nobeli Montes Zuniga, 20, and Oscar Canales Molina, 17. They both entered the country illegally as well. Monila was apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security in July 2017 but also ordered released by a federal judge several months later.
They were all charged with second-degree assault and face up to seven years in prison if convicted. All three were in the Suffolk County’s database of likely gang members. “While it’s not clear what the fight was about, it is clear that the defendants are all members of the MS-13 gang,” Suffolk Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart said.
The motto of MS-13, also known as Mara Salvatrucha, is “kill, rape, control.” Members, most of whom are illegal aliens, are known for their brazen violence, including beheadings. “MS-13 has created a brand—like Los Zetas in Mexico—based on its reputation for engaging in unspeakable acts of brutality using machete and knife attacks against those that cross it,” Robert J. Bunker, an adjunct research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, told The Epoch Times.
“This barbaric reputation greatly aids the gang in its collection of street taxes from local merchants and helps it to protect its turf and drug trade against opposing gangs who are afraid to face the ‘street terrorism’ it can wage against them.”
“The fear of not joining the gang is so significant that kids feel compelled, that they have no other option but to join the gang. And so obviously this is a win-win for MS, because this environment is there, and a lot of these kids are vulnerable.”
The Suffolk County Police Department (SCPD) formed a gang task force in response to an increase in gang activity. That, and the partnership with the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, has contributed to the falling crime rate in Long Island, said SCPD Commissioner Geraldine Hart.
Operation Matador, a “unified effort to combat the proliferation of MS-13 and other transnational criminal gang activity in Long Island,” has arrested a total of 475 individuals since May 2017, according to a news release by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Of those arrests, 274 were MS-13 members or affiliates. Two hundred and ten arrests were made in Nassau County and 177 in Suffolk County.
Four homicides on Long Island in 2018 were linked to the gang. Two of the killings were found to have happened in 2017 but because the bodies were found in 2018, the bodies were counted in that year’s homicide statistics, reported Fox News. Two other homicides in Long Island in 2018 were gang-related but they did not involve MS-13.
On Dec. 18, 2018, the body of 17-year-old Harold B. Sermeno was found near the Five Towns Community Center in Nassau County with several gunshot wounds, according to the LI Herald. This is one of the murders that is believed to be MS-13 related but the case is still under investigation.
In 2017, police reported that 14 killings were connected to MS-13 in Long Island, according to Newsday. The gang is infamous for its brutal crimes including executions, machete attacks, hacking victims to death, and human trafficking.
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| Obama let hundreds of thousands of Latino MS-13 Gang members into US through his catch-and-release program and DACA Dreamers program. |
Therefore, should not all politicians who support sanctuary status to protect illegal aliens also be held legally liable for the crimes the protected illegal aliens commit? Shouldn’t an activist judge who sets an illegal free also be held legally liable if that illegal, who should have been sentenced to prison, commits a crime?)
