Trump, Bukele and MS-13

Jul 21, 2025

The Trump administration maximizes the punishment imposed on undocumented immigrants, treating ordinary working people like criminals, while U.S. authorities regularly collaborate with the leaders of real criminal gangs.

Take the case of MS-13, the notorious gang that Trump has often called “probably the meanest and worst gang in the world.” Attorney General Pam Bondi had recently celebrated charges against several key leaders of MS-13, promising to bring “swift American justice” against these criminals.

The gang Trump and Bondi called out, MS-13, is a product of the civil war fought in El Salvador in the 1980s. Students, small farmers, and farmworkers in El Salvador had launched a political movement that became an uprising against the landlords and capitalists that dominated the country and its government. The United States backed the Salvadoran government against this uprising, arming and training death squads that murdered hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country.

Some of the refugees of this violence fled to Los Angeles, where they wound up in the impoverished Pico Union neighborhood. And a few of them formed a gang, MS-13. The U.S. then deported some of them back to El Salvador, where they established links with many of the same government officials and military officers who had worked with the U.S. in the civil war.

Trained with military weapons, MS-13 spread to other countries. In El Salvador, it took over neighborhoods and generated one of the world’s worst homicide rates, driving an exodus of immigrants reminiscent of the 1980s. The gang developed a reputation for torturing, brutalizing and dismembering its victims.

Upon taking office in 2019, Nayib Bukele offered MS-13 leaders political power and lots of money in return for supporting Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party and imposing Bukele’s dictatorship in many Salvadoran neighborhoods. Some of this blood money was supplied by the U.S. government, through the Agency for International Development. Money that U.S. officials claimed was going to build community centers was really being pocketed by Bukele and MS-13 gang leaders for their own enrichment.

All this was such common knowledge that even U.S. investigators and prosecutors used it to make cases against several MS-13 gang leaders, arrested in the U.S. But over the last couple of months, Bondi’s Justice Department dismissed all charges against two key MS-13 gang leaders, as part of a deal that Trump had made with Bukele in return for imprisoning 200 Venezuelan migrants that Trump had sent to the notorious megaprison known as CECOT.

Bondi’s prosecutors tried to keep their deal with MS-13 and Bukele secret. But on July 17, Federal Judge Joan Azrack ruled that “the public has the right to know about such seeming inconsistencies.”

Inconsistencies? The U.S. government is very consistent. It consistently supports dictators and criminals against the working class.