A member of the violent MS-13 gang who had been previously deported from the U.S. five times was found yet again in Toledo, Ohio.
Juan Carlos Alvarez-Robles, a wanted Mexican national, was found by U.S. Border Patrol agents after executing a federal arrest warrant, WTOL reported.
“Alvarez is suspected of numerous criminal activities in the Great Lakes region and has been removed from the United States five times previously,” the outlet reported. “He also has an extensive criminal history according to officials, including: possession of a controlled substance, transporting/selling of narcotics and grand theft auto as well as multiple accounts of theft and burglary.”
He was apprehended by agents with the Sandusky Bay Station, the Detroit Sector Special Operations Detachment, and the Toledo Drug Enforcement Administration Task Force and is currently being held by the U.S. Marshal Service, WTOL reported.
Brian McNeal, spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration Detroit Field Division, told WTOL: “MS-13 is one of the world’s largest gangs. Department of Justice estimates their membership to exceed 50,000 members with affiliates in several urban centers in the country including Northwest Ohio. Through law enforcement collaborations, MS-13 members continue to be arrested in order to keep our communities safe from drugs and the violence that is associated with drug trafficking.”
Throughout 2019, numerous members of MS-13 were arrested or convicted for murder across the U.S. In September, for example, The Daily Wire reported that six of the seven people arrested in Towson, Maryland, for murder that month were members of the violent gang – all in the country illegally. The seven arrested had targeted a man named Daniel Cueller because he allegedly flashed the hand sign of the rival 18th Street gang. The MS-13 members stalked Cueller to a laundromat, then followed him back to his apartment building and stabbed him to death, allegedly using a “machete-style knife.” Surveillance footage from the laundromat helped lead to the arrests of his killers.
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Maryland has been struggling with gang violence for some time. In July, four teenagers were arrested for beating 14-year-old Ariana Funes-Diaz to death. Two of the four were members of MS-13, who feared Funes-Diaz would tell police about a gang-related kidnapping two months earlier in Washington, D.C., WBAL reported.
At the end of August, an MS-13 gang member from Maryland was sentenced to 30 years in prison for racketeering and stabbing a rival gang member to death four years earlier, the Sun reported.
In April 2018, another MS-13 gang member from Gaithersburg, MD, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for the stabbing of a rival gang member three years earlier.
New York has also had trouble with MS-13. In September of last year, three members of the gang were arrested for the 2017 killing of a 16-year-old suspected of working with law enforcement. The murdered 16-year-old had been tasked with killing another low-level gang member who was suspected of warning a third low-level gang member that the leader wanted him dead. The murder victim apparently failed to kill his target and was then murdered by the leader of the gang.