Alexi Saenz, a high-ranking member of the MS-13 gang, pleaded guilty to racketeering charges for killing eight people, including two female teenagers in Long Island. His guilty plea was entered yesterday at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. He faces between 40 and 70 years in prison under his plea deal with prosecutors:
Among the deaths Saenz pleaded guilty to were those of two Long Island teenagers — 16-year-old Kayla Cuevas and 15-year-old Nisa Mickens — who were killed in Sept. 2016….several gang members chased them down and attacked them with baseball bats and a machete….the teens’ murders arose from a series of disputes and an altercation Cuevas and her friends had with people associated with MS-13 at Brentwood High School. After the altercation, the gang members “vowed to seek revenge against Cuevas”….Saenz, along with several other suspected MS-13 gang members, were arrested for the teens’ deaths in 2017. Charges against his brother, Jairo Saenz, who was also arrested at the time, remain pending.
“To say that Alexi Saenz’s hands are drenched in blood does not begin to describe the multiple killings and extreme mayhem he personally directed and committed in the span of one year in Suffolk County”…Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty for the two Saenz brothers, but Attorney General Merrick Garland said in 2023 they would no longer do so.
The murders of the two girls garnered national attention, with then-President Donald Trump inviting their parents to the 2018 State of the Union. “Here tonight are two fathers and two mothers: Evelyn Rodriguez, Freddy Cuevas, Elizabeth Alvarado, and Robert Mickens,” Trump said during his speech. “Their two teenage daughters — Kayla Cuevas and Nisa Mickens — were close friends on Long Island. But in September 2016, on the eve of Nisa’s16th birthday, neither of them came home. These two precious girls were brutally murdered while walking together in their hometown. Six members of the savage gang MS-13 have been charged with Kayla and Nisa’s murders.”…Prosecutors described Saenz as a ringleader in these killings, frequently instructing fellow gang members to carry out the attack or giving the greenlight to do so….
Three of the MS-13 gang members involved in killing the Long Island teens were in the U.S. due to a loophole in the immigration laws. According to the Washington Times, two of the boys, Ramon Arevalo Lopez and Oscar Canales Molina, entered the U.S. in 2016 as unaccompanied minors. But thanks to thanks to a loophole in the immigration laws, they were released out on the streets rather than detained or deported. “For Homeland Security Department officials” in the Trump administration, it was “the latest sign of a legal system that stymies their efforts to oust dangerous figures. ‘One of the loopholes we are imploring Congress to close could have prevented this gruesome attack,” said Katie Waldman, a Homeland Security spokeswoman.”
The law responsible for this outrage is the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. Under it children traveling without parents are required to be processed by immigration authorities and quickly released to social workers, and from there to sponsors. Under the law children are deemed unaccompanied even if they have family living in the U.S., which Arevalo Lopez did. His mother and her partner, as well as a brother, live in New York. Ten months after his arrival in the U.S., Arevalo Lopez was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on suspicion of gang membership, then released. The rest, as we now know, is history.
