When they tell everyone their explicit goals and our only response is to vote harder
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You can absolutely be arrested for being a gang member because it is an organized criminal racket. The primary reason most prosecutors and judges don't just issue out warrants because of that alone, is because they are attempting to fully document out the scope of the racket.
MS-13 was stupid and decided the only way you could be a member of their gang was by having killed and raped someone, and if you got caught with a tattoo and not in the gang, you would be executed.
As a result, each tattoo is an out-of-court record of admission of guilt to at least one murder, and one rape. That's your probable cause. If that's all you had, without a body, it would be hard to finish a prosecution; unless you hit the whole racket all at once. Which is what happened. Furthermore, the conduct of the gang had morphed from criminal activity into full-blown terrorism. At that point, the entire gang is either enemy combatants, or engaged in an insurrection.
As such, rounding up each and every member of a terrorist insurrection whose members explicitly make out-of-court-records-of-admission for rape & murder is actually super easy. You could do this in the US, and I don't even know that you'd need an insurrection act declaration to do it.
This is the whole point: none of this was outside of the system. It was within it, and all it required was the will to do it.
As for Trump, he's surrounded himself with better people, and had very little power to do anything before he was out of office, and not much in the mean time.
I'm not talking about being a gang member. I'm talking about being a suspected gang member on flimsy reasons. There are plenty of people who've been arrested but completely innocent. Otherwise they wouldn't regularly release people from prison.
That may very well be true for MS-13 affiliated tattoos but I seriously doubt hat MS-13 had a monopoly on all tattoos in El Salvador.
Guilty until proven innocent is not working within the system. The police and judicial system has to follow rules as not to infringe on the rights of innocent people. Even criminals are supposed to have rights. These rules were not followed as it was necessary because the cartel problem had grown so much that Bekele had to use a sledgehammer to destroy them. This has caused quite a bit of collateral damage but it was necessary. Pretending otherwise is ludicrous.
And I'm telling you that you can do this even in the US. If they have the probable cause, they can arrest you and interrogate you, and hold you for a while before the prosecutor drops the case and lets you out. It's an uncooth tactic that could breed public resentment, but it's absolutely within the system and the law.
They arrest you on a minor offense, ask the judge to set a high or no bail because given some context you are probably a gang member. Now you will wait months in jail for a minor offense. In the US, they would typically just turn you into a confidential informant. In Ecuador, they are probably just going to interrogate you to rat on others. If either police figure out you don't have anything, they'll let you go, but the message to the gang will be clear: the heat is on.
This is fully excluding an insurrection or terrorist frame. If you do that, now you can expect a lot looser restrictions on what the state is gonna do and how long it's gonna hold you.
It's not any tattoos, it's specific tattoos. And yeah, it's a monopoly on those tattoos, because they kill you if you aren't one of them. They may also kill the artist if they find out who put it on you. Most likely, you don't get it until your in prison already by an MS-13 prison artist who does it officially. And again, you got that prison sentence from the murder and rape.
This happens in the US too, by the way. Bloods, Crips, Gangster Disciples, Aryan Nation, 1% Hell's Angels, Mongols, whatever. You fly the wrong flag, you'll get killed for it. And yes, MS-13.
None of it was guilty until proven innocent. It was a dragnet. This is actually how "tough on crime" law enforcement is actually supposed to work. It looks harsh from a bleeding heart Democrat stance, but it's actually fully allowed within the system, because the makers of the system fundamentally understood that threats to the system had to be acted upon quickly and aggressively.
I'm sure it's unpleasant, but the reason he's popular is because a terror campaign was destroyed by these genuinely legal means.
It literally is. If you get imprisoned for weeks, months or even years without any proof, you are guilty until proven innocent. Sure you can argue that those imprisoned people were never actually convicted and thus it wasn't guilty until proven innocent but that doesn't change the fact that they were imprisoned without proof and despite being innocent.
But I suppose you can say that it all was within the system as the system is corrupt and hypocritical anyway. Rules are regularly bend, changed or simply ignored without consequences. Even the constitution isn't safe from that.
That's my point. You might consider it guilty until proven innocent, but it is how the American system works.
Innocent people go to jail because they face charges, but those charges are never carried out, not perused, or are dismissed. That is the system that you, very likely, already live in. So did your parents and grand-parents. You may not like it, but that's a reality of even Liberal states. That's how inside the system it is.