Jeff Sessions just named these 5 groups as the top transnational organized-crime threats to the US

Get the Full StoryREUTERS Jose Cabezas

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new transnational organized-crime task force on Monday. It's part of the Trump administration's crackdown on crime that has been one of its priorities since President Donald Trump took office.

The Justice Department, following Trump's lead, has intensified its efforts against the transnational gang MS-13, which started in the US and is now based in Central America.

Sessions designated the group a priority for the department's Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force.

Subcommittees within the new task force will focus on the five groups named by those officials.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new transnational organized-crime task force on Monday, furthering a crackdown on crime that he said has been a Trump administration priority since Day 1.

"The same day I was sworn in as attorney general, President Trump ordered me to disrupt and dismantle these groups," Sessions said in remarks delivered in Washington, DC.

The Justice Department, following Trump's lead, has intensified its efforts against the transnational gang MS-13, which started in the US and is now based in Central America. Sessions designated the group a priority for the department's Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, which he said had been able to hit it "from all angles."

Sessions directed that task force, as well as Justice Department officials, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration to name the top transnational criminal groups threatening the US. Subcommittees within the new task force will focus on the five groups named by those officials.

"I have ordered each of these subcommittees to provide me with specific recommendations within 90 days on the best ways to prosecute these groups and ultimately take them off of our streets," Sessions said.

Below, you can see the five groups on which the Justice Department's new task force will focus.MS-13

AP Photo Luis Romero

Trump has inveighed against MS-13 throughout his time in office.

Often calling its members "animals," Trump has claimed MS-13 has turned US communities "into blood-stained killing fields," accused child migrants of being members though the number of unaccompanied minors with suspected links to the gang is minuscule , and falsely claimed to have seen ICE agents "liberate towns from the grasp of MS-13."

The gang started among migrants from Central America, El Salvador in particular, who fled civil wars in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of them ended up in Southern California, where, without family networks or other connections, they gravitated toward gangs.

Deportations returned many members to their home countries in the 1990s and 2000s, where the gang blossomed in the post-conflict environment.

The gang's influence has since spread throughout the region, including to the US, where it often carries out extortion, robberies, and other crimes in areas with large migrant communities, like the Washington, DC, suburbs or Suffolk County on Long Island.

Though MS-13 members have committed particularly heinous crimes, experts have said the Trump administration misunderstands the reach and power the gang.

"Our research found that MS-13 is hardly a lucrative network of criminal masterminds," Steven Dudley, a senior fellow at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, wrote earlier this year. "Instead, it is a loose coalition of young, often formerly incarcerated men operating hand to mouth across a vast geographic territory."

The Jalisco New Generation cartel, or CJNG

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The Mexican organized-crime group CJNG is the youngest group on the list compiled by the Justice Department. It is believed to have sprung from one faction of the Sinaloa cartel, which is also on the list, around 2010.

Based in the southwest state of Jalisco, the CJNG has grown rapidly since then, expanding throughout the country. It often violently forces out competitors and has corrupted numerous law-enforcement officials.

It has focused on synthetic drugs like crystal meth, and it has helped push up homicide rates along Mexico's Pacific coast, fighting for control of ports needed to bring in precursor chemicals needed to make those drugs. The CJNG has expanded into other criminal enterprises; in some parts of Mexico it is believed to be fighting for a piece of the lucrative oil-theft trade.

Perhaps the group's most high-profile crime was shooting down a Mexican army helicopter over Jalisco in May 2015. The shoot-down killed six soldiers, who were among 15 people killed in wave of violence in the state that day. Mexican authorities said earlier this year they caught the suspects responsible for bringing down the helicopter.

In the years since, the CJNG and its leader, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, aka "El Mencho," have become high-profile targets. The capture of a number of CJNG financial operators, including the wife of "El Mencho," in recent years likely indicates Mexican authorities are trying to go after the gang's money. Though the wife was released on bail in September.

The group also appears to be facing competition at home. A group called the Nueva Plaza cartel, believed to be led by a one-time confidant of Oseguera, is thought to be challenging it on its home turf in Guadalajara, with backing from groups like the Sinaloa cartel.

The Sinaloa cartel

Mexico's Attorney General's Office Handout via REUTERS

Over the past two decades, the Sinaloa cartel has risen to the top of Mexico's narco hierarchy, operating throughout the country and around the world, linking coca fields in South America and drug labs in Mexico to consumers in the US, Europe, and parts of Asia.

Formed in the western state of the same name, the Sinaloa cartel emerged in the 1990s, after the breakup of the powerful Guadalajara cartel. Led by cartel chief Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, the Sinaloa cartel muscled rivals out of valuable territories, including cities bordering the US.

In the process, the cartel helped stoke dizzying bloodshed in Mexico, making its cities some of the most violent in the world.

The cartel's outlook has been cloudy since Guzman's January 2016 arrest, which came about six months after he broke out of jail for the second time. Rumors of a looming third breakout appeared to be snuffed out in January 2017, when Mexican officials whisked him to New York and turned him over to the US.

Since then, the Sinaloa cartel appeared ready to crack up. Guzman's sons and presumed heirs to the cartel were kidnapped by rivals in late 2016, and in early 2017 they were challenged by Guzman's former right-hand man and his son.

But Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, a shadowy cartel chieftain who helped form the group with Guzman and is backing Guzman's sons, appears to have reestablished some of the cartel's "cohesion" and avoided a major fracture.

The Sinaloa cartel is better understood as an alliance of factions rather than a hierarchical cartel — a organizational structure that is believed to give it some resiliency in the face of law-enforcement pressure.

With Guzman absent, the group is believed to have continued operating with a lower profile, led by experienced smugglers like Zambada. A sophisticated narco tunnel — a smuggling method pioneered by the Sinaloans — was recently discovered in Tijuana, where the group is still active despite a challenge from the CJNG.

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