An illegal immigrant from El Salvador and a member of the MS-13 gang has pleaded guilty to her involvement in a string of robberies across Maryland and participating in other gang-related crime, according to reports by The Washington Post.
Prosecutors proved that Josselin Ramirez, a 20-year-old MS-13 gang member was in charge of staking out business before armed robbery attacks and cleaning weapons afterwards to remove any traces of evidence. (RELATED: Teen Suspects In Maryland MS-13 Murder Are Unaccompanied Minors From El Salvador)
Ramirez was a seasoned criminal for the past seven years in El Salvador, where she was involved in an ambush on a police officer who was shot in the head and killing a rival gang member. She found her way back to gang life when she illegally entered the U.S. in 2013 and settled in Temple Hills, Maryland, according to court records. She then met an MS-13 associate in the U.S., had a child with him, and persisted with violent gang activity with the group that police believe is responsible for more than a half-dozen robberies in Washington, until she was arrested in Alexandria, Virginia, in 2017.
Ramirez “willingly embraced the violence that is MS-13,” and never told police she was forced or coerced to be a member of the gang to carry out criminal plots, Assistant State’s Attorney Teresa Casafranca said to The Washington Post.
“You embraced the lifestyle again. It doesn’t make sense to me, and I’m having trouble understanding,” Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge John M. Maloney said during her trial at the end of June. “You need to be housed away so you can’t harm others.”
President Donald Trump has taken a hard-line stance on cracking down on MS-13, whose rise in gruesome gang attacks in the U.S. have been correlated to illegal immigrants migrating from Central America and resettling in U.S. states such as California, Maryland, New York, Virginia and Massachusetts. These five states have the highest number of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) settling in these states, according to data from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and also make up 63 percent of all MS-13 arrests nationwide since 2012.
Illegal immigrants from El Salvador in the MS-13 gang are linked to multiple heinous crimes across the country including the death of a man stabbed over 100 times before he was beheaded and had his heart cut out in November in Wheaton, Maryland, and the kidnapping and murder of two teens in Fairfax, Virginia, in June.
Ramirez was given a total of 95 years on six charges including three counts of conspiracy to commit armed robbery and three counts of participating in a gang-related crime. She faces deportation proceedings in the future where she will be sent back to El Salvador.
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