WP Bloomberg
The Bloods gang member was sitting at a table inside the Prince George's County, Maryland, jail last spring when two other inmates approached from behind.
They belonged to MS-13. And in their hands they held pieces of metal, sharpened into prison shanks.
As other inmates in orange jumpsuits played dominoes or watched TV, the MS-13 members suddenly began stabbing the Blood in the head and upper body until guards at the Maryland facility intervened.
The attack on May 5, 2017, came at a moment when MS-13's ranks in the jail were at an all-time high - the result of a nationwide crackdown on the violent street gang. Of the jail's 900 or so inmates at the time, officials said, about 50 were tied to MS-13.
"Our incidents every month are predominantly MS," said a Prince George's jail investigator, speaking on the condition of anonymity for his safety. "They are vying for control of these housing units."
As bodies bearing MS-13's trademark stab wounds and machete slashes have appeared in quiet suburbs and secluded parks across the country, authorities have increasingly gone after the gang. From New York to Virginia to Texas, they have arrested hundreds of members of MS-13 over the past two years.
But that effort is now posing its own problems.
As jails fill with MS-13 members, facilities are feeling the strain. Fights are up. So is extortion. And jailers are struggling to keep MS-13 members away from one another and their rivals.
"MS-13 presents unique challenges not only to the criminal justice system but also to the correctional system," said Robert Green, head of corrections in Montgomery County, Maryland, where the gang has been linked to nearly a dozen killings since 2015.
"Gang altercations have significantly increased" over the past year, he said, as the jail's MS-13 population has risen 20 percent.
On Long Island, where a string of MS-13 killings has been invoked repeatedly by President Trump, the gang's jailhouse ranks are also up 20 percent compared to two years ago, Suffolk County officials said.
In Prince William County, Virginia, MS-13 jail membership is up 32 percent over the same time period.
And in neighboring Fairfax County, Virginia, the gang's jailhouse ranks have doubled in the past year, leading to what officials call a "turf war" between MS-13 and a coalition of other gangs.
Organized crime is nothing new inside the American correctional system: The Bloods, Crips, Latin Kings, Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia and Black Guerrilla Family have long held sway in jails and prisons across the country.
While jail officials acknowledge that the recent influx of MS-13 inmates has made their jobs harder, they also emphasize that the gang is just one of many within their walls and that the situation is under control.
Nonetheless, the rising number of MS-13 members in America's jails reflects both the gang's resurgence and law enforcement's renewed efforts to combat it.
"We have sent thousands and thousands and thousands of MS-13 - horrible people - out of this country or into our prisons," Trump said during his State of the Union address, as the parents of two girls killed by the gang in Long Island watched and wept from the balcony.
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