With its focus on immigration, the hearing seemed incongruous with another Senate committee meeting, held just a month before, in which local police chiefs had a much different answer for the apparent return of MS-13.

In many ways, the gang is Trump’s perfect villain. It’s exclusively Latino and recruits in heavily migrant neighborhoods, its members known for their face tattoos and savagery. The Time reference was one of his earliest, but Trump often mentions MS-13 to reinforce his immigration policy. In April, he tweeted, “Democrats don’t want money from budget going to border wall despite the fact that it will stop drugs and very bad MS 13 gang members.” Just last week, at a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Trump told the crowd, “You have a gang called MS-13. They don’t like to shoot people. They like to cut people. They do things that nobody can believe. These are true animals.”

MS-13’s activities appear to have become more aggressive in some states recently, but Trump’s understanding of the gang also seems limited to headlines. “The weak illegal immigration policies of the Obama Admin. Allowed bad MS 13 gangs to form in cities across the U.S. … ,” he’s tweeted. But what he omits is that MS-13 in the U.S operates like most other domestic gangs, and that law enforcement in cities where MS-13 has recently doubled homicide rates don’t see the gang as a problem that deportations can solve. It’s a gang, distinct in some ways, but ultimately like many others.

It was the deportation policies of the Clinton administration, in fact, that created MS-13. The gang began in Los Angeles, among Salvadoran immigrants living near Pico Union. In the 1980s, the U.S. had backed El Salvador’s military dictatorship against Marxist guerillas. Some 75,000 people died in the civil war, and many more fled. When Salvadoran migrants settled in Los Angeles, they landed in neighborhoods controlled by black or Mexican gangs at a time when violence in the U.S. was on the rise. By the late 1980s, the Los Angeles Police Department began what it called Operation Hammer, a crackdown on gangs that filled California prisons. Under the Clinton administration, federal agents tried to empty the prison by deporting undocumented gang members back to El Salvador, where civil war had left the country with little rule of law.

In one four-year period, the U.S. deported more than 20,000 criminals to El Salvador, and with them they brought tactics learned from U.S gangs. In Los Angeles, MS-13 learned to control territory and how to earn money through extortion. Now in El Salvador, the gang took over neighborhoods and feuded with its rival, Barrio 18, another U.S.-born gang. El Salvador had never dealt with such a problem, so just as MS-13 learned from its counterparts in Los Angeles, the Salvadoran government copied L.A.’s approach. El Salvador’s strategy was called “Mano Dura,” and from 2003 to 2005 the country jailed 31,000 young people, though nearly all would later be released without charges. The approach backfired, and it’s blamed for increasing MS-13’s ranks. Young men who may have only had loose affiliation with the gang became its leaders. Violence in El Salvador escalated to near-civil war rates, and within a generation the children of those who’d fled war, and who were then were deported, had destabilized the country so thoroughly that it fueled another mass migration.