In President Donald Trump’s push to restrict immigration to the United States, MS-13 has become the perfect villain. Trump has focused obsessively on the violent street gang tied to immigrants from El Salvador, appearing at events across the country to highlight brutal murders committed by the group, focusing on two teenagers who gang members allegedly hacked to death with machetes.

There’s a political angle to the singular focus on MS-13. The Trump administration has made its strident demands to wipe out the gang in explicit conjunction with sweeping calls to unravel so-called sanctuary city protections, to promote laws to ramp up deportation proceedings and expand the detention of immigrants, to broaden immigrant gang-tracking databases and special gang task forces, to deputize local law enforcement for immigration enforcement, and in recent days, even to justify the repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

In short, Trump is harnessing the horrors of MS-13 in an attempt to enact much of his immigration agenda.

There is nothing new about Trump’s demonization of immigrants, but his focus on MS-13 does not appear to have a long legacy. The Intercept searched in vain through his speeches and statements during the campaign for a single reference to MS-13 and came up blank. He seems to have discovered the decades-old gang in April, and since then has tweeted about them nine times.

The strategy may be new to the halls of power in Washington, but the idea of using violent gangs to demonize immigrants has long existed on the far-right. In fact, a blogger and legal analyst who now has a perch of power within the administration has for years promoted a detailed plan to elevate the dangers of MS-13 in order to radically expand immigration enforcement.

Jon Feere was in January appointed as a special adviser to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, following a decade of work at the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank. Feere outlined the strategy to use MS-13 as the perfect villain to ramp up a national crackdown on immigrants in a 2008 position paper he co-authored at CIS.

While Trump’s promises to weed out the “bad hombres” predate Feere’s hiring, the administration’s actions on immigration almost uncannily mirror the paper’s proposals. Feere focused on the dangers posed by MS-13 and, much like Trump and his allies are doing today, suggested that enhanced immigration enforcement — from removing sanctuary protections to granting local police immigration enforcement powers — was necessary to gang suppression.

Feere and his CIS colleague Jessica Vaughan set forth similar arguments in a video posted to CIS’s YouTube channel. The duo stressed the MS-13 threat and explained that a response could incorporate broad anti-immigrant policies, from preventing people without proper immigration documents from getting jobs, accessing social services, and obtaining identification documents to stop immigrants from “blend[ing] into the community.”