President Donald Trump blamed his predecessor for immigration policies that allowed the spread of the violent Central American street gang MS-13.

“The weak illegal immigration policies of the Obama Admin. allowed bad MS 13 gangs to form in cities across U.S. We are removing them fast!” Trump said in an early morning tweet Tuesday.

El Salvadorans fleeing the country’s civil war formed MS-13 in the U.S. during the 1980s. Federal law enforcement considers the transnational gang known for its violence and conspicuously tattooed members to be the one of the most dangerous in America.

Federal officials first noticed MS-13 was a rising problem in the early 2000s, and in 2004, the FBI created a task force to investigate the group, Politico reported. The FBI said MS-13 had expanded to at least 42 states and Washington, D.C. by 2008.

The gang has been recruiting young illegal immigrants in the U.S. from Central American countries many of whom arrived as unaccompanied minors in the last years of the Obama administration.

Trump signed an executive order in February instructing law enforcement agencies to target Ms-13 and similar gangs through increased deportations of illegal immigrants in transnational criminal organizations and through prosecutions of immigration and visa fraud. (RELATED: Executive Order Signed By Trump Will Take Aim At MS-13)

“I’m talking about illegal immigrants that were here that caused tremendous crime that have murdered people, raped people; horrible things have happened,” Trump told “Fox and Friends” host Ainsley Earhardt in an interview Tuesday.

“They are getting the hell out, or they are going to prison,” he said. “It is a serious problem and we never did anything about it, and now we’re doing something about it.”

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