A pair of Mara-Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang members were each sentenced to 27 years in prison for their involvement in murders, attempted murder, assaults, and drug dealing in Maryland.

MS-13 gang members Jose Garcia, 28-years-old, and Carlos Diaz, 29-years-old, were sentenced each to 27 years in federal prison and five years of supervised release for their involvement in a violent racketeering conspiracy that included murder, according to the Justice Department.

Garcia and Diaz were each involved in a murder carried out by the MS-13 gang. In one case, Garcia admitted to attacking a victim with machetes and knives in March 2017 alongside other gang members after luring him into Wheaton Regional Park. The victim was beheaded, dismembered, his heart was ripped out of his body, and he was buried in a pre-dug grave.

Diaz, in a separate incident in April 2017, and other MS-13 gang members helped lure an alleged rival gang member to the Frederick City Watershed to then murder him with machetes and dismember his body before throwing him in a pre-dug grave.

In Wheaton, Maryland, in 2016, prosecutors said Garcia was involved with a murder plot to kill a suspected rival gang member by luring him into Wheaton Park. When the victim would not go to Wheaton Park, another MS-13 gang member tracked him down and shot him on the street. The victim survived.

As Breitbart News reported in July 2018, the original case brought by the Justice Department saw the indictment of 24 MS-13 gang members in total in Maryland — all for their involvement in violent racketeering conspiracy, including murder.

Federal officials noted that every year, the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) program is widely used by the MS-13 gang to import illegal alien members into the country. Annually, about 22,000 potential recruits for the MS-13 gang are resettled throughout the country by the federal government. The MS-13 gang originated in El Salvador and has used the U.S. immigration system to slowly build up its membership.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.