Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) is one of the most notorious and deadly criminal gangs in the world; not just the United States and El Salvador, its place of origin, but Honduras, and Guatemala are also overrun with these vicious killers, rapists, and drug dealers. MS-13 had been determined to be a high threat to the United States by the FBI in 2008, below, though that might be changing given the ongoing War On Whites.

There’s a new program, or, more accurately, a reinterpretation, of an old, little used, miniature amnesty program hidden in immigration law, by corrupt officials in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) immigrant visa—more correctly a method of adjustment of status, as the Department of State does not issue SIJ Immigrant Visas. This program will be used to benefit MS-13 gangbangers…and many other dangerous “youths..”

DHS does adjustment of status, when an alien already in the United States applies to become a Lawful Permanent Resident (LPR), known to most as Green Card status. And DHS can basically do whatever it wants to adjust aliens; it can even violate the law and illegally adjust aliens to LPR.

That is often called an Administrative Amnesty, as with the Obama Regime Administrative Amnesty or the Biden Regime Administrative Amnesty. This is where the backdoor machinery and bureaucracy is used to benefit illegal aliens, whether by refusing to arrest illegal aliens or unlawfully giving illegal aliens benefits that they are not entitled to.

They perpetrate violence—from assaults to homicides, using firearms, machetes, or blunt objects—to intimidate rival gangs, law enforcement, and the general public. They often target middle and high school students for recruitment. And they form tenuous alliances…and sometimes vicious rivalries…with other criminal groups, depending on their needs at the time.

Who are they? Members of Mara Salvatrucha, better known as MS-13, who are mostly Salvadoran nationals or first generation Salvadoran-Americans, but also Hondurans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, and other Central and South American immigrants. And according to our recent national threat assessment of this growing, mobile street gang, they could be operating in your community…now or in the near future.

Based on information from our own investigations, from our state and local law enforcement partners, and from community organizations, we’ve concluded that while the threat posed by MS-13 to the U.S. as a whole is at the “medium” level, membership in parts of the country is so concentrated that we’ve labeled the threat level there “high.”

The MS-13 Threat, A National Assessment, unattributed, FBI.gov, January 14, 2008

Adam Hinton Photographic portraits of El Salvador MS-13 Gang members in prison pic.twitter.com/olc0uGU5Xa

— RolyKeates (@RolyKeates) May 17, 2016

MS-13 is not the only gang that will be benefiting from this latest iteration of the Biden Regime Administrative Amnesty. All gang members will be eligible, not just MS-13, but 18th Street Gang, Barrio Azteca, Border Brothers, La Eme, or any of the contrabandistas, the drug cartels from Mexico, like the Sinaloa Cartel, Jalisco New Generation, the Gulf Cartel, and Los Zetas.

There will be a wonderful diversity of Mexicans, Salvadorans, Jamaicans, Nigerians, Hondurans, et al. And not just gangbangers, any “juvenile” illegal alien will be eligible. And there is the key, this amnesty has one restriction: you have to be under age 21, well, at least at anytime during your life before the age of 21 you will have to have been brought to the United States and at some point not be under parental supervision, at least ostensibly, as the rewrite of the actual law behind this administrative amnesty will be quite loose in defining terms.

Just what is this new Gangbanger Administrative Amnesty? The underlying program is the Special Immigrant Juvenile program, sadly created by Congress to address a pretty much nonexistent problem: that of illegal alien minors who either entered to United States on their own or were brought by a family member, and then become either entangled in the juvenile justice system or the juvenile custody system.

Theoretically, it is for juvenile illegal aliens who have been abandoned by their parents or legal guardian, and then taken into custody of a juvenile court in the United States.

Here is the actual law for a juvenile to obtain SIJ status:

(J) an immigrant who is present in the United States-

(i) who has been declared dependent on a juvenile court located in the United States or whom such a court has legally committed to, or placed under the custody of, an agency or department of a State, or an individual or entity appointed by a State or juvenile court located in the United States, and whose reunification with 1 or both of the immigrant’s parents is not viable due to abuse, neglect, abandonment, or a similar basis found under State law;

(ii) for whom it has been determined in administrative or judicial proceedings that it would not be in the alien’s best interest to be returned to the alien’s or parent’s previous country of nationality or country of last habitual residence; and

(iii) in whose case the Secretary of Homeland Security consents to the grant of special immigrant juvenile status, except that-

(I) no juvenile court has jurisdiction to determine the custody status or placement of an alien in the custody of the Secretary of Health and Human Services unless the Secretary of Health and Human Services specifically consents to such jurisdiction; and

(II) no natural parent or prior adoptive parent of any alien provided special immigrant status under this subparagraph shall thereafter, by virtue of such parentage, be accorded any right, privilege, or status under this chapter;

Title 8 United States Code, Section 1101, unattributed, US Code.House.gov, undated

As you can see, the process is quite complicated and requires involvement of a State juvenile court declaring the alien in question a ward of the court. Now, this does not happen that often with illegal aliens, or in particular with the Children’s Jihad of “unaccompanied minors” that started in 2014 under the Obama Regime, and which also appeared during the Trump Administration, and returned again in force under the Biden Regime. And before one claims that criminal aliens can’t be ignored, the Obama Regime did just that; there is precedent.

Discerning readers might remember the case of Rifqa Bary, an illegal alien from Sri Lanka, and daughter of Muslim illegal aliens. Her parents illegally overstayed a tourist visa (B-2 Non-Immigrant Visa [NIV]). While still a juvenile, Rifqa Bary converted to Christianity and then fled her home under threat of death for her apostasy. She eventually was placed under the authority of a State juvenile court, where she soon applied for and received SIJ status. Note that her illegal alien parents were never arrested by the George Bush Administration.

The importance of this case is that Bary was formally under the authority of a juvenile court and could not return to Sri Lanka, though that was not actually true: Sri Lanka was at the time involved in bloody civil war, but that was between Buddhists and Hindus, neither Muslims nor Christians were involved.

However, the involvement of a juvenile court is required for the SIJ application and positive adjudication. Without a formal finding of dependency on the juvenile court, an alien is not eligible.

That presents a problem for the Gangbanger Administrative Amnesty, which includes the hundreds of thousands of what are inaccurately called Unaccompanied Minors (UM), who have been flooding the border on-and-off since 2014, and even before. Most, if not all, of these UMs, including the criminal aliens, are not abandoned or parentless children. Most are being deliberately and illegally smuggled into the United States to join parents, family members, or guardians already here.

And here is the rub for the Biden Regime’s attempt at an Administrative Amnesty: there is no legal basis to convert these minors here illegally into SIJs. First, almost none of these minors are in a juvenile court system, all are either with parents, waiting for their parents to arrive, with relatives, or in the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), the agency in the United States responsible for holding these illegal aliens until they can be placed in removal proceedings before the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the administrative law court for immigration cases. And the juvenile aliens in the custody of DHHS’ Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) do not qualify for SIJ.

So, the Biden Regime must defy the law to give status to the flood of invaders and their children who either were smuggled by others or brought by the parents themselves. Asylum is their first choice, but that is not enough, even under the weak standards for asylum instituted by the Attorney General Merrick Garland. So, something must be done.

And something is being done, in the dark and behind the scenes. Since Deep State bureaucrats cannot rewrite the law, they must rewrite the attendant regulations and the component’s policy manual for SIJ, thereby expanding SIJ to criminal aliens, aliens over the age of 21, and aliens never under the jurisdiction of a juvenile court. Sources in DHS have notified me that regulations and/or the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) policy manual are currently being rewritten to protect the mass of juvenile illegal aliens, and specifically to protect criminal juvenile aliens, to enable them to remain in the United States, including convicted murderers like these from MS-13. Other likely changes: expanding SIJ to aliens over 21, aliens never under the jurisdiction of a juvenile court, and juveniles for whom there is no legal impediment to being returned to their country of citizenship or former residence.

Now this is not without downside for the Biden Regime. Any rewriting of regulations on which the USCIS policy manual is dependent would require a public comment period as required by the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). And any regulations that contradict the law could be challenged in court, and legal groups and States Attorneys General have a successful track record on challenging various aspects of the Biden Regime Administrative Amnesty: DACA, DAPA, etc. have been defeated by Ken Paxton and other Attorneys General in Federal courts.

It will be harder though if the rewriting is only of the USCIS policy manual. Technically, that is not covered by the APA, though that is not stopping heroes from challenging the substance of any changes which would be in defiance of the statute and regulation. We have Federal judges that are standing up to Biden.

This is the most flagrant display of contempt for the rule of law since the Obama Regime gave us DACA, a thoroughly illegal action. It must not stand. Impeachment is one of the answers.