Attorney General Pam Bondi announces arrest of alleged MS-13 leader
Federal authorities on Thursday announced the early morning arrest in northern Virginia of a person they described as one of the top three MS-13 gang leaders in the United States.
At a hastily called morning news conference, top Justice Department officials declined to name the 24-year-old suspect, specify the charge against him or provide details about the circumstances that led to his apprehension. Instead, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) touted the arrest as a major milestone in President Donald Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
Court papers unsealed Thursday afternoon identified the suspect as Henrry Josue Villatoro Santos. He made an initial appearance in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, on a charge of being an alien illegally present in the country while possessing a firearm.
The arrest – hailed on social media by Trump and in public remarks by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt – stood out for the attention it drew from top officials.
“America is safer today because one of the top domestic terrorists in MS-13 is off the streets,” Bondi said at the news conference in a local FBI field office, where she was joined by Youngkin, FBI Director Kash Patel and state and local law enforcement officials.
“This has been an ongoing directive of Donald Trump,” Bondi continued, before adding an apparent reference to Trump’s successful effort while a presidential candidate last summer to torpedo a border bill that would have toughened enforcement.
“We didn’t need new laws, as President Trump always said. We needed a new president,” Bondi said.
Youngkin lauded the arrest as the work of a joint state-and-federal task force created under Trump. He criticized the Biden administration for providing “little to no help” in immigration enforcement efforts in his state, even though a local police official said the investigation began before Trump returned to the White House.
The governor also lashed out at sanctuary cities, which generally bar local cooperation with most federal immigration enforcement efforts.
“Virginia is not a sanctuary state,” Youngkin said. “We are working to get the bad guys out of here.”
A Justice Department spokesperson, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide nonpublic details about Thursday’s arrest, alleged that the man had been initiated into the gang from a young age. Investigators believe he was overseeing the group’s East Coast operations as part of “La Mesa” – MS-13’s top U.S. hierarchy, which reports to leaders in El Salvador, the official said.
The suspect’s name and other details about his case were initially withheld to protect “law enforcement priorities” and ongoing criminal investigations, the spokesman said.
Authorities took the man into custody without incident around 4:30 a.m. at the suspect’s home in Woodbridge, Virginia, a suburb about 23 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. Bondi, Patel and other top Justice Department leaders watched the operation on video screens from a nearby command center, the spokesman said.
Peter Newsham – chief of the Prince William County Police Department, which was involved in the case – said the investigation began before Trump took office and was driven by a detective in his agency who specializes in criminal gangs. He described the operation as “typical collaboration between locals and feds in a criminal case” but said the arrest appears to be “significant.”
“To get someone in a leadership position, regardless of the administration, shows how local and federal officers work together to get violent offenders off the street,” Newsham said.
Prince William County in 2020 ended a long-standing agreement with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that deputized some sheriffs’ deputies for immigration enforcement. County leaders also stopped honoring detainers – requests by ICE to hold detainees in jail past their release date – for inmates charged with misdemeanors.
Prince William Sheriff Glen Hill reaffirmed the new jail policies after Youngkin threatened to withhold state funding from so-called “sanctuary cities” late last year.
Trump and Bondi have made targeting transnational gangs, including MS-13, a top priority and have taken the unusual step of designating them as foreign terrorist organizations, a legal distinction typically applied to groups driven by political or religious ideologies.
The president campaigned on dramatically increasing immigration arrests and deportations and removing gang members from communities. The administration has heavily promoted its arrests of immigrants accused of violent crimes, while refusing to release details about the tens of thousands of others arrested in recent weeks.
The U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia, which is handling the case of the suspect arrested Thursday, has emerged in recent years as a leader in prosecuting MS-13 member. Its efforts, including during the Biden administration, have defanged the leadership of at least three of the gang’s most violent cells operating in Virginia.
Five members of one MS-13 unit received life sentences in 2022 after being convicted of murdering two teenagers they lured into the woods. Members of another cell were convicted in 2024 for a spree of random murders in 2019.
The second-in-command of an MS-13 cell that claims Reston, Virginia, as its turf was sentenced to life in prison last year after being convicted of participating in six murders – in what prosecutors then called Virginia’s biggest murder trial in years.
The leader of that unit, called the Uniones Locos Salvatrucha, was indicted in June and is scheduled for trial in January.
A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday’s arrest. But speaking at the news conference with Bondi, Interim U.S. Attorney Erik S. Seibert said: “This is just the beginning of our efforts.”