In early 2017, Hansy Sanchez was selling drugs at Bola 8, a dingy Latino pool hall and bar in a crumbling strip mall in southeast Nashville.
His path to becoming a drug dealer had been swift. When he was four years old, Sanchez was taken from Guatemala to Nashville. The move, he would tell a courtroom two decades later, was so he could have a better future. But in Nashville, he was smoking weed by age 12, and by 14, he had moved on to cocaine and methamphetamine.
By 16, he was selling $20 bags of cocaine in nightclubs and bars like Bola 8. One night, he went into the bathroom, where he saw a rival dealer leave to get change. Hansy had change, so he swooped in and stole the customer.
The rival dealer confronted Hansy and the two exchanged words before the dealer disappeared into the bar. But shortly after, a different man – a man his rival worked for – approached Hansy with a message. You have two choices, he told him. You can work for us, or you can leave and never sell drugs here again. If he did come back, they would kill him.
Hansy, though, didn’t answer to them. He answered to his boss, Gordo – the Fat Guy. Gordo told him to carry on selling drugs at the bar. And what began as an argument over a $50 drug deal would soon spiral into a bloody street feud.
A few weeks later, Hansy and Gordo stayed until closing time, then set out with a couple of friends to a nearby after-hours club in their Toyota Scion. They were followed by a dark Honda with tinted windows. As the Honda pulled up beside them, one of the passengers in Hansy’s car pulled out a gun and fired off a few rounds. The Honda window then rolled down a crack, and the barrel of an AK-47 poked out. The air rattled with bullets.
Hansy, Gordo, and their friends sped off. As the Honda chased them through back streets, they fired multiple times, shattering the back windshield and piercing the window where Hansy was sitting. They screeched into the parking lot, then piled out the car, jumped the fence, and ran for their lives as bullets whistled around them, thudding into the front of the nightclub.
It was a lucky escape. Hansy had crossed a group the United States government has since designated a foreign terrorist organization – the MS13, or Mara Salvatrucha. According to a January 2025 presidential order declaring a state of national emergency, the MS13 is a group that “threaten[s] the stability of the international order in the Western Hemisphere.” To confront this threat, the US government has said, it is now mobilizing security forces with orders to “repel the foreign invasion.”
But the gunmen who attacked Hansy were not killers who had been dispatched across the border by Central American terrorists to take Tennessee. The MS13 has been active in Nashville for over two decades. And most of those involved in the shooting, including the ringleader, were Nashville natives. Others had arrived as children. This was a story made in Tennessee.
Nashville’s Locos
Hansy Sanchez’s attackers were from the Thompson Place Locos Salvatrucha (TPLS) clica, or clique, as MS13 cells are known.
Thompson Place is a half-mile stretch of road tucked away behind Nashville International Airport. It is a fifteen-minute drive from the honky-tonk tourist bars of downtown and the new-build apartments of the city’s gentrified suburbs. But it is a different world: one of sun-baked strip malls, parking lots, and grimy one-bedroom apartments that rent for half the average price.
It is a destitute place. In the court transcripts from the TPLS trial that Hansy testified in, witnessess talk about “the streets” – “I met him on the streets.” “I know him from the streets.” But the streets is not a place, it is a concept. There are no streets here, just long stretches of road boxed in by sweeping highways and vast intersections.
Thompson Place is, in other words, one of the liminal spaces created by the sprawling automotive cities of the American South. And some of its residents live in a liminal world. Not there but not really here either. Lives of families and homes, jobs and schools, parties and churches, but which leave no trace in the official paper trails of visas, social security numbers, and driver’s licenses. Others have the documents that show they left their home countries to come to Tennessee. But they are still held in limbo by invisible barriers – a different language, baffling bureaucracy, and incomprehensible institutions. And by lingering racial prejudices that can spill over into open hostility.
This was the world where most of the Thompson Place Locos grew up. And it was a world where the MS13 had already put down roots.
“These gangs have been present in Nashville since the early 2000s. They’ve never not been part of the [criminal] scene unfortunately,” said Thomas Jaworski, who oversaw the prosecution of the TPLS as acting US Attorney for Middle Tennessee.
The history of the TPLS in Nashville follows the trajectory of the MS13 in the United States, a path shaped by a feedback loop of immigration and deportations.
The gang first emerged among Salvadoran immigrants in Southern California in the 1980s. It was then exported to Central America amid a surge of deportations in the 1990s, when the administration of President Bill Clinton passed a series of laws expanding the range of deportable offenses to include crimes such as drunk driving and petty theft. According to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, annual deportations to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras increased from just over 5,000 in 1995 to over 100,000 by 2014.
Back in Central America, the MS13 evolved from an upstart, violent street gang to a sophisticated criminal network. By the early 2000s, this new, metastasized version of the MS13 was spreading through Latino communities in the United States, where ever since it has regenerated by preying on vulnerable youth, whether they were born in the United States or had migrated there.
SEE ALSO: MS13 & Co.
On the national level, federal agencies launched the first large-scale operations combining immigration enforcement with anti-gang investigations in the mid-2000s, around the time the TPLS first emerged in Nashville.
In 2005, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) launched Operation Community Shield to target transnational gangs in partnership with federal and local law enforcement. Over the next 12 years, the operation saw law enforcement report 47,000 gang-related arrests. Among them were over 4,000 criminal arrests and nearly 3,000 civil immigration arrests of alleged MS13 leaders, members, and associates.
In Nashville, the first major case against the Thompson Place Locos came shortly after. Between 2007 and 2008, 13 TPLS members were sentenced in an organized crime case that included charges of murder, attempted murder, assault, weapons charges, and obstruction of justice following a joint investigation by local and federal law enforcement, including ICE. But in a pattern repeated across the country, a new generation of MS13 recruits soon emerged to take their place.
The Locos Life
The TPLS was like many gangs in Tennessee. It mostly sold drugs to friends and acquaintances, in the same few bars around the neighborhood, or to each other. Sometimes they stole cars or committed armed robbery. But mostly it was the drugs, every week a few ounces of cocaine and weed broken down into small bags and sold in affordable doses.
The TPLS answered to the MS13’s East Coast Program. According to the US Justice Department, in the 2010s, the program consisted of approximately 20 clicas, with thousands of members, stretching from Massachusetts to Louisiana. During its heyday, it was led from El Salvador by a deported gang member.
The TPLS’ role within this network, one leader turned informant said at trial, was simple: “Follow the rules of the program and report yourself with money.”
The money was collected at their misa – or mass – the weekly meeting where the gang dealt with business and laid their plans. According to the leader, these “dues” were sent to support incarcerated homeboys and kicked up to who they referred to as “the locos downstairs” – the program leaders in El Salvador.
But like other MS13 clicas in the United States, it was a shoestring enterprise. In Nashville, most of the members were unemployed, so the dues came out of the little that was left from their drug dealing. Everyone had to put in $25-30 a week, the leader said. With between 15 and 20 members, the TPLS contribution to the program would have amounted to somewhere between $19,500 and $31,200 a year – below the average wage for a single person in Tennessee.
The clica did little better when it came to maintaining order. Members regularly ignored rules, like only selling the gang’s drugs; procedures, such as the steps to follow when committing murders and disposing of weapons; and even never-to-be-broken commandments, like thou shall not kill women. But there was little sign the faraway program leaders did anything to impose discipline or punish transgressions.
The chaos and confusion that ran through the gang’s operations even became a central pillar of defense strategies at trial. The TPLS was nothing but “an unorganized, ragtag bunch of teenagers,” claimed one defense lawyer. Another argued the clica was so disorderly it essentially didn’t exist.
“With all the broken rules mentioned, with everybody out for their own benefit, there was no organization in existence,” the lawyer said in her closing arguments.
But while the business was small-time and the organization disorganized, the TPLS’ violence was extreme.
When the Beast Eats
In the days after the shooting, Hansy and Gordo fled to Miami, but the Thompson Place Locos kept looking for them in Nashville.
“Dog, we know who they are, man. The only issue is, is that we’re looking for those dudes,” an MS13 lieutenant told his leader in a phone call that was later revealed during trial.
“The devil is the devil. The devil will put it in front of you. You will see,” the leader told him. “Because the beast has to eat. It’s hungry.”
The beast, one of the witnesses told the court, was the gang.
Within a week, Hansy and Gordo were out of money, so they drove back to Nashville. As soon as they arrived, they changed their clothes, then headed straight out to Bola 8 with pockets full of cocaine. Hansy drank beer, did some cocaine, and took Xanax.
At around 4 a.m., they decided to pick up the car they had left in a parking lot since the first shooting, worried that it would get towed. When they got there, Hansy climbed out of the car and into the pock-marked Toyota while the others drove away. As he did, he saw the flash of a phone tapped into life in a car parked in front of them. Then, as he pulled out of the car park, a white jeep smashed into the side of his car, and Hansy felt a bullet rip through his throat.
Pouring blood, Hansy slammed on the accelerator and took off with more cars in pursuit. He couldn’t tell how many there were, but they were all shooting. Bullets hit him in the arm, the chest, the leg, the back, and the finger. Just as he was losing consciousness, he saw blue lights and aimed the car in their direction. He drove straight into the middle of a traffic accident scene, opened the door, then fell to the floor in front of the astonished police officers.
Hansy survived with nine bullet wounds. Later, he would suffer panic attacks, nightmares, and flashbacks. He was one of at least 17 people the Thompson Place Locos attempted to murder between 2016 and 2017, prosecutors said. Ten of those were killed.
SEE ALSO: MS13 in the Americas
Their victims were Latino, many of them from the same neighborhood as the gang. A few, like Hansy, were attacked over business. Some were attacked for disrespecting the gang. But many were part of a relentless hunting of “chavalas” – rival gang members. It was one of the few rules the TPLS seemed to follow: whoever they were, wherever and whenever they could be found, MS13 members are required to attack rivals with the maximum force available.
But the picture of this killing spree that emerges from the trial testimonies is not of a battle in a wider war. The TPLS was not a battalion in the MS13 army. Instead, witnesses described murders driven by a scrambling for status and respect within the clica.
Some were chequeos – new recruits – who killed so they could rise to the rank of homeboy and get their “letters” – the right to tattoo MS13 on their bodies. Others were more senior members anxious not to get outdone by the young guns or to look weak in front of the homeboys. One told a witness he wanted to kill one more than the person who had killed the most people so he could be famous.
Most of the murders were opportunistic, impulsive – and brutal. They shot people dead in car chases, firing assault rifles as they sped through neighborhood streets and along busy highways. They opened fire with an AK-47 as rivals left a bar, dropping two bodies in front of horrified revelers. They murdered people in car parks and as they got out of taxis. They executed a man in a field as he pleaded for his life. They stuffed the bullet-riddled body of another into the trunk of a car, then set it ablaze.
Refugees or Recruits?
The ringleader in the shooting of Hansy Sanchez, the man who opened fire on his fleeing car with an AK-47, was Carlos Ochoa Martinez, the TPLS Palabrero, or First Word, as the gang leaders are known. It was a position earned not from proving his mettle in Central America but through rising through the ranks locally. Ochoa was a Nashville native.
Of the 18 people convicted in the TPLS case, 7 were from Nashville or nearby, with most of the others from Honduras or El Salvador. When the investigation began in 2014, 12 were aged 20 or younger; 8 were still children – all of them migrants. Some of them were friends from high school. InSight Crime could only verify one case in which the defendant was involved with the MS13 before entering the United States, and he was a victim of forced recruitment.
Many of the Central American recruits arrived in the 2010s, when there was a dramatic increase in migration from Central America, and in particular a sudden uptick in the numbers of unaccompanied youths and minors. The surge was in part driven by the spiraling violence, youth recruitment, and predatory extortion schemes of the ever more powerful MS13 and its rivals.
Initially, the connection between the gangs and this wave of migration was seen through the optic of root causes in Central America, said Adam Iscacson, a migration expert at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a human rights advocacy organization.
“When all these kids and families started coming, [the attitude in the United States] was more, ‘we have to pay a lot more attention to these gangs in Central America because they’re making these countries unlivable, everybody’s fleeing, and they have often quite plausible asylum cases,’” he said.
However, Isacson said, that narrative was turned on its head by the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
SEE ALSO: 7 Things the Trump Administration Gets Wrong About MS13
“Trump comes in, and it flips: all of these kids and families, they are the gangs,” he said. “It ended up being a very handy way to scare Americans and build support for hardline immigration policies.”
The surge in migration of minors and young teenagers was in part a result of US legislation passed in 2008, which facilitated asylum claims for minors and allowed them to stay with relatives or sponsors while those claims were processed.
For critics of US immigration policy, this measure played into the hands of MS13 and other gangs.
The legislation incentivizes alien minors or those who claim to be minors to come to the United States, said Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge and fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a US think tank that advocates for stricter immigration controls.
“Some of those unaccompanied alien children were gang members themselves, some of them weren’t really minors, and with respect to the rest, it created a population of unattached children in the United States that offered an opportunity to the gangs for recruitment and expansion of their activities here,” Arthur said.
For those on the ground in Nashville, though, the critical factor was not what drew these youths to the United States, but what many found when they got there. And while some found the opportunity and stability they had been searching for in Nashville, others found an Americanized version of the poverty and violence they had been fleeing in Central America.
Nashville: Fertile Ground for Gangs
The districts where the TPLS clica operated have some of the highest poverty markers and violent crime rates in the city. But those districts are far from unique. Poverty walking hand-in-hand with gang violence can be found throughout the forgotten neighborhoods that circle Nashville’s thriving center.
Predominantly African-American gangs such as the Crips, the Bloods, the Gangster Disciples, and the Vice Lords have a long history in the area. Today’s panorama also includes other gangs with roots in immigrant communities, such as Kurdish Pride and Brown Power, which also recruits from the local Latino community.
Clemmie Greenlee has seen the impact of MS13, among countless other gangs, on communities in Nashville in her work leading Peacemaker Nashville, a community organization working with local youth vulnerable to gang recruitment. And that fallout has been personal: Nashville gangs killed her son and nephew.
When she spoke at an event organized for a victim of a Latino gang shooting, she told InSight Crime, it struck her how the conditions for the youth in the neighborhoods where MS13 is active echoed those of the predominantly Black communities where she usually works: poverty, exclusion, absent parents, easy access to firearms and drugs, an education system that is failing children in poor neighborhoods, and a lack of support for community organizations.
“Once you go there, you see the trailer park and the houses that look like ours, you see gentrification and poverty, people barely making it with bills, and if they got something in their refrigerator, that’s a plus,” she said. “So when I see them come out with their gang flags and all that macho stuff and that anger, I get it. You know, you go to bed hungry every night. You go to bed, and your father or your mother ain’t there because they’re working two or three jobs.”
For Nashville’s migrant youth, those challenges – and so their vulnerability to gang recruitment – can be magnified by issues such as a lack of bilingual support in education, living apart from their immediate families, and the breach between communities and security and judicial institutions, says Jazmin Ramirez, a community organizer who works with migrant youth in the city’s education system.
“Those students that have some status or no status at all are being left out in the margins,” she said.
“There’s all these perceptions of our community that the crime rate is up,” she added. “But then we’re not investing the resources to support our city, specifically with young Black and Brown males.”
New Generation, New Vulnerabilities
By July 2024, prosecutors had secured convictions for 18 Thompson Place Locos thanks to testimonies from as many as 70 people, including four gang members, collected by a multiagency task force involving local and state police working with federal agencies, among them Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative wing of ICE. The gang members convicted received a combined total of two life sentences and 730 years in prison for racketeering, murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, drug trafficking, firearms offenses, obstruction of justice, and destruction of evidence.
SEE ALSO: Trump Blurs the Line Between Immigration and Organized Crime
Since the conclusion of the case, however, such task forces have been dismantled in a restructuring of security priorities under the Trump administration. The new directive to prosecutors is to prioritize charging “the most serious, readily provable offense” over building cases. At the same time, budgets of investigative agencies have been slashed while extra funding is being pumped into immigration detentions and deportations.
The new approach demanded by the administration was on display in the week-long ICE immigration enforcement operation to hit Nashville in May. While an alleged MS13 member wanted for murder in El Salvador was one of two alleged gang members detained in the operation, he was just one of 196 arrests made. More than 100 of those had no criminal history or pending cases.
Several law enforcement officials consulted by InSight Crime said despite the low number of arrests, the operation would likely have a chilling effect on MS13 activity in Nashville by forcing members without legal migration status to keep a low profile.
Those working with the city’s migrant communities, though, fear such indiscriminate sweeps have driven young migrants further into the shadows where the gang thrives. One of the most troubling developments since the ICE operation, the community organizer Ramirez said, has been a surge in the absenteeism that can lead to recruitment as frightened parents and guardians keep their children home from school.
“With the fear of immigration [authorities] showing up, [parents and guardians are saying], ‘I can’t trust the system enough to protect me, so I’m just going to pull you out,’” she said.
And while the enforcement operations are nationwide, Tennessee’s state congress is also pushing anti-immigration measures that go even further than the Trump administration. In April, a law to restrict access to education for undocumented children was paused amid a debate over the fiscal impact. But in May, Republican lawmakers succeeded in passing what has been dubbed an “anti-harboring” law.
The sponsors of the law say it is designed to combat organized crime by criminalizing human smuggling and holding individuals and organizations accountable for transporting, harboring, or hiding illegal immigrants within the state. But it is being challenged in the courts on the basis that it is so vague it could criminalize everyone from landlords renting to migrants to churches and charities providing community services.
SEE ALSO: Could US Deportations Compromise Trump Administration’s MS13 Crackdown?
What no one disputes, though, is that in Nashville, the problem has not gone away. In September, authorities arrested 17 alleged MS13 members following an investigation that began at the start of the year.
Hansy, the young drug dealer-turned government witness, may have also been targeted. In November 2023, six months after a jury reached guilty verdicts in the racketeering case that formed the core of another TPLS investigation, one of the witnesses in the case was in a laundromat parking lot when five men forced him into a truck at gunpoint. There, they tied his hands, then held him for hours, beating him with a gun, a hammer, and a machete as they grilled him about his trial testimony.
Somehow, he managed to escape. He was left with a broken wrist and wounds to the chest, face, hands, and neck.
A later DOJ issued press release described the attack, but while it does not name the victim, it notes how he had taken the stand in the racketeering trial to testify how he had been shot by the MS13, who had tried to kill him on two separate occasions because of a dispute over drug dealing.