BRENTWOOD, N.Y. -- President Donald Trump on Friday called for police and immigration officials to be "rough" with suspected gang members in order to rid the country of "animals" he said are terrorizing communities.
"Please don't be too nice," Trump told police recruits at Suffolk County Community College in Brentwood, a heavily Hispanic suburb of New York. "Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you're protecting their head, you know the way you put their hand so they don't hit their head and they've just killed somebody ... you can take that hand away."
He implied that he was satisfied with rough handling of suspects by the police.
"When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon -- you just see them thrown in, rough," he said.
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Scoffing at calls for political correctness, Trump also renewed his pledges to build a wall along the Mexican border. He blamed the Obama administration for admitting criminals into the United States.
"The previous administration enacted an open-door policy to illegal immigrants from Central America," he said. "As a result MS-13 surged into the country and scoured, just absolutely destroyed, so much in front of it."
He was referring to Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, a primarily Salvadoran gang that started in Los Angeles in the 1980s and has spread into other communities. The gang is blamed for 17 killings in Long Island since the beginning of last year.
Trump's attorney general, meanwhile, was in El Salvador, promoting a similarly tough message against gang violence.
"Few communities have suffered worse at the hand of these MS-13 thugs than the people of Long Island," Trump told the recruits. "They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields. They are animals."
In often graphic detail, Trump spoke of gangs' cruelty to victims, describing how "they like to knife them and cut them and watch them die slowly."
The president's comments come on the heels of a speech he gave earlier this week in Youngstown, Ohio, in which he also appeared to be endorsing extrajudicial violence by law enforcement.
"It's clear that the way he views things is simple: If you're a person of color, then police can beat you, slam you to the ground, not have any respect for your rights as a human," said Jeff Robinson, a deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union.
"It's outrageous. ... If you're a person of color in this country, there's every reason to fear for your life, when you hear these comments from a president," Robinson added.
Brentwood has been terrorized by a string of murders of teens and young adults. Two girls, ages 15 and 16, were killed with machetes in September near an elementary school. In April, four young men were lured into a park and killed in adjoining Central Islip. The killings have been linked to MS-13.
The MS-13 gang has recruited from the ranks of immigrant teenagers from Central America, many of whom were sent to live with relatives in the U.S. because it had become too dangerous for them in their home countries.
These unaccompanied minors make up most of the people arrested for gang violence, as well as the majority of the victims. Few victims have been non-Hispanic.
Trump's visit to his home state of New York came as Attorney General Jeff Sessions was in El Salvador to bolster international cooperation against the gang.
Sessions has instructed the Justice Department's law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to prioritize the prosecution of MS-13 members, as directed by an executive order Trump signed in February.
One purpose of Sessions' trip was to learn more about how MS-13's activities in El Salvador affect crime in the U.S.
"It is in a very expansive mode, and we need to slam the door on that," Sessions said in an interview at the headquarters of El Salvador's national police force, where he met law enforcement officials to talk about quashing the gang.
"We need to stop them in their tracks and focus on this dangerous group," he said.
The president, who has battered Sessions for days with a series of tweets calling him weak and ineffective, did not mention Sessions in his Friday speech.
Trump has said his discontent with Sessions centers on the attorney general's decision months ago to recuse himself from the investigation into Trump campaign ties to Russia.
Sessions said Thursday that he won't resign unless Trump asks him to, but he has maintained that he was right to take himself out of that investigation after acknowledging he had met the Russian ambassador during the campaign.
On Friday, Sessions said he was hopeful his aggressive work against MS-13 would help mend his tattered relationship with Trump.
"It's one of many issues that we share deep commitments about," he said.
Information for this article was contributed by Barbara Demick and Kurtis Lee of the Los Angeles Times and by Sadie Gurman, Jill Colvin and Darlene Superville of The Associated Press.
A Section on 07/29/2017