From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the Daily.

Today, behind the decision to separate children from their parents was a flood of migrants from Central America

that began under President Obama and hasn't stopped.

What they are fleeing.

It's Monday, June 25th.

When I first started going to El Salvador, it was largely focused around this immense violence.

These gangs that had infiltrated practically the entire country and had been doing so for the last decade.

It was such a pervasive phenomenon. There was almost nothing else to write about in a place like El Salvador.

Asim Ahmed covers Central America for the Times.

The latest and most bitter round of fighting in El Salvador's civil war has claimed thousands of lives.

So, El Salvador obviously had had a pretty violent and extreme civil war.

And during that period, which bled into the 90s, many of Salvadorians who were living through this sort of awful guerrilla war were fleeing to the US.

Their prime destination, Los Angeles. Los Angeles is the more in Elis Island for Central America.

Now, these new arrivals to Los Angeles were suddenly greeted by a different brand of poverty and violence there.

It was not the ideological violence of the war they were leaving. It was criminal violence. It was sort of the self-protective violence.

In the Barrios of LA, young refugees encountered criminal gangs and formed gangs of their own.

That's where MS-13 and the 18th Street Gang were formed in the US.

They were mostly teenagers from El Salvador who had fled the growing conflict in their country and banded together here on the streets of Los Angeles forming the gang mainly to protect themselves from other street gangs.

The original kids that started MS were mostly stoner kids that were into heavy metal music.

The MS-13 gang is an American creation. It was American born on this soil right here in Los Angeles.

We'll see many of us had experienced violence in our own countries.

You know, on the way to school they used to see the capitated bodies. That's why the gangs became an option.

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