A Texas man was charged on Tuesday with selling firearms and parts through an online channel that promoted white-supremacist beliefs even as he was serving time in a Louisiana federal prison on previous gun charges.
The man, Hayden Espinosa, 24, advertised the guns on Telegram, a free encrypted messaging app, Manhattan prosecutors said. Mr. Espinosa moderated the channel, which they said was a “hub for racially and ethnically motivated extremism.”
Mr. Espinosa, who sold firearm and gun parts to a New York Police Department undercover officer, prosecutors said, was charged with four felony counts of transporting a firearm and one of attempted criminal sale of a firearm.
He was released from his federal prison term on June 4 and was immediately arrested on the New York charges. Mr. Espinosa is expected to be extradited to New York later this month and arraigned on June 24.
“We see this sad and tragic combination far too often — the intersection of gun violence and gun trafficking and hate and extremism,” Alvin L. Bragg, Manhattan’s district attorney, said at a news conference Tuesday.
The investigation by city and federal agencies that led to Tuesday’s charges began after investigators discovered in summer 2023 that Mr. Espinosa was selling firearms to members of the Telegram channel using cellphones smuggled behind bars, the district attorney’s office said.
The Police Department first identified the channel and Mr. Espinosa’s involvement with it after a racist massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., that killed 10 people in May 2022, said Rebecca Weiner, the deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. The Buffalo killer had visited the channel before the shooting, the district attorney’s office said.
In December of that year, Mr. Espinosa was sentenced to 33 months after pleading guilty to selling gun parts to undercover agents first from Knoxville, Tenn., and then from Corpus Christi, Texas. Although Mr. Espinosa was imprisoned in Pollock, La., between August and November 2023, he tried to make three different sales to a New York undercover officer, Mr. Bragg said.
On Aug. 7, he sold the officer two auto sears — devices that can transform a semiautomatic firearm into a machine gun — and a few weeks later, he attempted to sell a Glock-19 handgun. That November, he sold two silencers to the officer, prosecutors said.
The Telegram channel through which they did business included images of members of paramilitary groups outside the United States dressed in fatigues and saluting Hitler, Ms. Weiner said. Its members were motivated by neo-Nazi and white supremacist ideologies, and espoused accelerationism, which promotes violence as means to creating a new extreme-right society, prosecutors said.
Mr. Espinosa also posted content on YouTube that promoted neo-Nazi and anti-government ideologies, prosecutors said.
The Biden administration has said that racial extremism is the greatest domestic threat facing the United States. In June 2021, the administration unveiled a 32-page strategy that called for measures such as hiring more intelligence analysts and screening government employees for ties to hate groups.
“We cannot ignore this threat or wish it away,” President Biden wrote in the document.
On Tuesday, Ms. Weiner said that the Police Department’s Racially and Ethnically Motivated Extremism Unit, which led the investigation into Mr. Espinosa, was created in “recognition of the growing threats around accelerationism, white supremacy and Nazi ideology.”
The Police Department recovered roughly 6,500 illegal firearms in 2023, according to Ms. Weiner. Nearly 3,000 have been recovered so far this year, she said.
One of the sears that Mr. Espinosa sold had been 3-D printed, according to the indictment. The number of so-called unregistered ghost guns, which can be assembled from such printed parts or purchased online, has greatly increased in recent years, according to Police Department data. In 2018, officers recovered 17 ghost guns. Last year, officers recovered 400, the district attorney’s office said.
Mr. Bragg’s office created a ghost-gun initiative in 2020 and has proposed legislation that would outlaw the manufacturing of 3D-printed guns and parts. Mr. Bragg on Tuesday said it was time “to renew quite urgently the call to focus on that in the next legislative session.”