Illegal Immigrant Deported Three Times Gets Eight Years in Prison

A federal judge sentenced an illegal immigrant who had been deported from the United States three times and arrested on multiple occasions to eight years in prison on Thursday.

Victor Santos-Ochoa, 45, a Mexican national, pleaded guilty to entering the U.S. illegally four times and faced a prison sentence of 37 to 46 months.

“Quite frankly, you are the type of individual U.S. immigration policy is intended to keep out of the United States,” Virginia Federal Court Judge Henry Hudson told Santos-Ochoa at his sentencing Thursday, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Hudson reportedly told Nia Vidal, Santos-Ochoa’s attorney, that the case was “one of the worst” he had handled out of the 200 immigration cases he had handled as a federal judge.

Prosecutors said that Santos-Ochoa  had been convicted of 18 misdemeanor offenses in California, Virginia, and Georgia from 1992 to 2007. He spent eight years in and out of state and federal prisons during that period.

Court records show Santos-Ochoa had been deported in 2009 for being convicted of malicious wounding, a felony, the year before. He had been deported again in 2010 for illegally entering the U.S. through Arizona and had been sentenced to five years behind bars.

In 2016, he was deported a third time for a marijuana possession conviction in Virginia. Santos-Ochoa’s most recent arrest in Virginia in September of last year stemmed from an assault charge involving a 5-year-old family member and a drug charge.

At the end of his eight-year stint in prison, Santos-Ochoa will be deported from the U.S. for the fourth time.

Although Santos-Ochoa had been deported from the U.S. many times, a February report on data obtained from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency noted that one illegal alien from Mexico was deported 44 times within a 15-year period.