by Jason Hopkins
Border Patrol agents apprehended a foreign national and registered sex offender after he illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border.
Bienvenido Alberto Bonilla-Ponce, a Honduran national, was arrested on Wednesday by Border Patrol after he was caught illegally crossing the southern border into the Rio Grande Valley, a region in southern Texas, according to a press release by Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
After being processed by CBP, the parent agency of Border Patrol, authorities learned that Bonilla-Ponce had been previously convicted of indecency with a child in Cameron County, Texas. The Honduran national was sentenced to five years confinement for that offense, and remains a sex offender. It’s not immediately clear when he was removed from the U.S.
Bonilla-Ponce on Wednesday was spotted by Border Patrol jumping over a fence near the IDEA Riverview campus, a school that serves minor-aged students.
The agency said he is currently being processed. Illegal entry into the U.S. is a federal misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in prison, and illegal re-entry is federal felony punishable by up to two years in prison. Bonilla-Ponce is expected to be deported back to Honduras following processing of his latest immigration violation.
CBP, which handles security of the U.S. southern border, just completed a stellar year of border arrests.
“CBP’s enforcement actions on our southwest border totaled nearly 1 million in fiscal year 2019. This is a staggering 88% higher than the number of enforcement actions in 2018,” Mark Morgan, the acting commissioner of the agency, said in October. “These numbers are numbers that no immigration system in the world is designed to handle, including ours.”
The huge arrests of illegal aliens came as the Trump administration was faced with unprecedented numbers of migrants appearing last year at the U.S.-Mexico border, forcing the government to divert resources and spend emergency funds on the humanitarian and security crisis.
While the number of migrants has slowed down, immigration officials maintain that a crisis still exists at the southern border.
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Jason Hopkins is a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
