Maribel Martinez Garcia, who was deported after spending three years in prison for murder and had been deported three times prior, was arrested for entering the country once again.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has arrested an illegal immigrant woman who was previously convicted of murder in Birmingham, AL, and has been deported from the US four different times.
ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations in Houston arrested Maribel Martinez Garcia, a 40-year-old Mexican national, on Thursday at a home in North Houston, Houston. According to an ICE news release, Martinez had a fraudulent Social Security card and permanent resident card in her possession at the time of her arrest.
“This arrest is just another example of the critical public safety function that ICE ERO serves in our local communities while enforcing our nation’s immigration laws,” said ERO Houston Field Office Director Bret A. Bradford. “Thanks to hypervigilance and outstanding teamwork between ERO Houston and ERO New Orleans we were able to quickly locate this convicted murderer who has repeatedly violated our nation’s immigration laws and safely take her into custody before she could hurt anyone else.”
The federal government has no idea when Martinez first illegally crossed the border from Mexico to the US but she was first arrested on April 13, 2000, by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Houston. On Aug. 3, 2000, an immigration judge ordered her to be deported.
It is not known when Martinez illegally entered the US for the second time but she was returned to Mexico just after her discovery on Jan. 1, 2004. She came back for a third time, date and location unknown, that same year and was deported to Mexico again, AL.com reported. She crossed the border yet again sometime before Jan. 1, 2007, when she was arrested by Birmingham police for the murder of Francisco Ostiquin Cervantes.
Martinez was convicted on a lesser murder charge and sentenced to 20 years in prison, where she served just three years. Upon her release in 2010, the woman was deported for the fourth time, only to return again between then and her arrest last week.
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