Illegal from Dominican Republic Gets Prison Sentence

Acting United States Attorney Donald Feith announced today that Jose Rodriguez, of the Dominican Republic, was sentenced to 42 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to illegally reentered the United States after having been previously deported and to misrepresentation of a social security number, according to a press statement.

Rodriguez was located at the New Hampshire State Prison in December 2012 under the name Pedro Luis Martinez-Ortiz. He was interviewed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the prison and he insisted that his name was Pedro Luis Martinez-Ortiz and that he was born in Puerto Rico.

The defendant provided a Social Security number under the Martinez-Ortiz name. When examining the defendant’s hands, the agents notice that an attempt had been made to mutilate the finger tips. Nevertheless, the agents took fingerprint impressions from Rodriguez and submitted scanned images of the prints to the Department of Homeland Security’s fingerprint database and to the database used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The databases indicated that the defendant’s prints matched those of Jose Rodriguez, an individual from the Dominican Republic who had been deported from New York in 2002 and Miami in 2006.

Interviews of the Martinez-Ortiz family in Puerto Rico revealed that Martinez-Ortiz had died in Puerto Rico in 2011.

Rodriguez pled guilty to the charges on April 9, 2015.

The case was investigated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Alfred Rubega.