Previously Deported Illegal Alien Gets 24 Months in Prison

CONCORD, NH - An illegal alien from the Dominican Republic that was previously deported a few years ago was sentenced last week to 24 months in prison for illegally trying to obtain a New Hampshire driver's license.

Edwin Orlando Tejeda Aria, of the Dominican Republic, pled guilty to illegally reentering the United States after having been previously deported back in 2011, according to U.S. Attorney Emily Gray Rice.

On June 16, 2015, two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers assigned to Enforcement and Removal Operations responded to the New Hampshire Division of Motor Vehicles in Salem, after receiving a call from New Hampshire State Police asking for assistance identifying a male individual, subsequently identified as the defendant, who was presenting fraudulent identification to obtain a license.

"The fraudulent document included a Puerto Rican Birth certificate, a Social Security card, a Pennsylvania Driver's License, and a Comcast bill," according to Rice. "Both ICE officers identified themselves to the defendant, and then one of them fingerprinted him and submitted the prints to the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) and the ICE Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT). Both systems produced a match for Edwin Orlando Tejeda-Aria, an alien who had been deported in 2011 from Louisiana to the Dominican Republic."

Tejeda Aria was taken into ICE custody and transported to the Manchester ICE office where a full set of fingerprint impressions were taken from him and submitted to the Department of Homeland Security's IDENT system and to the FBI’s IAFIS system for comparison to databases of known fingerprints. Both systems confirmed the match to the submitted fingerprints of the defendant.

Tejeda Aria pled guilty to the charge on Dec. 9, 2015. The case was investigated by the New Hampshire State Police and the Department of Homeland Security and prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Alfred Rubega.