U.S. District Judge Judith Levy, who was appointed to the Eastern District of Michigan in 2014 by President Barack Obama, recently decided that 30-year-old Honduran national Edys Renan Membreno Diaz would not face additional prison time beyond what he had already served for violating federal immigration law, Breitbart reports. Diaz had been deported from the United States seven times after crossing the border in 2019 near El Centro, California, and later re-entering the country.
In 2022, Diaz was arrested and pled guilty to raping and sodomizing a woman with cerebral palsy and other disabilities in her apartment building, receiving a Michigan prison sentence of six to 15 years. Earlier this year, he also pleaded guilty to repeatedly re-entering the United States after deportation.
Although prosecutors argued that 19 months is a typical sentence for repeated illegal re-entry, Judge Levy determined that no further incarceration was warranted beyond Diaz’s existing federal custody time.
Detroit News‘s Robert Snell reported, “Levy went as far as to praise Diaz for illegally crossing the border several times, saying, ‘I commend you for supporting your family, for expressing your devotion to them and for working here in the United States in jobs that Americans apparently do not want to work in and certainly not for the wages that were undoubtedly abusive of your work for them.’”
“I see … somebody who is stepping forward to take responsibility and to gain insight into what led you to commit that crime of sexual assault and this one of illegal reentry,” Levy told Diaz, according to Breitbart.
According to the outlet, “the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit, Michigan, is now appealing Levy’s decision.”