A Guatemalan national and convicted rapist was arrested by U.S. Border Patrol agents last week.
Authorities say 36-year-old Hector Portillo-Soto was arrested after he illegally crossed into Texas from Mexico. He was walking through some brush along the Del Rio Sector of the border with ten other men when Brackettville Station agents arrested them. The group had been trying to avoid being detected.
The agents determined that the men were unlawful migrants and took all eleven to the station. Record checks during his processing revealed that Portillo-Soto was a convicted rapist. He was convicted of rape in Louisiana in 2019 and sentenced to three years in prison. He was deported from the country in February 2022 after serving his sentence.
Portillo-Soto faces a charge of re-entry after deportation, a criminal offense with a maximum sentence of up to 20 years in prison.
According to U.S. Customs & Border Protection (CBP), more than 1,269 “criminal migrants” were apprehended by Del Rio Sector agents between October 1, 2021, and May 31, 2022. Portillo-Soto is one of 10,659 “criminal noncitizens” who have been “encountered” in the Year 2022 to date. CBP explains that “criminal noncitizens” is a term used to refer to “noncitizens who have been convicted of a crime, whether in the United States or abroad, so long as the conviction is for conduct which is deemed criminal by the United States.”
