Three years ago, immigration authorities deported a border-jumping Guatemalan woman who killed four children and injured more than a dozen others when she slammed into a school bus in Cottonwood, Minnesota, in 2008. Despite eight years in the slammer and the trip home where she belongs, Olga Marina Franco del Cid didn’t get the message.
Last month, cops collared her again — back in Minnesota, where she doesn’t belong.
On Friday, federal prosecutors announced Franco del Cid’s indictment on multiple counts of identity theft and illegally crossing the border after being deported.
The Latest
Immigration authorities deported Franco del Cid on May 4, 2016. The illegal alien had just been released from state prison, where she served eight years of a 12-and-half-year sentence after the deadly crash in Cottonwood, a town of 1,200 or so about 140 miles west of Minneapolis.
“On Nov. 26, 2019, the defendant was found in the United States in violation of this previous removal,” federal prosecutors said. Aside from felony re-entering the country, the feds charged her with “identification fraud in the form of use of a false Permanent Resident Card [more commonly known as a “green card”] and social security fraud for falsely representing a social security number on an Employment Eligibility Verification Form I-9.”
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ICE agents arrested the 35-year-old child killer in Inver Grove Heights, the Star-Tribune of Minneapolis reported, after receiving a tip that she had returned to Minneosta.
ICE did not report when she jumped the border this time, although she undoubtedly crossed with the invading army of nearly one million “migrants” in fiscal 2019. Nor did ICE report how she slipped by the border patrol.
The Wreck
On February 19, 2008, hurtling down the road at about 50 mph in a maroon Plymouth Voyager, Franco del Cid plowed into the side of a school bus after she ran a stop sign.
Two of the four dead children were brothers, ICE noted in its report. All were between nine and 13 years old, and 17 others sustained myriad injuries.
“Various witnesses testified that they saw the crash, and that the minivan drove full speed through a stop sign and struck the side of the school bus,” says the decision that rejected her appeal in 2010.
The bus driver testified that Franco del Cid “did not attempt to swerve or slow down as [she] went through the intersection, which included railroad crossing arms and a stop sign that required the minivan to stop, and that the minivan struck “perfectly in the middle of the bus.”
A state cop verified that account. She was traveling between 46 and 50 mph, he testified, and street signs warned motorists of the stop sign ahead.
Though “responders at the scene found Franco del Cid behind the steering wheel, her right foot wedged under a crumpled dashboard near the accelerator,” as the Star-Tribune reported, Franco del Cid proposed the preposterous defense that her boyfriend, a Mexican illegal, was driving.
But he fled the scene for fear of being deported.
Her attorneys “argued that he was thrown out of the van on impact, and Franco del Cid was thrown into the driver’s seat.”
Problem was, Franco del Cid confessed in the hospital. She told cops that “she was driving the minivan, which belonged to her boyfriend … who had stayed home sick that day,” the appeals decision noted.
And so Franco del Cid landed in prison, and thankfully, the Court of Appeals of Minnesota rejected her ridiculous appeal in 2010, which included the bogus claim that her confession was involuntary because she was under the influence of narcotics in the hospital.
Penalty
Franco del Cid, the U.S. Criminal Code says, could spend up to 20 years in prison if convicted of felony re-entering the country because she was deported after committing a previous felony.
Problem is, that punishment is not deterring illegal-alien felons from re-entering the country, as a glance at the Border Patrol’s apprehensions at the border well show.
The latest example: On Friday, border agents collared a Guatemalan illegal convicted of dealing dope in Montgomery County, Maryland, a notorious illegal-alien sanctuary. Authorities deported the thug on July 3, 2019.
Thus, despite facing a 20-year federal prison sentence, he recrossed the border illegally just 163 days later.
Image: P_Wei via iStock / Getty Images Plus
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor
