An illegal El Salvadoran immigrant living in Maryland was recently charged with distribution and possession of child pornography, and now he just wants to go back to his own country.
"Just deport me," Cristian Alexander Magana, 19, of Hagerstown told a district court commissioner last week, reported the Herald Mail.
Magana has been charged with six counts of promoting or distributing child pornography and 15 counts of possession of child pornography, according to court records. He faces up to 10 years in prison.
District Judge Terry Myers set his bond at $100,000 at 10 percent, which allows Magana to post $10,000 bail.
Assistant State's Attorney Arthur Rozes told Myers that prior to being arraigned by the commissioner, the illegal alien repeated in English: "Just deport me."
Rozes asked the judge to hold Magana on a fully secured $100,000 bond until U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can decide its course of action.
It's not always as easy as just deporting an illegal immigrant, though. If an immigrant's home country refuses to take him or her back for repatriation, as countries often do with troubled aliens, ICE will typically release the individual back into the U.S.
In 2014, ICE released more than 30,000 illegal criminal aliens into the U.S., with convictions ranging from homicide and battery to kidnapping, sexual assault and larceny, reported The Washington Times. In 2013, ICE released 36,000 illegal criminal aliens. And as of March 2015, it had released an additional 10,246 criminal aliens, as HNGN previously reported.
Being that Magana, who lived with his aunt in Hagerstown for about a year, was relied upon to provide financial support, Assistant Public Defender Sean Mukherjee requested that the judge set "an extremely reasonable bond," according to the Herald Mail.
Magana's downloading of child pornography was mechanically not too different from illegally downloading music, Mukherjee told the judge, to which Myers asked, "Are you really comparing this to downloading music?"
"The legislature views this a little more seriously," Myers said, according to the Herald Mail.
Police obtained a search warrant for Magana's residence in May after a Maryland state trooper downloaded six files from an Internet address linked to Magana on the Ares file-sharing service. Officers then seized a laptop computer from his room for forensic examination, according to court records.
