United States v. Aguila-Montes De Oca

I. Background

Aguila-Montes, a Mexican citizen, queued up at the San Ysidro Point of Entry on July 5, 2004. Customs and Border Protection officers arrested him after verifying by computer that he was a deported alien. The government charged him with violating 8 U.S.C. § 1326 by attempting to reenter the United States. A jury convicted him, and the district court sentenced him to 120 months in prison and two years of supervised release.

During sentencing, the district court determined that 1 Although Aguila-Montes also raised a constitutional challenge to his sentence, and appealed the underlying conviction, this opinion addresses only the district court’s decision to apply the sixteen-level sentence enhancement. We considered Aguila-Montes’s other appellate arguments in a separate memorandum disposition filed April 28, 2008. UNITED STATES v. AGUILA-MONTES 753 Aguila-Montes had previously been convicted of a crime of violence as defined by section 2L1.2 of the Guidelines, and for that reason enhanced his sentence sixteen levels. The prior conviction was from 1988, when Aguila-Montes pleaded guilty to first degree residential burglary in violation of sec- tion…