Mexican deported from US 20 times gets 35 years for assaults on women

A Mexican man who was deported from the United States more than a dozen times was sentenced Friday in Oregon to 35 years in prison after pleading guilty to sodomy, kidnapping, sex abuse and other charges in separate attacks on two women.

Sergio Jose Martinez told victims' relatives he would see them in hell after the sentence was pronounced Friday in a Portland courtroom.

Just a day earlier, another man who had also been deported multiple times for being in America illegally, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, was found not guilty by a jury in San Francisco in the shooting death of a woman. That case that touched off a national immigration debate.

"Unfortunately, after Zarate got acquitted, Martinez is now the boogeyman of the face of immigration," Martinez's lawyer, Jonathan Sarre, said in a phone interview.

A week before the attacks, Martinez was freed from jail in Portland where he had served time for interfering with police and providing a false birth date. He was let go despite a request from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office to hold him so the agency could take him into custody.

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