Federal authorities tossed an illegal immigrant former gang member into solitary confinement in a Virginia jail because his many tattoos led them to believe he would take a leadership role among other MS-13 inmates, court documents said.
Jose Noe Uria Hernandez’s attorney said in documents filed in Alexandria’s federal court that his 30-year-old client left the gang before he snuck into the United States from El Salvador in early 2003. Hernandez had been in the United States illegally before and was deported in 2002 after serving a one-year sentence for stealing cars in Fairfax County, where he had been running with MS-13.
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Hernandez was sentenced to one-year, four months in prison Friday after pleading guilty to being in the United States illegally.
He was most recently arrested in October while traveling from Nashville, Tenn., to Northern Virginia for a construction job, his attorney, Douglas Steinberg, wrote in court documents.
Since then, “he has been placed in solitary confinement because of his tattoos,” Steinberg wrote. Authorities are concerned that Hernandez “would take a leadership role among other MS-13 detainees.”
According to Steinberg, as a teenager in El Salvador, Hernandez “had little choice but to join a gang, either MS-13 or 18th Street,” MS-13’s bitter rival. He became fully immersed in gang society, a lifestyle that resulted in his many tattoos. Eventually, Steinberg wrote, Hernandez had to flee El Salvador because “flying death squads related to right wing paramilitary groups were shooting MS-13 gang members on sight.”
In 2001, Hernandez moved to Northern Virginia and fell in with MS-13 there. He quickly racked up convictions, including one for grand larceny in Fairfax County that resulted in his deportation a year later.
Hernandez quickly returned to Untied States, moving to the Nashville area for construction work. Steinberg wrote that since his return, Hernandez has led a “quiet life in which he started a family.”
But prosecutors say Hernandez “may have had good intentions when he illegally re-entered the United States,” prosecutors wrote, “but while he has been present in the United States he has continued to engage in criminal conduct.” Prosecutors cited Hernandez’s convictions of “violent assaults and battery” as evidence of his violent history.
