The United States government had already removed him four times. Federal authorities had sent Jorge Luis Martinez-Ulloa back to Honduras, watched him return, and sent him back again. None of it was enough. This week in Lexington, a child became the answer to the question of what happens when a broken system keeps failing the same test.
According to a Breitbart report, Lexington police arrested the 31-year-old Honduran national and charged him with a list of crimes that is difficult to read. Prosecutors say Martinez-Ulloa kidnapped a minor, held her inside an apartment, grabbed her by the throat, and raped her on March 29. He faces two counts of first-degree rape involving a victim under 12, two counts of first-degree sodomy involving a victim under 12, two counts of sexual abuse of a victim under 12, kidnapping a minor, and first-degree strangulation.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement moved quickly after his arrest, lodging a detainer with Lexington police and requesting notification if he is released from custody at any point.
Lauren Bis of the Department of Homeland Security put the stakes plainly. “This criminal illegal alien kidnapped and raped a child. ICE is requesting Lexington not release this child predator without notification to ICE law enforcement,” she said, adding that “Lexington cooperates with ICE, so this pedophile will not be released from jail back into American neighborhoods. We need more cities and states to cooperate with us to help remove sickos like this from our country. Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, ICE will continue arresting and removing child rapists from our country.”
The record of how Martinez-Ulloa came to be in Kentucky at all is a damning portrait of systematic failure. He first crossed the southern border near Laredo, Texas in 2012 and was deported back to Honduras. He then crossed illegally on February 21, 2021, was removed, and crossed again just seven days later on February 28. He crossed a third time that same month on March 7, 2021. At some later point, he crossed for a fifth time and made his way to Lexington, where he reportedly lived until his arrest this week.
Three of his five crossings occurred within a single two-week stretch in February and March of 2021, during the opening weeks of the Biden administration, when border enforcement priorities were being rapidly dismantled and illegal crossings were surging to historic levels. The timing is not incidental. It is the story.
Lexington’s cooperation with ICE in this case means Martinez-Ulloa will not walk out of jail and disappear into another American city. That cooperation, however, is the exception rather than the rule across much of the country. Dozens of sanctuary jurisdictions maintain explicit policies prohibiting local law enforcement from notifying federal immigration authorities when someone with a detainer is released. In those cities, a man with Martinez-Ulloa’s record would already be free.
Every child harmed by a repeat deportee represents a deliberate policy choice made by politicians who decided that enforcement was optional and that borders were a suggestion. Illegal immigration is not an abstract debate about economics or demographics. It is a public safety emergency that demands immediate, comprehensive action including mandatory deportation, no tolerance for repeat crossers, and full cooperation between local and federal law enforcement in every jurisdiction in the country. The American people deserve a government that treats the protection of its own children as a higher priority than the comfort of those who have no legal right to be here.
