Same story, new date: twice-deported thug’s ‘not credible’ persecution tale gets a second outing ahead of fast-track sentencing
The illegal alien felon arrested by immigration agents in San Francisco last month has recycled a tale of persecution in El Salvador so unconvincing that an immigration judge threw it out as “not credible”.
Ahead of his ‘fast-track’ sentencing this week, Milton Ramos Rodriguez has told another judge the same story. In 2013 he swore it all happened in 2004; this time, he says, it happened in 2017.
Ramos will appear at the city’s federal courthouse on Thursday for a change of plea and sentencing hearing where, if U.S. District Judge Edward Chen agrees, he will receive a time-served sentence of just over two weeks’ imprisonment for illegal reentry and be sent for deportation.
His public defender has told Judge Chen that after his last deportation in October 2017, Salvadoran agents stripped him naked at the airport and told him he had 15 days left to live. His brother secured his release. Gang members later cornered him in a friend’s car and opened fire.
“It is a small miracle that they escaped with their lives,” the sentencing memo says.
He then fled through Guatemala back to the United States, the memo says, and he fears he will be harmed or killed if he is deported again.
But in 2013, facing deportation for a second time, Ramos told an immigration judge under oath that almost exactly the same thing had happened to him after his first deportation, in 2004.
Then, he said, Salvadoran soldiers stripped him at the airport and told him he had 15 days to live. Masked police later sprayed his getaway car with machine-gun fire, and he fled to the Guatemalan border.
Under cross-examination he admitted lying to an asylum officer, to whom he had claimed MS-13 gang members tried to kidnap him and shot at him. He said he had done so because he thought it would help his case.
An immigration judge ruled in 2013 that his story was “not credible”, calling the admission a “material fabrication” which cast doubt on his entire story.
His appeals failed all the way to the Ninth Circuit, and he was deported again in October 2017.
The new version keeps the airport strip-search, the warning that he had 15 days to live, the gunfire and the escape through Guatemala. The masked police who sprayed his taxi have become gang members, the very claim he admitted inventing under cross-examination.
His account will go unchallenged, because government and defense attorneys have asked the judge to dispense with a presentence report. That report would have had probation officers check his story.
“Ramos Rodriguez… does not deserve leniency,” federal prosecutors wrote, before recommending it anyway. Their recommendation, they said, reflects the priorities of the fast-track program, which saves “substantial prosecutorial and judicial resources”. To what end is a mystery.
Judge Chen has also been told that Ramos gave back to the community by mentoring Latino children for United Playaz, a city-funded ‘violence prevention’ nonprofit.
The group evidently sets the bar for youth mentors low. Last December its founder, Rudy Corpuz, told the state parole board that Leonard Boone, who punched his 16-month-old son to death at his Potrero Hill home in 2002, would make an ideal youth mentor and that he would offer him a job. The board affirmed his release.
United Playaz’s listed donors include the San Francisco District Attorney’s Neighborhood Justice Fund, the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development and the Department of Public Health.
Ramos was charged with murder in 1992 over a Mission District drive-by shooting and spent four years on the run before pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter and being sentenced to ten years. In 2012, after seven more years as a fugitive, he was arrested as a suspect in a stabbing.
San Francisco prosecutors say that in June 2025 he beat and strangled his girlfriend at a friend’s Eddy Street apartment, telling her “I’ll kill you”, then hit both women with a hammer, and that in October he choked her and held a screwdriver to her neck. He was charged with 12 counts, including criminal threats and assault with a deadly weapon, and was out on an ankle monitor when ICE arrested him. Judge Brian Hill released him on his own recognizance despite prosecutors’ request that he be held without bail.
At the time of the attacks he was on felony probation for stabbing the same woman in the abdomen outside her home in May 2023. He pleaded guilty in January 2024 to false imprisonment with a deadly weapon and being a felon in possession of a firearm, and was released the same day with a GPS tag.
When ICE agents arrested him on a SoMa sidewalk on October 19, Ramos falsely claimed to be a U.S. citizen and an attorney. Video of him protesting that he was a citizen was enough to bring city leaders out on the steps of City Hall the next day. Supervisor Jackie Fielder told the crowd he had been “kidnapped”.
It is not the first time federal judges in San Francisco have had the wool pulled over their eyes at rushed sentencing hearings.
In April a Mexican illegal alien was jailed for a month after telling a federal judge he had only crossed the border in 2024 in response to a plea for help from his brothers. Weeks earlier he had told a state judge he had lived in the city for 13 years, in a bid to have his bail conditions relaxed.
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