Thrice-deported pedophile remains free in Mendocino County thanks to federal judges in San Francisco and California sanctuary laws
A thrice-deported pedophile remains at liberty in Mendocino County thanks to a federal judge in San Francisco who granted him bail after he sneaked back in to the United States, it has emerged.
Salvadoran Jose Alberto Panameno-Cisneros appears also to have been protected by an unwillingness among Mendocino County authorities to call immigration authorities and demand his prompt removal.
For their part state authorities provided the illegal alien felon with a California driver’s license in 2024.
Panameno’s case has rumbled on since his most recent arrest, when an eagle-eyed highway patrol officer saw him driving a trailer without brake lights or a license plate near Ukiah in April 2025.
It quickly became apparent that he was a sex offender, convicted in a distressing 2005 case of ‘lewd and lascivious acts with a child’ in Mendocino County, had other convictions for domestic violence and drunk driving and had illegally returned to the U.S. after being deported for the third time in 2015.
Last week he appeared before U.S. District Judge James Donato at San Francisco federal courthouse for proceedings in his federal ‘illegal reentry’ case. He walked into and out of court under his own steam having earlier been bailed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Alex Tse who said he was not a flight risk.
Federal prosecutors had pressed for a detention hearing and demanded that he be detained.
Judge Donato heard that Panameno’s public defender intends to attack the lawfulness of his original deportation in 1998, presumably in an effort to undermine the validity of his subsequent deportations. He ordered the parties to return in March for a scheduling hearing on that motion.
On July 28 2025 Panameno pleaded guilty in Mendocino County Superior Court to one misdemeanor count of failure to register as a sex offender. A felony count of failure to register was dismissed.
It appears from court records that he has failed to pay some court-ordered financial obligations.
It transpires that 64-year-old Panameno has lived in Fort Bragg for years – always being drawn back to the Northern California coast – and was in violation of court-imposed conditions that he register as a sex offender.
The 2004 child sex abuse case, in which he impregnated a 15-year-old girl, resulted in an exceptionally lenient sentence of 360 days in county jail – from which he was allowed to depart unhindered and return home after serving about half of this time.
In 2008 he was convicted of spousal battery, sentenced to 60 days’ jail, had an ICE detainer placed on him, which appears to have been honored, which resulted in him being deported in 2009.
The only instance of Panameno being dealt with less than leniently arose in 2010, when he was captured by border patrol officers shortly after he crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas. Chief U.S. District Judge Alia Moses of the Western District of Texas sentenced him to 65 months’ imprisonment.
He was detained without bond for the entirety of that case.
Moses is famously contemptuous of California sanctuary policies and wary of the tendency of federal judges in the state to spring illegal aliens.
There is no suggestion that any local law enforcement agency or prosecutor contacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Panameno’s latest arrest. Mendocino County Sheriff Matt Kendall has insisted that it is not his job to enforce federal immigration law. Fort Bragg describes itself as a ‘sanctuary city’.
A spokesman for California Highway Patrol Northern Division Chief John Pinoli did not respond to questions about whether any officers had contacted immigration and customs enforcement.
This is one more case illustrating the nature of the illegal immigration issues facing California and the almost total absence of enforcement across the Golden State.
Here federal authorities appear to have prosecuted a case which they themselves consider might secure a sentence of 12-18 months instead of simply deporting him immediately – which has resulted in his release by a lenient judge and federal public defenders’ lavishing more taxpayer dollars trying to undermine the sex predator’s original 1998 deportation order.
Once again the only judge interested in properly protecting residents of Northern California is the redoubtable Judge Moses from a courtroom 1,500 miles away.
The case continues.
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