Mexican Man who Desecrated WW II Memorial is Illegal Alien Protected Under Obama Amnesty

The Mexican national who desecrated a World War II monument in Quantico, Virginia last week is an illegal immigrant protected for over a decade under an Obama amnesty program for adults who came to the United States illegally as children. His name is Miguel Alonso Maldonado Soriano and on October 21 Prince William County Police caught him actively destroying the Iwo Jima Memorial outside Marine Corps Base Quantico with a sledgehammer. “The damage to the memorial included the complete removal of one of the heads of the individual Marine statues, removal of multiple rifle barrels on the monument, and the defacing and disfiguring of other parts of the monument,” according to the Department of Justice (DOJ), which announced this week that Soriano faces federal charges of willfully injuring or committing a depredation against property of the United States and willfully injuring or destroying a monument on public property commemorating the service of persons in the armed forces. If convicted, he faces up to a decade in prison.

Soriano was originally charged in Virginia with state crimes of felony destruction of property, trespassing with intent to damage property and felony injury to a monument and this week a Prince William County Circuit Court judge granted him a $2,500 bond. Authorities estimate he caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to the historic statue, which is located at the entrance of Marine Corps Base Quantico, around 36 miles south of Washington DC. The limestone monument depicts six U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Japan’s Iwo Jima Island during World War II and is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo taken in 1945 by Associated Press photojournalist Joe Rosenthal. The statue is a smaller replica of the original bronze monument outside of Arlington National Cemetery which stands about 78 feet tall with 32-foot high figures raising a 60-foot flagpole on a rock slope above a granite base. The flag flies 24 hours a day, 365 days a year by presidential proclamation. “This hateful illegal alien attacked a memorial to our brave Marines, decapitating one of the statues with a sledgehammer,” Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Markwayne Mullin said this week, confirming what much of the establishment media has failed to report, that Soriano benefitted from Obama’s special amnesty.

Soriano entered the U.S. illegally at an unknown date and location in 1999, according to DHS, and was granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status in October 2014 by the Obama administration. Under the controversial initiative over 800,000 illegal immigrants under the age of 31 have been shielded from deportation and allowed to obtain work permits and drivers’ licenses. Although the Trump administration has cracked down on DACA there are still over 436,000 illegal aliens in the program, according to government figures. A sizable chunk of DACA applicants has arrest records, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the DHS agency that administers the nation’s lawful immigration system. Years ago, the agency disclosed that nearly 110,000 illegal aliens who requested the special Obama-era reprieve for adults who came to the U.S. as children “through no fault of their own” have criminal records that include assault, battery, rape, murder and driving under the influence. Tens of thousands of DACA recipients were found to have over 10 arrests, according to USCIS.

Those protected by DACA include rioters and looters arrested and charged with crimes during a Black Lives Matter “Justice for George Floyd” protest in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. This includes a then 30-year-old Mexican national, Maxima Guerrero, who was a community organizer with a Phoenix-based grassroots migrant justice organization called Puente Movement. During the riots, Guerrero and her fellow DACA friends occupied a vehicle “loaded with incendiary devices,” a high-level Phoenix Police source told Judicial Watch. Soriano, who since childhood has lived in the quaint Virginia town of Stafford, about two dozen miles south of the nation’s capital, was arrested for trespassing there in 2022. By then he was already protected under DACA, which expires every few years and was renewed by the Biden administration. His DACA has since expired, and a renewal request was denied earlier this month.

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