A Santa Ana man was sentenced Monday to eight months in federal prison for posing as an immigration officer to extort money from a woman.
It was the second known time that 28-year-old Luis Flores-Mendoza pulled the act on a stranger, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Keenan.
She was working in an Anaheim restaurant on June 6 of that year when Flores-Mendoza, who was outfitted with a green uniform, vest, badge and handgun, confronted her, identified himself as a federal agent and gave her a letter that stated ICE was enforcing a case against her. He then told her to pay him $5,000 or she and her child would be deported.
Rather than complying, the woman contacted authorities, who had her set up a meeting where Flores-Mendoza thought he would be paid. Though he pulled up in a car equipped with a siren and police-style lights, he was the one who was arrested.
Flores-Mendoza pleaded guilty last year to a single felony count of impersonating a federal officer, although Keenan wrote in a pre-sentencing brief that the defendant did the same thing in 2016.
At his sentencing in the Reagan federal courthouse in Santa Ana on Monday, Flores-Mendoza told U.S. District Judge James V. Selna, “I’m truly sorry for everything I did and the people who were hurt. I truly, truly regret it.”
His attorney sought home confinement on grounds his client suffered from mental illness. Keenan argued that Flores-Mendoza’s actions were “serious” and “abusive and exploitive.”
Selna, who in addition to eight months in the can ordered Flores-Mendoza to spend two years on supervised release, said, “He preyed on a segment of the community that at this time and place is particularly vulnerable. A message has to be sent that you can’t do that.”
If convicted without the guilty plea, Flores-Mendoza was looking at three years in lockup.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.
2 Replies to “Phony ICE Agent Luis Flores-Mendoza Gets 8 Months in Pen for Extortion Plot”