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A man whose pickup plowed into a car with a six-year-old child inside—the family had been driving home from Disneyland—is a Mexican citizen who has already been deported 15 times, border agents claim.
Constantino Banda-Acosta, the 38-year-old driver of the truck, was last deported this January, federal authorities said. He was arrested after the crash in San Diego’s San Ysidro district—just north of the Mexican border—and booked on charges of felony hit-and-run with injury, drunken driving with injury, and driving without a valid license. A passenger in the truck was also taken into custody, and is also allegedly an unauthorized immigrant.
The boy involved in the crash, Lennox Lake, remains hospitalized in serious condition. ICE officials told the San Diego Union Tribune that they will seek deportation for Banda-Acosta after any potential sentence stemming from the DUI and hit-and-run charges. Meanwhile, local immigration advocates are concerned the case will be used to justify President Donald Trump’s attempts to depict all illegal immigrants as criminals.