Franklin Arquimedes Viera-Guevara, arrested alongside partner Wedni Del Cid Rodriguez for keeping two boys aged seven and nine chained near a sleeping cot in Virginia town near the Washington D.C. metro area, has been outed as an illegal alien deported under former President Donald J. Trump in 2018.
Viera-Guevara, 29, and Rodriguez, 47, told law enforcement they would only chain up the brothers occasionally to “scare them” into not leaving the apartment. However, a roommate said the boys were left shackled and unsupervised regularly, only being released when Viera-Guevara and Rodriguez were at home.
Police intervened after being contacted by the boys’ sister after one of them sent her a picture of his leg in chains. Officers heard a “chain rattling” when they approached the residence in Groveton, Fairfax County. They found the chain and identified marks on the boys’ ankles that appeared to match it.
Following his arrest, it has emerged that Viera-Guevara “unlawfully entered the United States near McAllen, Texas” in November 2018 and was “processed for expedited removal and removed from the United States to El Salvador [in] Feb. 1, 2019.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) says the Salvadoran “unlawfully re-entered the United States on an unknown date, at an unknown location” and now faces “two counts of child abuse/neglect: reckless disregard for life, two counts of child endangerment while in one’s custody, and two counts of child abduction: by force.”
ICE has lodged an immigration detainer against the illegal with the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center.