NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION File Name: 22a0221n.06 No. 21-5390 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT ) FILED UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ) Jun 03, 2022 ) DEBORAH S. HUNT, Clerk Plaintiff-Appellee, ) ) v. ON APPEAL FROM THE ) UNITED STATES DISTRICT ) FIDEL ANGEL AMAYA BENITEZ, COURT FOR THE EASTERN ) DISTRICT OF TENNESSEE ) Defendant-Appellant. ) ) Before: BOGGS, MOORE, and GRIFFIN, Circuit Judges. BOGGS, Circuit Judge. Fidel Angel Amaya Benitez appeals his sentence and term of supervised release following his felony conviction for illegal reentry. This was the third such violation for Amaya Benitez, who is a citizen of El Salvador. This time, police found large amounts of cash and drugs in his possession. Amaya Benitez pleaded guilty to illegal reentry in exchange for the government’s agreeing to dismiss the drug charge, and the district court sentenced him to 68 months of imprisonment—below the range recommended by the Sentencing Guidelines—and 3 years of supervised release. On appeal, Amaya Benitez challenges his sentence as substantively unreasonable and his term of supervised release as procedurally unreasonable. We affirm. No. 21-5390, United States v. Amaya Benitez BACKGROUND Fidel Angel Amaya Benitez is a citizen of El Salvador with a long history of unlawful entry into the United States. The instant case is the third occasion on which Amaya Benitez has been discovered residing illegally in the country. He was found to be eligible for deportation in 1989 for committing a crime of moral turpitude, but he was not deported for the first time until 2007 after a conviction for drug possession. Amaya Benitez reentered the country and was convicted of evading arrest and driving under the influence, and he was again deported in 2017 after serving a 40-month sentence for illegal reentry. Amidst these immigration violations, Amaya Benitez racked up a litany of other interactions with law enforcement, including a conviction for unarmed manslaughter (pleaded down from second-degree murder) and an arrest for murder that was no- billed by a grand jury. In 2019, he was pulled over for a traffic stop in Tennessee, again as a result of erratic driving, and officers found $20,000 in cash and a large amount of cocaine in his vehicle, leading to the instant case. Amaya Benitez agreed to plead guilty to illegal reentry in exchange for the government’s dismissing the drug charge pursuant to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11. The parties did not negotiate an appeal waiver. At sentencing, because of Amaya Benitez’s repeated unlawful reentries into the country, as well as his lengthy criminal history, the district court noted a recommended range of 100 to 125 months of imprisonment according to the Sentencing Guidelines, based on an offense level of 25 and a criminal history category of V. The fact that Amaya Benitez’s prior 40-month sentence for illegal reentry had not deterred him, offset by a criminal-history calculation that may have overstated the severity of Amaya Benitez’s past convictions, led the court to grant Amaya Benitez a downward …
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Source: All recent Immigration Decisions In All the U.S. Courts of Appeals