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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

At Least He Didn’t|Try to Sneak In

BROWNSVILLE, Texas (CN) - A Belizean faces up to 20 years in federal prison for trying to re-enter the United States after being deported.

Bernard Talbert, 37, was convicted in a 1-day bench trial this week, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

He didn't exactly try to sneak in.

Talbert presented a phony passport at an international bridge in Brownsville in August 2011, and "asked for a non-immigrant visa so he could travel to Washington D.C. to speak with President Obama about what he considered to be genocide in Belize," according to the prosecutors' statement.

Talbert's "passport" was "a World Passport issued by a private organization known as the World Service Authority in Washington D.C.," prosecutors said.

Finding the "passport" invalid, Customs officers sent him to secondary inspection, where officers found he had been deported several times and had been convicted of felony drug trafficking and immigration crimes, prosecutors said.

Talbert told his trial judge he thought the passport was legitimate.

He will be sentenced on May 21.

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