A judge in Madison, Wisconsin, sentenced Demetric DeShawn Scott to 16½ years in prison after a Milwaukee County jury convicted him of forging threats against President Donald Trump as part of a scheme tied to immigration custody and deportation.
The sentence, announced Friday in court, followed Scott’s January convictions on charges that included felony identity theft, witness intimidation, bail jumping and reckless endangerment. Judge Kristy Yang imposed a year and six months behind bars on the identity theft count, five years on the intimidation count and 10 years on the endangerment count, according to the Associated Press report. Yang also sentenced Scott to 882 days already served on the bail jumping charge.
The case began with an attack prosecutors described as connected to Reyes’s immigration status. According to court documents cited by the AP, Mexican immigrant Ramon Morales Reyes was riding his bike in Milwaukee in September 2023 when Scott approached him. Court records said Scott kicked Morales Reyes off the bike, stabbed him with a box cutter and then rode away on the bike, and that Scott was out on bail in a separate burglary case at the time.
After Scott was arrested hours after the stabbing, prosecutors said he wrote multiple letters while in jail, posing as Morales Reyes to state and federal officials and threatening to kill Trump at a rally. Federal immigration authorities took Morales Reyes into custody in May after he dropped his daughter off at school, the AP reported.
The AP also described how the case became a public example of federal immigration enforcement. U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem shared Morales Reyes’ photo on social media along with an excerpt of a letter she said he wrote in English, and Trump supporters and the White House promoted Scott’s arrest as a success in the administration’s immigration crackdown. The report said investigators determined Morales Reyes could not have written the letters, citing that he did not speak English well, could not write in English and that the handwriting in the letters did not match.
The AP said Scott admitted to police that he wrote the letters and that he made calls from jail discussing the letters that needed to be mailed and a plan to get U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to pick someone up so his trial could be dismissed. Scott, who served as his own attorney beginning in December, maintained his innocence as sheriff’s deputies escorted him out after sentencing.
Noem’s department issued a news release in connection with the arrest, but the AP reported that the release—still posted on the DHS website—now includes a disclaimer stating that Morales Reyes is no longer under investigation for threatening Trump while remaining in ICE custody pending deportation. The release, as described by the AP, said Morales Reyes entered the U.S. illegally multiple times between 1998 and 2005 and included criminal history in the description.
Morales Reyes was released on $7,500 bond in June. His deportation defense attorney, Cain Oulahan, said in January that Morales Reyes was living with his family in Milwaukee and had applied for a U-visa that can allow crime victims and their family members to remain in the United States, and that the process can take up to eight years. Oulahan declined to comment Friday on Scott’s sentencing, the AP reported, and said Morales Reyes’ attorneys planned to seek an order simply canceling his deportation.
In court filings and statements summarized by the AP, Morales Reyes moved to the United States from Mexico in the 1980s and worked as a dishwasher in Milwaukee. His attorneys said he is married and has three children who are U.S. citizens, and the AP reported that a search of online court records did not show state or federal criminal cases in Wisconsin listing Morales Reyes as a defendant.