Four-time deported Honduran gets 21 months after Buncombe County arrest

Federal authorities said Franklin Flores-Penas was arrested in Buncombe County and then sentenced to 21 months in prison after pleading guilty to illegal reentry by an alien, a case prosecutors tied to repeated defiance of prior deportation orders. The 48-year-old Honduran national remains in federal custody and will be removed from the United States again after he completes his sentence.

Court records and the sentencing hearing, both dated Oct. 26, 2025, show that Flores-Penas had already been caught in the immigration system years earlier. He was convicted of a felony drug offense in Los Angeles on Jan. 16, 2004, and ordered deported to Honduras on Feb. 25, 2004. Federal authorities said he was then removed from the country in 2008, 2015 and 2018, meaning he illegally reentered four times after being deported.

Chief U.S. District Judge Martin Reidinger imposed the sentence on June 18 and pointed to Flores-Penas’s repeated returns after deportation and his disregard for the law. The sentence sends him back into federal custody before he is turned over for another deportation.

The case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations and the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office, a local-federal combination that placed the arrest squarely in Buncombe County’s public-safety orbit before it moved into federal court. Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher S. Hess of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Asheville prosecuted the case.

The U.S. Department of Justice said the case was brought as part of Operation Take Back America, a Justice Department initiative aimed at federal immigration and border-enforcement cases. For Buncombe County, the arrest underscores how local deputies and federal agents can intersect when someone with a long removal history is found back in the community, and how quickly a local arrest can turn into a federal prison term followed by another deportation.