A 24-year-old Venezuelan man was arrested this week for reportedly posing as a student at an Ohio high school.
According to news station WTOL 11, the man, Emmanuel Labrador Sierra was arrested on Monday (May 19) and charged with forgery for attending Perrysburg High School by using false documentation. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has issued a detainer request with the Wood County Jail, as Sierra reportedly entered the U.S. illegally in March 2020. In the high school, Sierra used a different name and claimed he was 16 years old.
According to a court document, per ABC 13, Sierra claimed to have been "abandoned, neglected, and abused" and left Venezuela for the U.S. at 15. “He presented a Venezuela birth certificate that reported his age again at the time would have been 16. He had reached out to the school at the end of 2023, claiming that he was trafficked into the country from Venezuela and he wanted to enroll in school and I started that process,” said Perrysburg Detective Ryan Merrow.
The man was arrested following a traffic stop, which occurred on Sunday (May 18), when he was in the passenger seat of a vehicle driven by a 22-year-old woman, who contacted authorities over concerns about Sierra's identity.
According to U.S. Border Patrol, Sierra was born in 2001. His visa expired two years later, around the time that he contacted the high school about enrollment. The man also forged documents to obtain a Social Security card, an Ohio driver's license and legal guardianship. Housing Sierra was a local foster family, who helped him procure the documents.
"It is disturbing that a grown man would impersonate a teenager and infiltrate the lives of underage girls and boys to fool them into doing God knows what," stated Tricia McLaughlin, Assistant Secretary for Internal Affairs.