A Mexican man who Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents thought they were pursuing when they clashed with activists in South Burlington on March 11 missed a court hearing Monday for the DUI charge that had put him on the agency’s radar.
Middlebury police arrested 24-year-old Deyvi Daniel Corona Sanchez on suspicion of DUI during a late-night traffic stop in January. A few weeks later, the Addison County State’s Attorney’s office offered to enroll Corona Sanchez in a confidential court diversion program, which allows the charge to eventually be expunged.
For most Vermonters, their legal entanglements would end there.
But as part of the booking process for his DUI arrest, Corona Sanchez’s fingerprints went into a vast federal database that, in turn, matched his prints to those that immigration authorities in Texas collected from Corona Sanchez after he illegally crossed the southern border in 2021. The system then alerted ICE to the match, an agent wrote in a federal court filing.
On March 11, ICE agents in Vermont were surveilling a home on Dorset Street in South Burlington when they checked the registration of a blue Toyota Camry parked outside. Agents attempted to pull over the Camry — registered to Corona Sanchez — when it left the driveway, but the driver fled.
Agents’ subsequent efforts to apprehend the driver triggered a nearly 11-hour protest by anti-ICE activists who surrounded the residence, culminating in a chaotic street clash between activists and local, state and federal law enforcement.
Agents arrested three people on civil immigration violations — though Corona Sanchez, an ICE agent later acknowledged in court records, was not inside the car or the home.
The Department of Homeland Security nonetheless published a press release that described Corona Sanchez as a “dangerous criminal alien” who was “still at-large.”
The Monday hearing in state court in Middlebury was set as a brief, routine status conference. Because Corona Sanchez did not appear either in person or by video, Judge Alison Arms issued a bench warrant for police to cite Corona Sanchez.
His court-appointed public defender, James Gratton, told the judge that the state’s initial offer to send the case to a diversion program was invalid because his blood alcohol content wasn’t high enough. Only cases with a BAC over .08, the legal driving limit, were eligible for diversion at the time, Gratton said. The state’s attorney office has since changed its policy, Gratton said, but had not decided whether to apply the change retroactively.
Addison County State’s Attorney Eva Vekos — whose law license is currently suspended following her own DUI conviction — did not respond to a request to clarify her office’s diversion policy.
Corona Sanchez blew .07 in a breath sample roughly two hours after the traffic stop, according to a Middlebury police officer’s affidavit.
The criminal citation noted that Corona Sanchez was driving an Audi registered to someone else at the time of his arrest. His personal residence was listed as an apartment in Winooski.
According to the advocacy group Migrant Justice, Corona Sanchez had sold his Camry and was not residing at the Dorset Street home.
