Jury finds Wisconsin man guilty of forging threat against Trump to get witness deported

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A jury found a Wisconsin man guilty Thursday of forging threats against President Donald trump in an attempt to get the victim in a robbery case against him deported.

Online court records show the Milwaukee County jury found 52-year-old Demetric Scott guilty of felony identity theft and witness intimidation after deliberating for most of the day. He represented himself during the three-day trial and was immediately taken into custody after the verdicts were read, leaving no way to reach him for comment on Thursday evening.

According to court documents, Mexican immigrant Ramon Morales Reyes was riding his bike in Milwaukee in September 2023 when Scott approached him and kicked him off the bike. He stabbed Morales Reyes with a box cutter before stealing the bike and riding away.

Scott was arrested hours later. While he was in jail, Scott wrote multiple letters posing as Morales Reyes to state and federal officials 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.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blasted his photo on social media, along with an excerpt of a letter he purportedly wrote in English promising to shoot Trump at a rally. The White House and Trump supporters played up his arrest as a major success in the administration’s crackdown on immigration.

Investigators determined that Morales Reyes couldn’t have written the letters since he doesn’t speak English well, can’t write in the language and the handwriting in the letters didn’t match his.

Meanwhile, Scott was making calls from jail in which he talked about letters that needed to be mailed and a plan to get U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities to pick someone up so his trial could get dismissed. He admitted to police that he wrote the letters.

Scott was charged separately in September with armed robbery, battery, and reckless endangerment in connection with the bike theft. The jury on Thursday acquitted him on the robbery and battery counts but found him guilty on the endangerment charge.

Court records show prosecutors charged Scott in 2022 with being a party to burglary. He was out on bail in connection with that case when he stole Morales Reyes’ bike and wrote the letters, prompting prosecutors to charge him with two counts of bail jumping in the identity theft case and one count of bail jumping in the robbery case. The jury on Thursday acquitted him of the two bail jumping charges in the identity theft case but convicted him on the single bail jumping charge in the robbery case.

All together, he faces up to 26 years in the state prison system when he’s sentenced on Feb. 27. The burglary charge is still pending.

The Noem news release with Morales Reyes’ photo touting his arrest is still posted on the DHS website but now includes a disclaimer stating that he’s no longer under investigation for threatening Trump but remains in ICE custody pending deportation. The release says he entered the U.S. illegally nine times between 1998 and 2005 and has a criminal record that includes arrests for felony hit and run, property damage and disorderly conduct with a domestic abuse modifier.

Morales Reyes was released on $7,500 bond in June and is currently residing with his family in Milwaukee, his deportation defense attorney, Cain Oulahan, said. He has applied for a U-visa, a document that allows crime victims and their family members to remain in the U.S., but Oulahan said it could take years to obtain one.

Wisconsin online court records do not show any criminal cases involving Morales Reyes. Oulahan, his attorney, said that all the background checks he has conducted on Morales Reyes have turned up nothing.

Morales Reyes moved to the U.S. from Mexico in the 1980s. He worked as a dishwasher in Milwaukee, is married and has three children who are U.S. citizens, according to his attorneys. He said Scott’s conviction is a huge relief for Morales Reyes and his family.

“He’s been traumatized by going through all this, all these different levels that feel like victimization,” Oulahan said. “He just wants to work and be with his family again.”