A man who repeatedly tried to exploit a purported 14-year-old — who was actually an undercover Fairfax County police officer — for lewd images and sex last year was sentenced to 18 years in prison earlier this week.
According to court records, Mario Alexander Bonilla Canales, 50, was found guilty of attempted coercion and enticement of a minor and attempted sexual exploitation of a child during a two-day bench trial held in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in June.
The initial arrest was part of a months-long operation by the Fairfax County Police Department in 2025 targeting people seeking criminal encounters with minors online. Sixteen men, including Bonilla Canales, were charged with felonies as a result.
Over the course of several days in June 2025, Bonilla Canales sent a series of messages to the Facebook profile of a person who repeatedly identified herself as a 14-year-old. After days of exchanging messages in which he repeatedly attempted to obtain explicit images, Bonilla Canales went to a local park to meet up with the girl, according to the memorandum opinion issued by U.S. District Judge Rossie D. Alston, Jr.
“Defendant sped away, briefly colliding with one of the police vehicles, before driving out of the park and about one mile away into a neighborhood nearby,” Alston wrote. “Police pursued Defendant’s vehicle and caught up with him in a cul-de-sac. There, Defendant was apprehended, and the police officers retrieved identification, a cellular phone, and condoms from his vehicle.”
The case was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative launched in May 2006 to marshal “federal, state, and local resources to better locate, apprehend, and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the internet,” according to an announcement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
A citizen of El Salvador, Bonilla Canales was also found guilty at his bench trial in June of illegal reentry to the U.S. after removal subsequent to a felony conviction.
Bonilla Canales first entered the U.S. in 1989, was deported in 1999, reentered again and was again removed in September 2016. He re-entered again “sometime thereafter,” according to Alston’s memorandum opinion.
