NEW YORK — Cartel leaders Rafael Caro Quintero and Vicente Carrillo Fuentes are set to be arraigned in a U.S. federal court in New York City on Friday, following their surprise transfer from Mexico.
The pair were among 29 Mexican prisoners sent Thursday to eight cities across the U.S.
Caro Quintero, the former leader of the Guadalajara cartel, was behind the killing of a U.S. DEA agent in 1985 and had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. Carrillo Fuentes is a former leader of the Juarez drug cartel.
The pair are set to appear in federal court in Brooklyn, part of the Eastern District of New York, where Sinaloa cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was previously prosecuted.
The White House, in a statement Friday ahead of the arraignments, called Caro Quintero “one of the most evil cartel bosses in the world.”
“The Trump Administration is declaring these thugs as terrorists, because that is what they are, and demanding justice for the American people,” the statement read.
The prisoner handover comes as Mexican officials are in Washington trying to dissuade President Donald Trump from imposing 25% tariffs on all Mexican imports.
In exchange for delaying tariffs, Trump had insisted that Mexico crack down on cartels, illegal immigration and fentanyl production.
Among the others extradited are leading members of the six Mexican organized crime groups recently designated by the Republican administration as “foreign terrorist organizations.”
They include cartel leaders, security chiefs from both factions of the Sinaloa cartel, cartel finance operatives and a man wanted in connection with the killing of a North Carolina sheriff’s deputy in 2022.
Carrillo Fuentes is the brother of drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as “The Lord of The Skies,” who died in a botched plastic surgery in 1997.
Caro Quintero, meanwhile, has long been one of America’s top Mexican targets for extradition.
He had served 28 years in a Mexican prison but walked free after a court overturned his 40-year sentence for the 1985 kidnapping and killing of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. The murder marked a low point in U.S.-Mexico relations and was a focus of the popular Netflix series “Narcos: Mexico.”
Caro Quintero returned to drug trafficking and unleashed bloody turf battles in the northern Mexico border state of Sonora until he was arrested by Mexican forces in 2022.
The U.S., which at one point had offered a $20 million reward for Caro Quintero’s capture, immediately sought his extradition.
But the request remained in limbo as then-Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador severely curtailed his country’s cooperation with the U.S. to protest undercover American law enforcement operations targeting Mexican political and military officials.
Then, in January, a nonprofit group representing the Camarena family sent a letter to the Trump administration urging it to renew the extradition request.
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Follow Philip Marcelo at twitter.com/philmarcelo.
