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, which marked a low point in U.S.-Mexico relations and was dramatized in the popular Netflix series “Narcos: Mexico.”
Carrillo Fuentes is a former leader of the Juarez drug cartel.
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 was one of the founders of the Guadalajara cartel and one of the primary suppliers of heroin, cocaine and marijuana to the U.S. in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Caro Quintero had U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena kidnapped, tortured and killed in 1985 because he blamed the agent for a raid on a huge marijuana plantation the year prior.
Caro Quintero was captured in Costa Rica and had been 28 years into a 40-year sentence in Mexico when an appeals court overturned his verdict in 2013.
After his release, he 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 had added Caro Quintero to the FBI’s 10 most wanted list in 2018 with a $20 million reward, 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.
