MEXICO CITY — Mexico has sent an additional 37 suspected cartel operatives to the United States to face justice, the country’s top law enforcement official said Tuesday, in what appears to be the latest bid to discourage President Trump from ordering a U.S. military strike against drug-trafficking targets in Mexico.
The 37 suspects were dispatched in seven Mexican military flights to various U.S. cities, including Washington, Houston, New York, San Antonio and San Diego, Omar García Harfuch, the Mexican security minister, said in social media posts on X.
It is the third such transfer of “high impact criminals” from Mexico to the United States since Trump assumed the presidency a year ago vowing to crack down on Mexican cartels. The transfers include a total of 92 prisoners now in U.S. custody, Mexico says.
While García Harfuch stressed that the expelled suspects “can no longer generate violence in our country,” the transfers are widely viewed here as an effort to appease Trump and head off his oft-stated desire to send U.S. military assets after cartels in Mexico.
The latest handover was clearly an attempt by the Mexican government to ease “pressure from Donald Trump on Mexico to allow incursions of elite U.S. troops to launch ground attacks on drug laboratories,” said David Saucedo, a Mexican security consultant.
“For months Mexico has been managing the conflict, gradually addressing the demands of the United States government,” Saucedo said. “This is precisely what they are doing now, under American pressure, making small concessions and not fully meeting the goals that Washington had set on the issue.”
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has been engaged in a year-long effort to convince the Trump administration that Mexican authorities are targeting cartels as never before. Her daily briefings include regular updates on arrests of suspects, destruction of drug labs, disruption of money-laundering operations and other actions.
Sheinbaum has turned down repeated requests from Trump to dispatch U.S. troops to help fight cartels in Mexico.
The notion of U.S. military intervention in Mexico is highly controversial in a country that has weathered various historic U.S. land grabs and invasions, including the 19th century Mexican-American War, which resulted in Mexico losing half of its national territory, including California.
However, Trump, while praising Sheinbaum, has insisted on numerous occasions that Mexico is “controlled” by the cartels and that U.S. military action was probably needed to turn the tide.
Many in Mexico fear that Trump will be further emboldened to deploy the U.S. military south of the border following the successful U.S. operation in Caracas on Jan. 3 to capture then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, whom U.S. prosecutors accuse of drug trafficking.
The Maduro arrest followed months in which U.S. forces destroyed suspected drug-ferrying vessels, killing the crew members, in both the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Trump depicted the operation as a likely prelude to “land” strikes on drug traffickers.
In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump said: “We’ve knocked out 97% of the drugs coming in by water and we are going to start now hitting land, with regard to the cartels.”
Mexico, unlike Venezuela, is a major source of U.S.-bound illicit drugs.
Mexico is a both major transshipment point for South American cocaine and a production hub for fentanyl, the synthetic opioid blamed for tens of thousands of overdose deaths in the United States. Illicit fentanyl in the United States is produced in Mexico and smuggled across the border, authorities say.
Trump has designated fentanyl and related precursor chemicals as weapons of mass destruction, a classification that many view as increasing the likelihood of U.S. strikes on Mexican trafficking targets.
The Trump administration had already designated various Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.
The latest group of 37 detainees includes suspects affiliated with various cartels, including the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation syndicates — Mexico’s two largest criminal organizations — along with the Northeast cartel, which operates along the Texas-Mexico border, and the Beltrán Leyva gang.
These detainees include both suspects charged in the United States and others sought by U.S. authorities, but with no official charges pending against them, Saucedo said.
The Justice Department has agreed not to seek the death penalty for any of those expelled to the United States, García Harfuch says. Mexico has abolished capital punishment and routinely seeks U.S. guarantees that any suspects extradited or otherwise sent to the United States will not face the death penalty.
While all 37 people expelled are wanted in the United States, none are especially well-known names beyond law enforcement circles.
The most notorious of the 92 cartel operatives expelled north in the past year was the legendary drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, wanted in connection with 1985 slaying of U.S. Drug Enforcement Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.
The transfer of the 37 suspects was announced on the one-year anniversary of Trump’s assuming office, a date that has prompted a series of reviews in the Mexican media looking back on a bumpy year in U.S.-Mexican relations.
Since Trump took office, Sheinbaum has fought a kind of two-front battle: She has sought to head off any U.S. military incursion against cartels even as her government has been engaged in a bureaucratic effort to thwart Trump’s plans to slap more tariffs on Mexican imports.
However, there was no indication that the Jan. 20 timing announcing the transfer of 37 drug operatives was any more than a coincidence.
Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.
