The Biden administration has released a notorious Mexican drug cartel leader from U.S. federal prison and is planning to hand him over to Mexico, a U.S. official told NBC News.
Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, who founded one of the most violent criminal organizations in Mexico’s history, was released from federal prison Friday, a Bureau of Prisons spokesman told NBC News — 14 years into a 25-year sentence on charges that included threatening U.S. federal agents. A former leader of the Gulf Cartel, he created the Zetas, a spin-off criminal gang filled with former military operatives that became known for engaging in torture, beheadings and indiscriminate killings. The spokesman said he was transferred to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In a statement, an ICE spokesperson said that Enforcement and Removal Operations officers from the agency “took custody of Osiel Cárdenas Guillén from the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, earlier today, and he remains in ICE custody pending a final disposition determination.”
A U.S. official who declined to be identified speaking about a sensitive matter said the Biden administration was planning to transfer Cárdenas Guillén on Monday to Mexico, where he is wanted on criminal charges.
Officials at the Justice Department and the White House did not immediately comment on the reasons behind the planned transfer.
Cárdenas Guillén was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison without parole in 2010. The Justice Department said at the time that he “oversaw a vast drug trafficking empire responsible for the importation of thousands of kilograms of cocaine and marijuana into the United States from Mexico” and that he “used violence and intimidation as a means of furthering the goals of his criminal enterprise.”
In May 1999, the Justice Department said in a 2010 news release, Cárdenas Guillén threatened to kill a sheriff’s deputy from Cameron County, Texas, who was working in an undercover capacity with ICE after the deputy refused to deliver a load of almost 1,000 kilos of marijuana.
In November 1999, the Justice Department said, he and a group of his men surrounded a Drug Enforcement Administration agent and an FBI agent in Mexico and threatened them at gunpoint, warning them not to return.
Cárdenas Guillén pleaded guilty to five felony offenses, including conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute controlled substances, conspiracy to launder monetary instruments, and threatening to assault and murder federal agents.
Experts say he ran the Gulf Cartel from 1997 until 2003, when he was captured by Mexican security forces and ultimately extradited to the U.S. He began assembling the Zetas in 1997 as a Gulf Cartel security force, but the group broke away after the U.S. took custody of him.
As Reuters reported, by 2012 the Zetas had grown to a force of 10,000 gunmen that took up a dominant position in the cross-border drug trade after committing some of the worst atrocities in the history of Mexico’s drug war.
The Zetas ultimately splintered in the mid-2010s.
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