Blog dedicated to reporting on Mexican drug cartels
on the border line between the US and Mexico
.

Showing posts with label ice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ice. Show all posts

Saturday, July 5, 2025

FGR Alleges Boxer Julio Cesar Chavez, Jr. Punished Cartel Members for "El Nini"

"Socalj" for Borderland Beat


According to Mexico's Attorney General's Office (FGR), recently arrested boxing figure Julio Cesar Chávez Jr. allegedly served as a "henchman" for Néstor Isidro Pérez Salas, known as "El Nini," who once was the head of security for Los Chapitos.

Through information allegedly obtained through legal wiretaps between 2021 and 2022; Chavez would beat cartel members who had made mistakes that put the organization at risk. Wiretaps of alleged drug traffickers and immigration records shared by US agencies were presented as evidence as well.

Friday, July 4, 2025

Boxer Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. Arrested by ICE Alleging Sinaloa Cartel Ties, Faces Arrest Warrant in Mexico

"Socalj" for Borderland Beat


The DHS announced that ICE has detained 'prominent Mexican boxer and criminal illegal alien Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., and is processing him for expedited removal from the United States.'

His arrest in Los Angeles was made as he had overstayed his B2 tourist visa that expired early last year.

Chavez is a Mexican citizen who has an active arrest warrant in Mexico for his involvement in organized crime and trafficking firearms, ammunition, and explosives. According to DHS, Chavez is believed to be an affiliate of the Sinaloa Cartel, a recently designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.

Thursday, May 8, 2025

Jesús "El Azteca" Salazar del Villar, Son of CIS/Los Salazar Leader "Muñeco" Detained by ICE in Miami, Florida

 "Socalj" for Borderland Beat


A third generation drug trafficker from the Salazar family of Sonora was among 1,100 other alleged illegal aliens detained by ICE with the help local law enforcement in a week long sweep across Florida, dubbed Operation Tidal Wave. The operation targeted supposed gang members and illegal alien smugglers among others who had illegally entered the country.

The grandson of long sanctioned trafficker Don Adán Salazar Zamorano, and son of "Muñeco" had been targeted by rival cartel factions as recently as February of this year. 

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Sinaloa cartel member arrested by ICE in Texas: sources. January 27, 2025

"Char" for Borderland Beat 

Thanks to "Nuffy" for sending the story

This information was posted by Greg Norman Alexis McAdams 
Author: Fox News
Date: January 27 2025
Time: 2:28 est


Sinaloa cartel member arrested by ICE in Texas: sources

Multiple rifles, pistols and thousands of rounds of ammo found during El Paso arrest


A member of the Sinaloa cartel was arrested in Texas by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) over the weekend and was found to be carrying three rifles, two pistols and more than 3,000 rounds of ammunition.

The individual — who is from Mexico — was taken into custody in El Paso, the sources added. Across the U.S., ICE operations this past weekend resulted in more than 1,000 arrests.

The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) said last year that the U.S. is facing the "most dangerous and deadly drug crisis" in its history with fentanyl and methamphetamine flowing across the border — and that the "Sinaloa and Jalisco Cartels are at the heart of this crisis." 

"They operate clandestine labs in Mexico where they manufacture these drugs and then utilize their vast distribution networks to transport the drugs into the United States," DEA Administrator Anne Milgram wrote in her agency’s annual National Drug Threat Assessment.

"The Sinaloa Cartel also uses border tunnels to cross drugs into the United States undetected," she added. "Most of the tunnels are not built by the cartel but are part of the border cities’ sewage and water systems." 

Last week, alleged Sinaloa cartel cell leader Octavio Leal-Hernandez, who "is believed responsible for trafficking large amounts of methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin and marijuana into the United States from Mexico," entered a not guilty plea during a federal court appearance following his extradition from Mexico, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of California said. 

The alleged Sinaloa member’s arrest in El Paso comes as reports are also emerging that the Trump administration is pushing ICE to increase the number of arrests per day from a few hundred to between at least 1,200 to 1,500 people.  

Citing four sources who spoke on condition of anonymity about a purported internal call with ICE officials on Saturday, The Washington Post first reported about the new objective, categorizing the 1,200 to 1,500 daily targets as "quotas," although a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told Fox News, "Goals is the correct phrasing." 


Source: FOXNEWS 

Saturday, December 21, 2024

2024 Saw the Most ICE Deportations in 10 Years

"Socalj" for Borderland Beat


Deportations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement soared to a 10-year high in fiscal year 2024 under the Biden administration, surpassing the Trump-era high recorded in 2019, according to a government report released Thursday.

ICE deported more than 271,000 unauthorized immigrants in fiscal year 2024, the highest tally recorded by the agency since fiscal year 2014, when the Obama administration carried out 316,000 deportations. In fiscal year 2019, ICE reported 267,000 deportations, the peak under the Trump administration. Fiscal years start in October and end in September.

While the incoming Trump administration has vowed to launch the largest deportation effort in American history next year, the statistics released by ICE show the Biden administration has already overseen a dramatic increase in deportations in its final year in office.

Monday, October 14, 2013

El Universal Reveals,Sandra Ávila Beltrán, a demanding, entitled Queen

Borderland Beat
During  Sandra Avila Beltran's fleeting stay in El Paso's immigration processing center, reports show "the Queen of the Pacific" is not a woman content with just anything. As laid back as she has appeared in early videos since her arrest, she seemed to act more entitled than others in the El Paso facility. Among her requests, Avila Beltran demanded guards bring her better clothes, "something more comfortable to wear" and make up. 

Even after the repatriation program had already provided her customary clothes, "the Queen of the Pacific" was able to mobilize FBI agents to go to the closest Walmart and bring her a pair of tight  skinny jeans, a white sweatshirt, a make up case with eyeliner and eyebrow accentuating pencils

Sandra was in El Paso prison "limbo" because she had served her formal sentence, and was waiting to be returned to her country. When extradited prisoners are deported, they pass through an ICE processing centre before stepping back on Mexican soil. She was waiting to board the plane that would send her to a Mexican prison, where her attire would be a  brown uniform.


During her stay at the immigration Center, U.S. and Mexican authorities exchanged a series of emails regarding how to meet the personal requirements of Sandra Ávila Beltrán, La Reina del Pacifico. UNIVERSAL had access to that correspondence.

Sandra Avila arrived at the ICE protection center on August 14.  After spending more than five years in Mexican prisons. A year earlier she had been extradited to the United States,.

She pleaded guilty to financially helping her boyfriend, Colombian Diego Espinoza Ramírez, El Tigre, one of the big drug traffickers who was arrested in 2009.

Her tour of US prisons began in July 2012, when she was transferred to a processing center in Louisiana, then to another in Miami,  and, finally, to El Paso, Texas, her last, where she stayed for six days.


Sandra Ávila Beltrán, as any other inmate, was given facility appropriate clothes, from  PRIM (procedure of repatriation to center)...but she demanded something else all together.  She wanted skinny,  tight jeans, a sweatshirt and a make-up kit.
So the emails began, Thomas Homan, Reginald Buck and Arturo Fierro, the three heads of the ICE sent the request to the FBI. Consulted emails read by UNIVERSAL show that agents of the Federal Bureau of investigation went to a Walmart and bought the Queen's requirements.

The Attorney General of the Republic (PGR) in a correspondence to their San Antonio office writes that Sandra Avila Beltran hates to be left alone, and perhaps, is terrified at finding herself in that situation. An email that came out of the correspondence from PGR with the San Antonio Office, said she had beaten her head intentionally in order to be moved from an isolation cell to another cell in "General population", and one night, she asked for sleeping pills to sleep. Doctors evaluated her and decided that they would give them to her. They brought her  two capsules purchased from a Walgreens pharmacy so she could finally relax. The next day she asked to speak to her lawyer. ICE authorities once again evaluated her request. They agreed that the staff would place calls under the condition that they would be recorded, with the exception of the calls to her lawyer.

Sunday, March 28, 2010

House of Death Informant Won't be Deported to Mexico

By Bill Conroy

Board of Immigration Appeals agrees that Mexican government agents or the "cartel" would likely torture and murder him.
The House of Death informant, Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, has won a huge victory in the U.S. Court system.

After some five years of battling in the immigration courts, twice being granted protection under the Convention Against Torture, and twice having that lower court ruling overruled by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) — and twice having that BIA decision reversed and remanded by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals — the BIA has finally ruled in Ramirez Peyro's favor.

From the BIA ruling, just released:

The DHS [Department of Homeland Security] has filed a Motion to Remand [back to the Immigration Court], seeking further fact-finding tailored to the Eighth Circuit's decision. We agree with the respondent that the [most recent Eighth Circuit's] decision forecloses such a remand, as it instructs the Board to apply the appropriate standard to the highlighted fact-findings. In light of the Eighth Circuit's affirmance of the Immigration Judge's fact-findings, we discern no error in the grant of torture protection. The respondent [Ramirez Peyro] has shown that he more likely than not would be tortured upon return to Mexico, either directly by government agents or indirectly by government agents turning him over to the cartel. [Emphasis added.]

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

House of Death Lingers

ICE burns informants across the country - House of Death lingers

San Diego County Political Buzz Examiner

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are quickly gaining attention within the war on drugs. This war is a deadly one fought day in and day out along the U.S. borders and well as cities that serve as distribution centers for the warring Mexican cartels.

Having confidential informants on the company payroll is a necessity to infiltrate the violent drug cartels and other organized crime syndicates. Some are double agents looking to elude authorities, others looking to work off a court conviction and others who may have got in over their heads and are looking for redemption.

Since ICE’s inception there have been eight agents investigated for improper informant handlings and more than 35 agents have been reported as being involved with questionable actions.

Documents and interviews have shown ICE handlers involvement with underreported debriefings, failure to document informant actions, drug use and improper sexual relations.

The El Paso ICE office sits in the heartland for drug cartels that carry the products across the Rio Grande River from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico where more than 14,000 murders have been committed since the renewed drug war in 2004.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Ice Role in the Investigation of Juarez Excecutions

ICE fired agent for not reporting U.S. informant's role in Juarez murders .
If you have not read the house of death, we highly recommend it.

By Bill Conroy

But informant claims ICE officials monitored call in which the murders were discussed.


El Paso, TX - If we are to believe the U.S. government, then justice was served in the House of Death homicides in February of this year when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) special agent Raul Bencomo was fired from his job.

But then, just because Lady Justice is blind doesn’t mean she’s stupid.

Bencomo was the ICE agent who controlled, or handled, the U.S. government informant implicated in the House of Death murders.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Former Anti-drug Chief's Reputation on Trial

Richard Padilla Cramer is accused of selling out to drug lords, helping them unmask informants and set up smuggling deals. Family and former colleagues say he's the last person they'd suspect.


Los Angeles Times

Nogales, Ariz. - Around here, the grim joke goes, most people work for the government or the mafias.

Or both.

Richard Padilla Cramer apparently had bested the temptations that come with the territory. During three decades in border law enforcement, he made the most of his pitch-perfect Spanish and talent for undercover work. He locked up corrupt officials, racked up drug busts and rose through the ranks. He retired after a coveted stint as a U.S. attache for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Mexico, the land he had left as a child.

At 56, the former anti-drug chief was an immigrant success story: a decorated Vietnam veteran; a youthful, solidly built grandfather whose three children served in the military and law enforcement.

So his arrest in September resounded in the close-knit law enforcement community like a bomb blast in the desert. The alleged corruption goes beyond the typical case of an inspector waving drug loads north.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Feds Link 15 to Mexican Drug Cartel

Indicted suspects distributed millions in coke: prosecutors

Chicago Suntimes


Fifteen suspected members of a Chicago distribution cell of a Mexican drug cartel were indicted Thursday for allegedly distributing thousands of kilograms of cocaine in the Chicago area and collecting millions of dollars.

The Chicago office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration seized 250 kilograms of cocaine and $8 million during an investigation that started in 2007 and focused on the Mexican drug-trafficking cartel La Familia Michoacana, according to the U.S. attorney's office.

The seizures were mostly in the suburbs, including Berwyn, Bolingbrook, Oak Lawn, Hickory Hills, Joliet and Justice.

A total of seven separate indictments were unsealed Thursday. All 15 suspects were charged with conspiracy to possess and distribute multi-kilogram quantities of cocaine.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

U.S. Gives Mexico Keys to Open Border and Amnesty

San Diego County Political Buzz Examiner

Congressman calls for investigation on Sutton and House of Death


Mexico’s culture of corruption is synonymous with the drug dealers, Federales as well as the government. It is no secret business south of the border is handled with a greasy handshake full of money, but what’s surprising to most Americans are the major trade deals cut to benefit our neighbor to the south.

Why has America bent over backwards to create free trade and open borders with such an uncooperative neighbor? What has Mexico given up for the sake of our benefit? Still thinking? It could take awhile.

Mexico is a country filled with natural resources. There is plenty of fertile land for crops, it lays claim to a massive amount of oil and contains thousands of miles of sandy beaches for tourists to frolic on. So why does this country, so close to the successes of its North American neighbor continue to stagnate in corruption and remain an oligarchy?

For the meantime America is the sole superpower. But unlike the past, American administrations have made mistakes and those blunders translated into some bad deals for the American people.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Are Our Crime Fighters Becoming 'Mexicanized'?

Source: by Judith Miller FOXNews
October 27, 2009


Chilling are the signs that one of the worst features of Mexico’s war on drugs is the reality of Mexican police on the take from drug lords but this is also becoming an American problem as well.

Corruption indictments and convictions of law enforcement linked to drug-trafficking organizations, known in police parlance as DTOs, are popping up in FBI press releases with disturbing frequency. Some experts disagree about how deep this rot runs. Some try to downplay the phenomenon, dismissing the law enforcement officials who have succumbed to bribes or intimidation from the drug cartels as a few bad apples.

Washington is taking no chances. In recent months, the FBI’s Criminal Division has created seven multiagency task forces and assigned 120 agents to investigate public corruption, drug-related and otherwise, in the Southwest border region.

While the FBI task forces focus mainly on corruption along the border, cartel-related activity has spread much deeper into the American heartland. Consider New Mexico’s San Juan County, some 450 miles north of the border, where the U.S. Attorney’s office has recently prosecuted a startling corruption case that may be a portent of things to come.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Informant puts out a hit on another informant

A man accused of hiring a U.S. Army soldier and another man to kill a Mexican drug cartel lieutenant who was cooperating with U.S. authorities was himself a government informant, police said Tuesday.


In this photo provided by the El Paso police department, Ruben Rodriguez Dorado is shown, Monday, Aug. 10, 2009.

Ruben Rodriguez Dorado hired Pfc. Michael Jackson Apodaca, 18, and Christopher Duran, 17, to help kill Jose Daniel Gonzalez Galeana, El Paso police said Tuesday in charging documents against them. The three men were arrested Monday and charged with capital murder in the May 15 slaying of Gonzalez, who was shot eight times outside his pricey El Paso home.

Rodriguez, like Gonzalez, was an informant working with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement service, El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said. He said a warrant has been issued for a fourth man who police say ordered and paid for the killing.