FBI’s Ten Most Wanted: Five Caught Hiding in Mexico

Mexico City — Mexico has handed 178 people accused of drug trafficking, organized crime, homicide and money laundering over to the United States since early 2025, and five of the FBI’s ten most wanted fugitives were among them, President Claudia Sheinbaum said this week.

The transfers came in batches: 29 alleged kingpins in February 2025, including Rafael Caro Quintero; 26 more in August 2025; and 37 members of criminal groups in January 2026. The five fugitives from the FBI’s list were tracked down in Mexico, arrested and turned over to US authorities. “It is a collaboration, within the framework of our sovereignty,” Sheinbaum said.

Not all of them were high-profile cartel figures. The group included a Canadian Olympic athlete turned cocaine trafficker, a man who killed his wife less than 48 hours after their wedding, a fugitive who spent a decade on the run after killing a young woman, and a man accused of shooting two waitresses in a bar.

The Olympic snowboarder turned ‘king of cocaine’

“Let me tell you how bad Ryan Wedding is,” FBI Director Kash Patel said at a Jan. 23 press conference held as the former Canadian athlete was extradited from Mexico to Los Angeles. “He went from being an Olympic snowboarder to the biggest drug trafficker of the modern era. He is a Chapo Guzmán, a Pablo Escobar of our times.”

Accused of trafficking drugs for the Sinaloa Cartel, Wedding was considered an extremely violent criminal and a suspected mastermind of several killings abroad, including of US citizens. A precocious snowboarder, he joined Canada’s national team at 15 and at 21 competed in the parallel giant slalom at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah.

After the Games he enrolled at a university in the Vancouver metropolitan area, with his parents paying the bills. Drawn to the city’s nightlife and criminal underworld, he started out as a security guard at clubs and bars while setting up a large marijuana plantation. After authorities disrupted his operation, he jumped to the big leagues of the drug trade and styled himself the King of Cocaine — until Mexico arrested him.

Nearly a decade on the run

Alejandro Rosales Castillo, 27, was born in Arizona and was arrested in Pachuca, Hidalgo, in January. He had been on the FBI’s ten most wanted list since Oct. 24, 2017, accused of murdering Truc Quan Sandy Ly Le, 23, a resident of Charlotte, North Carolina, whose body was found on Aug. 17, 2016, in a wooded area of Cabarrus County. Surveillance video showed Castillo crossing into Mexico from Nogales, Arizona, on Aug. 16, 2016.

For almost a decade, special agents and officers from a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police task force spent countless hours chasing leads before finally establishing where he had hidden in recent years. He flew back to the United States on the same plane as Wedding.

The husband who killed his wife after the wedding

Arnoldo Jiménez, born in Texas, was a fugitive for more than 10 years until his arrest in Monterrey, Nuevo León, on Jan. 30, 2025. At the time he was the fourth most wanted man on the FBI’s list. Authorities accuse him of killing his wife, Estrella Carrera, 26, whose body was found in the bathtub of Jiménez’s apartment in Burbank, California, on May 13, 2012 — less than 48 hours after the couple married. She was still wearing the dress she had worn to the celebration.

A record arrest in Culiacán

Samuel Ramírez Jr., 33, a US citizen, was accused of the May 2023 double murder of Katie Duhnke and Jessyca Hohn, two waitresses at the Stars bar and restaurant, in an attack that also wounded a customer. He stayed on the run for three years while the FBI raised its reward for his capture from $25,000 to $1 million. He was placed on the ten most wanted list on March 13 and arrested 73 minutes later in Culiacán, Sinaloa — the fastest apprehension in the history of the list. The previous record belonged to Billie Austin Bryant, taken into custody in 1969 two hours after being added.

Francisco Javier Román-Bardales had been a fugitive for nearly three years after US federal prosecutors issued an arrest warrant against him in 2022. Prosecutors describe him as an alleged senior commander of Mara Salvatrucha 13, wanted for conspiracy to provide and conceal material support and resources to terrorists, narco-terrorism conspiracy, conspiracy to commit crime and migrant smuggling. Mexican authorities arrested him without incident in Veracruz on March 17, 2025. “This is an important victory both for our law enforcement partners and for a safer United States,” Patel said in a statement.