Mexico Extradites 37 Drug Traffickers to US Under Trump Pressure

Mexico — In what represents a new offering to try to calm the anger and desperation of President Donald Trump, just as he completed the first year of his second presidency, the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum sent 37 drug traffickers and cartel operators to the United States, who arrived yesterday in various American cities where they are wanted for various crimes.

This is the third time since she began her presidency that the doctor has resorted to sending high-risk capos and hitmen, with which she seeks to calm and attenuate pressure from the White House to deliver “concrete and verifiable results” against Mexican drug cartels; in total, the Mexican government has sent a total of 92 convicted drug traffickers who were serving sentences in maximum-security prisons: 29 in February 2025, 26 in August of that same year, and the 37 from yesterday; in all cases without it being clear under what legal framework these Mexican prisoners are handed over to American justice.

It seems that the Mexican government does not have the capacity to monitor and guarantee that these criminals sentenced by a judge serve their sentences in the country and prefers to get rid of the prisoners, in order to keep Trump happy and prevent him from continuing to threaten to intervene militarily in Mexican territory, given the dissatisfaction and annoyance of American authorities with the meager results of the fight against cartels in Mexican territory.

Because strangely, in its own official statement, which reports on the new shipment of Mexican criminals, which it justifies with the National Security Law, Secretary of Security Omar García Harfuch confirmed the delivery of prisoners, who yesterday arrived in various cities in the United States where they were claimed by that country’s justice, with the argument that they “represented a real security threat for our country” and that “they will no longer be able to generate more violence among Mexicans.”

How is it that already being in prison, several of them with several years of incarceration and sentences handed down by judges, those drug operators continued to be “a security threat” and continued “generating violence in the country”? Does the penitentiary system—especially that of maximum-security prisons like the one where the recently sent prisoners were located—not serve to prevent drug traffickers from continuing to operate in the criminal world or continue generating violence?

The reality is that, amid growing pressure from the White House for the President to deliver greater results in the fight against drug cartels or to accept armed help from the American military in that fight, what the doctor is doing is handing over as many drug traffickers and hitmen as are requested in the United States, but so far she continues not to hand over the politicians and officials who protect criminal activity in Mexico and who are also demanded from Washington.

To put it clearly and simply: if they are already handing over the drug traffickers that the United States wants, at least those who were already sentenced in prisons, when will they start handing over the narcopoliticians, several of them from the ruling party, whom the White House also wants and demands to be handed over? Because at some point the “human sacrifices” they make with already convicted prisoners, whom they do not give the opportunity to either opine or defend themselves from an extradition that has no legal basis, will no longer be enough for the irate Donald Trump, and they will have to start sending politicians and officials who protect, tolerate, and even form part of drug cartels.

It is more than clear that the presence of American military aircraft in Mexico, like the Hercules that landed in Toluca, is part of what the Sheinbaum government is ceding, in private and without informing Mexicans, because clearly that plane had to arrive crewed by American military personnel, and the President’s argument that it was a “training” program clearly does not hold up because the Mexican Air Force has its own planes to send or return Mexican military personnel who might have gone for training from the neighboring country.

That is the reality of what we will see increasingly in the coming months: the President who wraps herself in the flag and swears to be a defender of sovereignty will end up accepting, as she is already doing, that American military personnel, properly camouflaged in “cooperation and training” programs, will enter Mexican territory to plan, organize, and execute actions against drug cartels in which Mexican forces will go first, but Americans behind.

That already happened in the government of Felipe Calderón, with the presence of elite DEA agents and other agencies who came to participate in captures like that of Arturo Beltrán Leyva. And although they now deny it and appear outwardly with the double discourse of “defending sovereignty,” it is happening again in the government of President Sheinbaum, who has no other way out than to yield to American pressures.