The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that a top assassin for the Sinaloa Drug Cartel in Mexico was extradited to the United States to face charges.
“We also allege El Nini was a part of the Sinaloa Cartel’s production and sale of fentanyl, including in the United States,” Mr. Garland said, referring to the synthetic opioid drug that has been responsible for hundreds of thousands of drug overdoses across the United States in recent years.
The attorney general said he’s “grateful” for Mexican officials’ efforts in taking him into custody.
“With this enforcement action, El Nini joins the growing list of cartel leaders and associates indicted in, and extradited to, the United States,” his statement reads. “The Justice Department will continue to go after the cartels responsible for flooding our communities with fentanyl and other drugs.”
Court records did not list an attorney or anyone else for Mr. Pérez Salas who might comment on his behalf.
The DOJ last year announced a slew of charges against cartel leaders, and the Drug Enforcement Administration posted a $3 million reward for the capture of Mr. Pérez Salas, 31. He was captured at a walled property in the Sinaloa state capital of Culiacan in November 2023.
President Joe Biden also issued a statement thanking Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador for extraditing him to the United States.
“Our governments will continue to work together to attack the fentanyl and synthetic drug epidemic that is killing so many people in our homelands and globally, and to bring to justice the criminals and organizations producing, smuggling, and selling these lethal poisons in both of our countries,” President Biden said.
Mr. Pérez Salas commanded a security team known as the Ninis, “a particularly violent group of security personnel for the Chapitos,” according to an indictment unsealed last year in New York.
“[They had] received military-style training in multiple areas of combat, including urban warfare, special weapons and tactics, and sniper proficiency,” the indictment reads.
Mr. Pérez Salas participated in the torture of a Mexican federal agent in 2017, authorities said, according to the indictment. His group also carried out gruesome acts of violence in a number of other cases, court documents say.
Earlier this month, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) released a report stating that there is now a “higher average purity in pills containing fentanyl” that’s being smuggled into the United States by Mexican cartels.
“In 2022, the average fentanyl pill contained 2.4 milligrams (mg) of fentanyl, ranging from a low of .03 mg to a high of 9 mg,” the agency wrote in its 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment, noting that a lethal dose is about 2 mg.
The two prominent cartels involved in the fentanyl trade—the Sinaloa and Jalisco criminal syndicates—are the entities responsible for bringing the drug into the United States. Those groups manufacture the drug with chemicals that are sourced from China, according to the DEA.
“These two Cartels are global criminal enterprises that have developed global supply chain networks. They rely on chemical companies and pill press companies in China to supply the precursor chemicals and pill presses needed to manufacture the drugs,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in a statement earlier this month.
