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      Suspect in arson attack at Josh Shapiro’s residence faces domestic abuse charges

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      The man accused of setting fire to the Pennsylvania’s gubernatorial mansion early on Sunday morning while the governor, Josh Shapiro, and his family were asleep inside was due in court three days later on allegations that he assaulted his wife and stepson after trying to take his own life.Those records help provide a more complete picture of Cody Balmer, 38, of the Pennsylvania capital of Harrisburg, who was denied bail on Monday on charges of attempted murder, terrorism, aggravated assault and aggravated arson in connection with the governor’s mansion blaze.Balmer, who stuck his tongue out at news media reporters as he was being led into court on Monday, had been due in court on Wednesday on charges related to domestic abuse allegations.According to a police affidavit from January 2023, police were dispatched to Balmer’s residence after a child called about domestic abuse. Balmer allegedly told officers responding to the call that he had taken a full bottle of pills in a suicide attempt.That escalated into an argument between Balmer and his wife, with Balmer allegedly assaulting both her and his stepson, according to court records reviewed by the Hill.USA Today further reported that Balmer and his wife finalized their divorce in February 2025, and he was subject to a protection from abuse order.Balmer’s mother spoke to the Associated Press and said her son grappled with mental health issues. She reportedly said she had made calls in recent days about those issues, but “nobody would help”.Balmer’s bail denial on Monday occurred after prosecutors said he told police that he planned to beat Shapiro with a hammer – and used Molotov cocktails made from beer bottles filled with gasoline to start the fire. Security footage from the residence evidently shows a man who was carrying a bag and wearing a black jacket – as well as black boots – breaking a window into the home and tossing a homemade molotov cocktail inside.Balmer surrendered to the Pennsylvania state police on Sunday and admitted to “harboring hatred toward Governor Shapiro”, authorities alleged. Asked during a police interview what he would have done had Shapiro found him inside the residence, “he advised he would have beaten him with his hammer”, said the probable cause affidavit justifying Balmer’s arrest.In court on Monday, county judge Dale Klein asked Balmer if he took any medication for mental illness. Balmer responded that he was not mentally ill and he had not taken medication, adding that it had “led … to different types of behavior” in the past.Klein said he had denied Balmer bail because he could be a danger to the community and himself.The arson attack attributed to Balmer followed a series of other attacks targeting US political figures.Those include against Paul Pelosi, the husband of congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, and two separate assassination attempts on Donald Trump.Supporters of Trump – whose first presidency ended in defeat after the 2020 election before he then won back the Oval Office in November – violently attacked the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. And on 8 April, a California man pleaded guilty to trying to kill US supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022.ABC News reported that social media pages connected to Balmer appear to show both critiques of Trump and his presidential predecessor Joe Biden.Balmer seemed to reject Biden’s 2020 presidential win over Trump and criticized him on Facebook during his term. Posts included a picture with the text “Joe Biden owes me 2 grand” and another that said: “Biden supporters shouldn’t exist.”In 2020, he posted a meme that argued that both Democrats and Republicans “would rather argue with other than work to solve the problems we are facing”.After the alleged arson attack, Shapiro said: “This kind of violence is not OK.“I don’t give a damn if it’s coming from one particular side or the other, directed at one particular party or another, or one particular person or another. It is not OK, and it has to stop.”Authorities have not disclosed the precise motive for the alleged arsonist. Posting on X, Biden said he and former first lady Jill Biden were “disgusted by the attack on the Shapiro family and their home” – while noting it occurred during the first night of the major Jewish holiday of Passover.“There is no place for this type of evil in America, and as I told the governor yesterday, we must stand united against hatred and violence,” Biden said.Trump commented from the White House on Monday that Balmer was “probably just a wack job”.“The attacker was not a fan of Trump,” the president said. “I understand, just from what I read and from what I’ve been told, the attacker basically wasn’t a fan of anybody.“Certainly a thing like that cannot be allowed to happen.”Other entries on Balmer’s rap sheet include several additional violations in Pennsylvania. Among them: a guilty plea to forgery in 2016, for which he was sentenced to 18 months of probation.ABC also reported that Balmer had been dealing with “protracted” foreclosure proceedings. The outlet added that Balmer posted memes urging people to “become ungovernable” and reposted an artwork of a molotov cocktail in 2022 with the slogan: “Be the light you want to see in the world.” More

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      Pennsylvania governor’s residence set ablaze in ‘act of arson’, police say

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      Police say a person is in custody after a suspected arson fire at the Pennsylvania governor’s mansionwhere Josh Shapiro and his family were evacuated after someone set fire to the building.No one was injured in the blaze and the fire was extinguished, authorities said.Pennsylvania state police Col. Christopher Paris identified the man in custody as Cody Balmer, 38, of Harrisburg. Paris emphasized at a Sunday afternoon news conference that the investigation is continuing.Francis Chardo, the Dauphin county district attorney, said that forthcoming charges will include attempted murder, terrorism, attempted arson and aggravated assault.Authorities said the suspect hopped over a fence surrounding the property and forcibly entered the residence before setting it on fire.The fire broke out overnight on the first night of the Jewish holiday of Passover, which Shapiro and his family had celebrated at the governor’s official residence in the state capital of Harrisburg. State police said in a statement that, while the investigation was ongoing, they were “prepared to say at this time that this was an act of arson”.In a statement, Shapiro, viewed as a potential White House contender for the Democratic party in 2028, said he and his family woke up at about 2am to bangs on the door from the Pennsylvania state police after the fire broke out.The Harrisburg bureau of fire was called to the residence and, while they worked to put out the fire, police evacuated Shapiro and his family from the residence safely, the governor said.Authorities said the fire caused a “significant amount of damage” to a portion of the residence before the blaze was extinguished.“Thank God no one was injured and the fire was extinguished,” Shapiro said in a statement.Shapiro and his family had been in a different part of the residence, police said.There was a police presence on Sunday as yellow tape cordoned off an alleyway, investigators observed the damage inside and an officer led a dog outside an iron security fence before investigators sawed off a section from the top of the security fence on the residence’s south side. They wrapped it in heavy black plastic and took it away in a vehicle.Shapiro splits his time between the mansion that has housed governors since it was built in the 1960s and a home in Abington, about 100 miles (160km) east. He posted a photograph on social media on Saturday of the family’s Passover Seder table at the residence.Republican Mark Schweiker, the former Pennsylvania governor, called the attack a “despicable act of cowardice” and said he hoped Pennsylvanians joined he and his wife in keeping the Shapiros in their prayers.Republican Tom Ridge, another former governor, said images of the damage to the residence where he lived for eight years with his family were “heartbreaking” and said the attack on the official residence was shocking.“Whoever is responsible for this attack – to both the Shapiro family and our Commonwealth – must be held to account,” Ridge said.State police said they were leading a multiagency investigation into the fire. More

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      Trump pardons January 6 loyalist and commutes jail time of Hunter Biden associate

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      Donald Trump has issued a full pardon to another person involved with the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol and commuted the sentence of a former business associate of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s scandal-plagued son.Thomas Caldwell, 69, of Berryville, Virginia, has been granted a pardon for his alleged role in the Capitol attack following a series of pardons Trump has given out to those involved with or present during the events on 6 January 2021.Caldwell, a navy veteran, stood trial earlier this year alongside leaders of the Oath Keepers militia. He was acquitted by a jury in Washington’s federal court of seditious conspiracy and two other conspiracy offenses, but was sentenced in January to time served with no probation.At the time, the sentencing was thought to be the ending of a years-long saga for one of the first defendants charged in the government’s largest January 6 case.The Oath Keepers, founded in 2009, is a far-right anti-government extremist militia group. Eleven members of the organization, including its founder and leader, Stewart Rhodes, were indicted for seditious conspiracy for their role in the insurrection.The US Department of Justice previously described the actions of the Oath Keepers militia as “terrorism”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDuring the trial, prosecutors said that Caldwell helped coordinate “quick reaction force” teams that prosecutors allege the Oath Keepers stationed outside the capital city, with the purpose of getting weapons into the hands of extremists if they were needed. The weapons were never deployed, and lawyers for the Oath Keepers said they were only there for defensive purposes in case of attacks from leftwing activists.On the day of his inauguration, Trump issued “full, complete and unconditional” presidential pardons for about 1,500 people who were involved in the January 6 attack on Congress, including some convicted of violent acts.Trump has also issued a commuted sentence for Jason Galanis, who had been serving a 14-year federal prison sentence after pleading guilty to a multimillion-dollar scheme involving fraudulent tribal bonds. He is the second former business partner of Hunter Biden to be granted clemency. More

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      US government cuts imperil life-saving gun violence research. As doctors, we fear for the future | Jessica Beard and Elinore Kaufman

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      We don’t have a reliable count for how many people have been shot in the United States this year. We don’t know how many were shot last year either. Or the year before that. These most basic numbers should inform our gun violence prevention efforts. But they don’t exist.This is the void of information that is created and persists when critical research is suppressed.For those struggling to keep up with our erratic news cycle, what we saw unfold in February at the National Institutes of Health – with communication blackouts, funding freezes and cuts that will obstruct life-saving research efforts – may feel inconsequential. But make no mistake: the peril hanging over our country’s research efforts remains, and we in the gun violence research community are bracing ourselves for a dangerous situation we know all too well.Our field has already experienced the devastating consequences of defunding and censorship. The story of how we got here begins in the 1990s.Buoyed by the success of a public health approach in curbing traffic fatalities, researchers were hopeful that the same approach – track the problem, identify and test solutions, share findings and implement what works – could be used to prevent gun violence. The researchers got to work, and that work advanced rapidly. But some of the findings that emerged – in particular, that owning a gun increased one’s risk of being murdered in one’s home – angered the powerful gun lobby.The late congressman Jay Dickey, who served as the National Rifle Association’s point person in Congress, took up the cause, introducing a provision into an omnibus bill that called for no federal funds to be used “to advocate or promote gun control”. The Dickey Amendment, passed in 1996, did not ban gun violence research outright, but research dollars within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were reallocated, and the search for solutions was reduced to a trickle.Sixteen years later, days after the Aurora theatre mass shooting, Dickey co-authored an op-ed reversing his stance. In it, he urged more scientific research, not less, and stated the truly “senseless” part of gun violence “is to decry these deaths as senseless when the tools exist to understand causes and to prevent these deadly effects”.Six months later – and one month after Sandy Hook – then president Barack Obama directed the CDC to “conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it”.But even with the public outcry that followed these mass killings, even with Dickey’s reversal, even with the president’s directive, the pause in research continued.In 2018, on the heels of yet another high-profile mass shooting – this one at a high school in Parkland, Florida – then president Donald Trump signed a bill clarifying that the Dickey Amendment did not actually prohibit gun violence research.But it wasn’t until 2021 that these policy changes would lead to the first dedicated federal funding for gun violence research in 25 years. By this time, we lacked the most fundamental tools to support gun violence research: expertise, mentorship, basic data, surveillance and the infrastructure to implement that critical public health approach to address and prevent gun violence.The year the funding returned, 2021, was also the deadliest on record for gun violence in the US: 48,830 lives lost to guns over the span of just 12 months. As trauma surgeons in Philadelphia, we witnessed this heartbreaking moment in our country’s history firsthand. We were bombarded by the dying and the desperate and the so many who were harmed by this disease of gun violence – a disease our government had, for 25 years, not deemed consequential enough to cure.Because the CDC tracks gun deaths but not the total number of people with non-fatal firearm injuries each year, we don’t know exactly how many people were shot during that 25-year funding pause. But we do know that hundreds of thousands of lives were forever altered or lost. And the research community could not ask why, could not ask how, could not find the answers we so desperately needed then and so desperately need now.The suffering of our patients motivates us to do research to prevent gun violence – and the suffering we witnessed during the pandemic-related surge of gun violence very nearly brought us to our knees. We want research to stop our patients from being shot. We want research to stop them from dying.The moment we find ourselves in today is especially painful because with renewed research efforts over the last few years, we had finally begun to untangle the root causes of gun violence and identify and test solutions. We had also been making progress with gun violence prevention policy nationally.Three years ago, with bipartisan support, Congress passed the first major federal legislation addressing gun violence prevention in decades. Two years ago, we saw the creation of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which implemented an all-of-government approach to tackling gun violence. And last year brought the landmark US surgeon general’s advisory, which deemed gun violence a public health crisis that demands attention.What’s more, we’ve seen the rate of gun violence decreasing. Here in Philadelphia, the total number of shooting victims over the last year is down about a third from the same point just before the pandemic.We had so much reason for hope, until January, when the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention was shuttered. Then in February, there were broad attacks on scientific research. And this month, the surgeon general’s gun violence advisory disappeared from the government’s website.We loathe to think of what the next news cycle may bring.We were among the first to document the rise in violence in 2020, anticipating the catastrophic years that would follow. Now, as we watch a cascade of executive orders threaten public health and public safety, as we see fears of economic disempowerment sowed across this country, we trauma surgeons are bracing ourselves for another surge in gun violence.We should be filled with hope, not fear.But here we are, fearing for our patients, for our communities and for the countless many who will die from this preventable and treatable disease of gun violence because the research that could have saved them was defunded and censored yet again.No matter your political allegiances, no matter your life experiences, no matter your job, your income, your religion, your age or your race, we must stand firmly, together, in support of research that will help us understand this disease that causes suffering for so many – and one day, find its cure.

      Dr Jessica Beard is the director of research for the Philadelphia Center for Gun Violence Reporting, a Stoneleigh Foundation Fellow, and director of trauma research at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University; Dr Elinore Kaufman is the research director for the division of trauma at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the Pennsylvania Trauma System Foundation Research Committee. Both are trauma surgeons in Philadelphia. More

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      Trump’s January 6 pardon doesn’t cover FBI murder plot conviction, judge rules

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      A man pardoned by Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection who also was convicted of plotting to kill federal agents investigating him is still legally liable for the plot, a judge ruled on Monday.Edward Kelley was pardoned by Trump for his role in the US Capitol riot, but he remained in prison on separate charges. The Tennessee man had developed a “kill list” of FBI agents who had investigated him for the Capitol attack.On his first day in office, Trump issued pardons and commutations to more than 1,500 people convicted for their roles in the January 6 insurrection, including militia members. But other rioters had separate charges that the courts and the justice department are working through.In Kelley’s case, the justice department argued he was not pardoned by Trump for the plotting charges. In Monday’s ruling, the US district judge Thomas Varlan deniedKelley’s motion to dismiss the charges, saying the case “involved separate offense conduct that was physically, temporally, and otherwise unrelated to defendant’s conduct in the D.C. Case and/or events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021”.The plotting charges stemmed from “entirely independent criminal conduct in Tennessee, in late 2022, more than 500 miles away from the Capitol”, Varlan wrote.Prosecutors allege Kelley – who was the fourth rioter to enter the Capitol on January 6 and was carrying a gun – was developing a plan to murder law enforcement agents. They produced recordings of his planning activity, including Kelley giving instructions to “start it”, “attack”, and “take out their office”.“Every hit has to hurt,” he allegedly says in one recording.A cooperating defendant testified against Kelley and said he and Kelley were planning to attack the FBI field office in Knoxville with car bombs and drones, and were strategizing over how to assassinate FBI employees at their homes or in public places.While most participants in the events of January 6 who were in prison have been released, some are still inside because of other charges, both related and unrelated to the Capitol riot. It is not yet clear what will happen to some rioters who were charged with gun crimes during searches of their homes when authorities were serving January 6 warrants. More

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      US justice department to review conviction of former election clerk

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      Donald Trump’s justice department said it will review the Colorado conviction of former election clerk Tina Peters, who received a nine-year prison sentence for her role in a voting system data-breach scheme as part of an unsuccessful quest to find voter fraud in 2021.Yaakov Roth, an acting assistant attorney general, wrote in a court filing on Monday that the Department of Justice was “reviewing cases across the nation for abuses of the criminal justice process”, including Peters’.“This review will include an evaluation of the state of Colorado’s prosecution of Ms Peters and, in particular, whether the case was ‘oriented more toward inflicting political pain than toward pursuing actual justice or legitimate governmental objectives’,” Roth wrote, echoing the language in a Trump executive order on “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government”.Peters, then the clerk of Mesa county, allowed a man affiliated with the pillow salesman and election denier Mike Lindell to misuse a security card to access the Mesa county election system. Lindell posted about the DoJ’s statement on his fundraising website, telling donors their assistance had “contributed to positive developments at the Department of Justice that give us hope that the wheels are in motion for the early release of Tina Peters”.Jurors found Peters guilty in August, convicting her on seven counts related to misconduct, conspiracy and impersonation, four of which were felony charges. Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced her in October to nine years in prison, calling Peters “as defiant as a defendant that the court has ever seen” and said he believed Peters would do it all over again if she could.Peters had argued for probation and is appealing against her conviction.The DoJ’s statement of interest notes that Peters’ physical and mental health have deteriorated while she’s been in prison, and that “reasonable concerns have been raised” about her case, including the “exceptionally lengthy sentence” the court imposed and the denial of bail for Peters while her appeal plays out. Her appeal deserves “prompt and careful consideration” by the court, Roth wrote.Dan Rubinstein, the Mesa County district attorney, said in a statement that “nothing about the prosecution of Ms Peters was politically motivated”.“In one of the most conservative jurisdictions in Colorado, the same voters who elected Ms Peters, also elected the Republican district attorney who handled the prosecution, and the all-Republican board of county commissioners who unanimously requested the prosecution of Ms Peters on behalf of the citizens she victimized,” Rubinstein said.“Ms Peters was indicted by a grand jury of her peers, and convicted at trial by the jury of her peers that she selected.”Peters has become a cause célèbre on the right, with some Republicans promoting a “free Tina Peters” movement. A small rally in Fort Collins, Colorado, over the weekend called attention to Peters’ appeal, and protesters there insisted she was innocent and had discovered election fraud.Trump cannot pardon Peters because she was convicted of state crimes, not federal ones. Some Colorado Republicans have suggested Trump should withhold federal funds from the state until the Democratic governor Jared Polis agrees to pardon Peters, Colorado’s 9News reports. More

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      Pardoned January 6 rioter said ‘I’m shooting myself’ before Indiana deputy fatally shot him

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      The pardoned US Capitol attacker who was shot to death by an Indiana sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop in January had first told the officer: “I’m shooting myself,” before attempting to retrieve a gun from his car, according to officials as well as newly released video of the encounter.Matthew Huttle’s killing by the deputy – whose body-worn and dashboard cameras captured video of the traffic stop – was “legally justified” and would not lead to any criminal charges, prosecutors said in a statement published on Thursday.Huttle, 42, had traveled to Washington DC with his uncle, Dale, when a mob of Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 in a desperate attempt to prolong his presidency despite his losing the 2020 White House election to Joe Biden, according to federal prosecutors. Matthew Huttle entered the Capitol for about 15 minutes – recording it on video – and agreed to a plea deal that resulted in about six months of prison for him.Dale Huttle, meanwhile, received 30 months in prison after he pleaded guilty to using a long flagpole to jab a police officer protecting the Capitol.The Huttles were among more than 1,500 Capitol attackers who were pardoned by Trump on 20 January, his first day back in the Oval Office after retaking it by defeating Kamala Harris in November’s election.Six days after Trump’s mass clemency, a deputy stopped Matthew Huttle as he drove at 70mph (113km/h) in a 55mph zone near the line between the north-west Indiana counties of Jasper and Pulaski. The deputy told Huttle he would be arrested for being a habitual traffic offender, which prompted the motorist – who had been ordered out of his car – to say: “No, I can’t go to jail for this.”Huttle later sprinted for his car as the deputy shouted: “No, don’t you do it buddy! No, no, no, no, no!”The deputy and Huttle struggled in the latter man’s car. Video captured Huttle shouting: “I’m shooting myself”, and investigators said he “reached in a manner consistent with retrieving a weapon”.Prosecutors said the deputy fired multiple shots at Huttle – mortally wounding him – after seeing him raise a gun. Investigators subsequently found a loaded 9mm pistol as well as additional ammunition inside Huttle’s car, prosecutors also said.“Based on the evidence … the deputy’s actions were legally justified under Indiana law,” said the statement signed by prosecutor Chris Vawter, which called Huttle’s killing a case of self-defense. “This investigation is now closed, and no charges will be filed.”Attempts to contact an attorney for Huttle were not immediately successful. In court filings pertaining to the case against him in the January 6 attack, Huttle’s attorney, Andrew Hemmer, claimed that his client was “not a believer in any political cause” and only went to the Capitol that day “because he thought it would be a historic moment”.“He had nothing better to do after getting out of jail” in connection with a driving violation, Hemmer wrote of Huttle.Those who criticized the clemency that Trump granted the Capitol attackers included the US’s largest police union, which had endorsed him over Harris, a former prosecutor.The Fraternal Order of Police said in a joint statement with the International Association of Chiefs of Police: “Crimes against law enforcement are not just attacks on individuals or public safety – they are attacks on society and undermine the rule of law.”Huttle was one of multiple pardoned Capitol attackers who have since landed in news headlines over other legal issues.That group included a man left facing unresolved charges in Texas of having solicited a minor.Another pardoned January 6 participant was rearrested on federal gun charges. And yet another was handed a 10-year prison sentence for killing a woman in a 2022 drunk-driving crash, according to authorities. More

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      Mexican drug lord pleads not guilty to killing of DEA agent after US extradition

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      After years as one of US authorities’ most wanted men, the Mexican drug cartel boss Rafael Caro Quintero was brought into a New York courtroom on Friday to answer charges that include orchestrating the 1985 killing of a US federal agent.Caro Quintero pleaded not guilty to running a continuing criminal enterprise. Separately, so did Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, the leader of another cartel. Carrillo is accused of arranging kidnappings and killings in Mexico but not accused of involvement in the death of the DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena.Caro Quintero, Carrillo Fuentes and 27 other Mexican prisoners were sent on Thursday to eight US cities, a move that came as Mexico sought to stave off the Donald Trump administration’s threat of imposing 25% tariffs on all Mexican imports next week.For Camarena’s family, the arraignments marked a long-awaited moment.“For 14,631 days, we held on to hope – hope that this moment would come. Hope that we would live to see accountability. And now, that hope has finally turned into reality,” the family said in a statement thanking Trump and everyone who has worked on the case over the years.The White House, in a statement Friday ahead of the arraignments, called Caro Quintero “one of the most evil cartel bosses in the world”.In exchange for delaying tariffs, Trump had insisted that Mexico crack down on cartels, illegal immigration and fentanyl production.But members of Mexico’s security cabinet on Friday framed the transfer of the 29 prisoners as a national security decision.“It is not a commitment to the United States. It is a commitment to ourselves,” said Mexican attorney general Alejandro Gertz Manero. “The problem of drug trafficking and organized crime has been a true tragedy for our country.”Mexican security secretary Omar García Harfuch said the people sent into US custody were “generators of violence” in Mexico and represented a security threat to both countries.Caro Quintero had long been one of America’s top Mexican targets for extradition.He was one of the founders of a Guadalajara-based cartel and one of the primary suppliers of heroin, cocaine and marijuana to the US in the late 1970s and 1980s.Caro Quintero had Camarena kidnapped, tortured and killed in 1985 because he blamed the agent for a raid on a huge marijuana plantation the year prior, authorities said. Camarena’s killing marked a low point in US-Mexico relations and was dramatized in the popular Netflix series Narcos: Mexico.Caro Quintero had been 28 years into a 40-year sentence in Mexico when an appeals court overturned his verdict in 2013.After his release, he returned to drug trafficking and unleashed bloody turf battles in the northern Mexico border state of Sonora until he was arrested by Mexican forces in 2022, authorities said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCaro Quintero told the Spanish newspaper El País in 2018 that he “never went back to drugs”.“Whoever’s saying it is a liar!” he said, according to the newspaper. “I’m not working any more, let’s be clear about that! I was a drug trafficker 23 years ago, and now I’m not, and I won’t ever be again.”The US, which had added Caro Quintero to the FBI’s 10 most wanted list in 2018 with a $20m reward, sought his extradition immediately after his 2022 arrest. It happened days after the Mexican and US presidents at the time, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Joe Biden respectively, met at the White House.But the request remained in limbo as López Obrador severely curtailed his country’s cooperation with the US to protest undercover American law enforcement operations targeting Mexican political and military officials.Then, in January, a non-profit group representing the Camarena family sent a letter to the new Trump administration urging it to renew the extradition request.Carrillo Fuentes is the brother of the drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as “The Lord of The Skies”, who died in a botched plastic surgery in 1997. Carrillo Fuentes, who was known as “The Viceroy”, continued his brother’s business of smuggling drugs over the border until his arrest in 2014.He was sentenced in 2021 to 28 years in prison for organized crime, money laundering and weapons violations.Among the others extradited are leading members of Mexican organized crime groups recently designated by the Republican administration as “foreign terrorist organizations”.They include cartel leaders, security chiefs from both factions of the Sinaloa cartel, cartel finance operatives and a man wanted in connection with the killing of a North Carolina sheriff’s deputy in 2022. More