ICE, September 11, 2017

Deportation officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) removed a top Mexican drug kingpin Sept. 1.

Esteban Rodriguez-Olivera, 52, departed from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York and arrived in Mexico without incident.

He was transferred to ERO New York custody Aug. 28 from the Federal Bureau of Prisons Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where he was serving a sentence for a felony cocaine conviction.

Rodriguez-Olivera, one of the leaders of the “Los Gueros” international drug organization, pleaded guilty in November 2012 to charges of conspiring to import illegal narcotics into the United States.

He was sentenced Aug. 24 to 60 months incarceration, and credited for time served, by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, the Los Gueros drug cartel is estimated to have imported more than 100,000 kilograms of cocaine into the United States from 1996 to 2008. It smuggled cocaine from Colombia to the Gulf of Mexico. From there, it routed the cocaine through Mexico to Texas before delivering it to various parts of the United States, including New York.

Rodriguez-Olivera and his brother Luis Rodriguez-Olivera were both designated as ‘kingpins’ in 2007 by the U.S. Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force.