McALLEN, Texas (Border Report) — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have sent back to Mexico a Mexican national wanted for kidnapping and organized crime in connection with the disappearance and abduction of 43 students in Mexico in 2014, the agency said Friday.
Ariel Nuñez Figueroa, 30, was transported Thursday from the Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe, Texas, to the Juarez-Lincoln Bridge Port of Entry in Laredo, Texas, and turned over to Mexican authorities, ICE says.
ICE fugitive operations officers located Nuñez after receiving information that he was potentially residing in the Houston area. They took him into custody on Sept. 9 after they say he illegally entered the United States on an unknown date and at an unknown location.
A U.S. immigration judge on Jan. 22 ordered him sent back to Mexico.
“For nearly eleven years, this foreign fugitive evaded authorities while the family and friends of those 43 students who were brutally murdered patiently awaited justice for their loved ones,” said ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Houston Field Office Director Bret Bradford. “Thanks to outstanding teamwork by ICE, Interpol and the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, we were able to successfully track him down and remove him to Mexico to face prosecution for his alleged crimes.”
On Sept. 26, 2014, 43 male students at the rural Ayotzinapa Teachers’ College, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, south of Mexico City, were attacked by security forces linked to a local drug gang, the Guerreros Unidos. The students had been stealing buses to transport themselves to a protest at the time they were kidnapped, authorities say.
They were mistaken for rival gang members, authorities initially said.
But in the ensuing years an investigation by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights says the students were caught up by stealing buses from heroin-running businesses known by local, state and federal Mexican authorities, as well as the Mexican army.
Investigators said members of the army were involved with the gang in smuggling heroin from the mountains of Guerrero on buses to the United States. Prosecutors said the decision to hide the truth was taken at the highest levels of government, the Associated Press reported in September on the tenth anniversary of their disappearance.
In January 2023, ICE also returned to Mexico another man to Mexican officials at an international boundary in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, in connection with the disappearance and abduction of the college students,
Nuñez now joins over 100 people in custody in connection with the disappearances, including over a dozen soldiers awaiting trial. Dozens of people have been charged however there have not been any convictions.
Sandra Sanchez can be reached at SSanchez@BorderReport.com.
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