On Wednesday attorney Jose Luis Gonzalez Meza stood outside of the Mexican Attorney General's office in Mexico City and hoisted a banner that read: "Mr. Trump, Deport the illegal and criminal Chapo Guzman."
Meza appears to be capitalizing on Trump’s promise to deport immigrants who are guilty of criminal behavior, and the lawyer maintains that his client’s due process rights were violated by Mexican prosecutors in January when authorities extradited him to the US.
According to Meza, "That means he is in the United States illegally…We are going to ask he be returned, because he is illegal and criminal!"
While on the campaign trail in 2015, Trump wrote on Twitter, "El Chapo and the Mexican drug cartels use the border unimpeded like it was a vacuum cleaner, sucking drugs and death right into the US."
Such statements were part of the billionaire’s virulent anti-immigrant platform, which also called for a wall to be built at the US’ southern border, to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants.
Guzman has pled ‘not guilty’ to charges including money laundering and racketeering.
The vacuum left by El Chapo’s absence has caused a bloody turf war between warring factions of his organization, the Sinaloa cartel. Daily murders in the Sinaloa state, which some call 'the cradle' of the country’s drug trade, have so terrified residents that schools often cancel classes and businesses close early.
USA Today quoted one mother saying, "It is a nightmare, but one we have lived many times before."
Before his latest capture, Guzman managed to escape imprisonment twice, once in 2001, in which he was smuggled out of the facility in a laundry basket, and again in 2015, when he escaped through a hole chiseled in a shower floor.
