The Honduras government said that it had started the extradiation process to the United States an undocumented immigrant who was accused of having killed an Iowa young woman in 2016, a case that President Trump has made a focal point in his first presidential campaign.
The decision to respond to an American demand to extradite Eswin Mejia comes as Honduras and other countries in Latin America sought to demonstrate their desire to cooperate with the Trump administration.
Mr. Mejia would have led drunk when he crashed into Sarah Root’s vehicle at a stop fire in Omaha in January 2016. He was detained and charged, but fled the country after being released on bail.
He was arrested Thursday in a city about 125 miles northwest of the Honduurian capital of Tegucigalpa, where he was taken and appeared on Friday before a judge of the Supreme Court, according to Hondurian officials.
Enrique Reina, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Honduras, said in an interview that the Supreme Court had ordered Mr. Mejia’s arrest and that a judge would determine whether to grant an extradition by the United States.
“This must go through a process,” said Reina, adding that the Honduran government had received more than 50 extradition requests in the United States since President Xiomara Castro took office in 2022.
The White House did not respond to requests for comments. The State Department referred a request for comments to the Ministry of Justice, which did not respond.
The Trump administration has put pressure on the nations of the region to return the individuals sought by American authorities to the United States, seeking early victories on illegal immigration and crime issues at the heart of Mr. Trump’s political mark.
On the same day of the arrest of Mr. Mejia, Mexico sent 29 high agents of the cartel sought by the American authorities. The group includes Rafael Caro Quintero, a founding member of the Sinaloa drug cartel, who was found guilty of Mexico for having certified the murder in 1985 of Enrique Camarena, an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration. This week, the Trump administration also met a high -level Mexican delegation to try to travel a new security agreement.
Ricardo Zúniga, a retired State Department which was its special envoy to Honduras, Guatemala and Salvador, said that concessions were part of a wider effort in Latin American countries to present their efforts to target criminal groups and illegal immigration while Mr. Trump threatens to impose new prices.
“For many governments in the region, having an agreement where they give Trump what he wants and in exchange they are left alone and no one will get into their business, they are quite comfortable with this agreement,” said Zúniga. “On the other hand, they are very worried about the prices.”
The case of Sarah Root, who was 21 years old when she was killed, became a goal for Trump in his first campaign in 2016. In this race, he repeatedly stressed his reprimand plans on illegal immigration and sought to carry out cases in which undocumented immigrants were accused of crimes.
Unlike Mexico, Honduras does not face imminent prices. But the country’s government is looking forward to showing that it is open to working with the Trump administration.
The Honduras was left next to the itinerary of the Secretary of State Marco Rubio through Central America last month, during his first official trip, sending what the experts said they were a clear message to President Castro.
Last year, Ms. Castro moved to end a long-standing extradition treaty with the United States, and the day of the New Year, she threatened to expel the US military from a large air base if Mr. Trump carried out mass deportations.
Recently, the Honduran government has reversed the course.
Last week, the country agreed to allow its Soto Cano air base to serve as a transfer point for expulsion flights from Guantánamo. The Venezuelan deportees were piloted by the American authorities of the Naval base in Honduras, where they were transferred to a flight sent by the Venezuelan government.
Reina, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, then said that it was a sign of the strengthening of Honduras with the United States.
Honduras also agreed last month to continue the extradition treaty with the United States that Ms. Castro previously moved. Tony García, the deputy minister for foreign affairs, said in an interview at the time that Honduras hoped that it would lead to “warmer and more fluid relations” with the United States, “because it was a thorny subject”.
On Thursday, the Hondurian government announced the capture of Mr. Mejia in an article on social networks and said that “the historical arrest had been made possible thanks to the cooperation between the government of the president @xiomaracastroz and the administration of the president @realdonaldtrump”.
Honduras was aware that Mr. Mejia has been in the country for some time, according to a person familiar with the situation, who was not authorized to comment on publicly and spoke of the state of anonymity. Castro’s government moved to stop it quickly after the United States extradition request, the person said.
The Honduran government could still face national legal challenges to return Mr. Mejia to the United States, the person said. The Honduurian law makes it difficult to extract individuals accused of murder.
Mr. Mejia will remain in detention in Honduras until His next hearing in MarchAuthorities said on Friday.
His arrest comes when Mr. Trump continued to link crime to illegal immigration, a centerpiece of his strategy aimed at strengthening his anti-immigration program. He was some success. The survey in the last campaign showed that the Americans supported more Republicans than democrats on immigration.
One of his first victories of his second term was the legislation appointed for a 22-year-old Nursing in Georgia killed last year by a migrant from Venezuela who had illegally crossed the United States. The bill requires the detention of migrants who enter the country without authorization and are arrested or accused of certain crimes.
While the crimes committed by immigrants have received national attention, Trump also has a long history of swelling of their crime. Over the past 150 years, immigrants have been less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States, A 2023 study ended.
