What deal did Trump have with El Chapo’s family?

Since returning to the White House in January 2025, Donald Trump has put the fight against immigration back at the heart of his agenda, promising a near-hermetic closure of the southern border and implementing controversial measures aimed at mass deportation of migrants already on US soil.

However, according to The Daily Beast, in May, some twenty people close to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the former leader of the Mexican Sinaloa cartel, currently serving a life sentence in an ultra-secure prison in Colorado, quietly crossed the US border, with the explicit approval of the Trump administration.

According to the Mexican authorities, the entry of El Chapo’s relatives into the USA was not an impromptu escape. According to them, it was authorized under a confidential agreement between the Trump administration and Ovidio Guzmán, El Chapo’s son, currently incarcerated in the United States. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum expressed surprise at the operation, which was carried out without bilateral coordination.

Yet this same cartel has been officially classified as a terrorist organization by Washington since 2024, a designation established under the Biden administration to broaden the legal means to combat its transnational operations.

While Trump claims an ironclad migration policy, his behind-the-scenes arrangements with drug trafficking figures are drawing sharp criticism and revealing troubling exceptions.

This highlights Donald Trump’s double standards: while he is stepping up mass deportations of migrants, often settled for years on American soil, to third countries or even Salvadoran prisons, he is rolling out the red carpet for relatives of a Mexican cartel classified as a terrorist. But why?

Several days after the revelation of this information, no official explanation had yet been provided as to why Donald Trump had, in May, opened the US doors to El Chapo’s family.