DHS Includes People Extradited to the U.S. and Serving Prison Time on ‘Worst of the Worst’ List

Ramon Santoyo-Cristobal, a Sinaloa Cartel drug trafficker and former partner to Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, was arrested by Italian authorities in 2020. The Department of Justice extradited him to the United States, where he was sentenced to more than eight years in federal prison for conspiring to distribute meth, cocaine and heroin.

Now, two years later, the Trump administration is taking credit for arresting Santoyo-Cristobal as part of its immigration-enforcement campaign.

Santoyo-Cristobal is not a migrant — the federal government brought him to the U.S. to be tried and serve time. He was not apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security, either. Instead, he likely came into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody as the result of a prison transfer last year from Federal Correctional Institution, Lompoc, where he was serving his sentence.

But Santoyo-Cristobal is featured on the administration’s “worst of the worst” website, launched in 2025 to show Americans “the criminal illegal aliens that have been arrested and removed from their communities thanks to President Donald Trump and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s leadership.”

The site features a photo of Santoyo-Cristobal wearing a gray T-shirt, with a bald head and bushy white beard, next to a few details: his country of origin, crimes, where DHS says he was arrested and his name. There are links just below to share on Truth Social, X or Facebook.

The “worst of the worst” site lists Santoyo-Cristobal alongside more than 600 other people DHS says it arrested in Lompoc, California, where the federal prison is located. Nearly all of them feature photos similar to Santoyo-Cristobal’s: wearing a gray shirt or sweatshirt, standing in a room with a glass wall behind them.

In total, the “worst of the worst” list features more than 25,000 people that DHS suggests its agents apprehended on U.S. streets as the administration conducts sweeping raids — and many of the people do fit that profile. But local officials, law enforcement and critics have repeatedly pointed out that some of these individuals were already in prison and transferred to ICE.

But NOTUS found that a number of the individuals on DHS’s list weren’t living in American communities even before they were in prison. Instead, some were extradited to the U.S. by the DOJ and have never left federal custody — meaning deportation could allow them to skip out on the full prison sentences the U.S. government spent considerable resources to obtain.

As the list is currently constructed, an ICE repatriation of Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan leader detained by the U.S., would qualify for the “worst of the worst” list.

NOTUS was unable to verify whether Santoyo-Cristobal remains in ICE custody or has been deported back to his home country. His counsel of record declined to comment.

DHS website

He’s not the only person on the list who was extradited to the U.S. Besart Hoxha — who went by the alias “Pizza” — is a Kosovan that DHS included on the “worst of the worst” list. But like Santoyo-Cristobal, Hoxha was only in the United States because the DOJ brought him to the U.S. to face trial for cybercrimes, records show.

DHS says its agents arrested Hoxha in Danbury, Connecticut. Court records show he was serving prison time at Federal Correctional Institution, Danbury. According to the “worst of the worst” list, DHS arrested nearly 50 people in Danbury — as with Lompoc, their photos on the site feature similar outfits and backdrops to one another.

Historically, the majority of people taken into DHS custody are people who were in criminal custody already, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

“When ICE put together the ‘worst of the worst’ website, it’s very clear that it wanted to find as many people as they could to put on there because they were being hit in the media for continually arresting people with no criminal record,” he said.

“So they wanted to fight back by saying, ‘Here are all the people we have arrested,’” he continued. “The problem with that is that if you don’t know the background, you would think that all of those people were, you know, in American communities, when the reality is that most of them were likely not.”

DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

Mark Morgan, the head of Customs and Border Protection and ICE in Trump’s first term, told NOTUS that individuals extradited to the United States belong on the “worst of the worst” list, comparing them to individuals that the U.S. allows to remain during their asylum process.

“What matters is that whether they entered illegally or whether we release them [into the country] for whatever reason, either they’re pending their asylum claim and/or they’re serving out their time because they’ve been convicted. At the end of either one of those … they now will be deported,” he said. “That’s why he’s on the ‘worst of the worst’ list, because when he’s done serving time, he doesn’t have legal status here and he’s going to be removed.”

Still, some of the anomalies have drawn attention on social media and criticism.

In 2020, the Drug Enforcement Administration facilitated the arrest of Jhon Viáfara, a famous footballer, in Colombia and extradited him to the United States.

In 2021, he was convicted and sentenced for cocaine importation. He completed his sentence in 2025, and spent about two months in ICE detention before returning home to his family in Colombia, an attorney for Viáfara confirmed.

“He’s definitely not the ‘worst of the worst,’” his lawyer said, adding that the U.S. only prosecuted him to make an example out of him because he was famous.

His presence on the “worst of the worst” list drew social media attention after someone recognized him.

“This guy never lived in the US, was not a migrant, and was not captured by Noem’s DHS. Yet they have him on the database to inflate numbers,” Carlos Eduardo Espina, an immigration rights activist, wrote on X.

According to the “worst of the worst” list, DHS arrested Viafara and more than 100 others in Oxford, Wisconsin, a town of 500 people. Oxford is also home to a federal correctional institution.

DHS deployed the “worst of the worst” list in the midst of resistance to sweeping ICE raids across the country. The department has been under pressure from Trump and some members of his base to deliver on mass deportations, but public support for deporting individuals whose only crime is illegal entry or overstaying a visa is waning.

“I say to my people all the time — they’re so busy doing other things they don’t say it like they should. They’re apprehending murderers and drug dealers and a lot of bad people,” Trump said on Jan. 20. “I say, ‘Why don’t you talk about that more?’ Because people don’t know. Do you want to live with these people?”

DHS and the White House frequently pull from the “worst of the worst” list to make posts on social media. The list makes it easy for private individuals to make posts based on DHS’s claimed arrests.

“Ciprian-Ionut Filip, a Romanian national, was caught in New Jersey for running a massive RICO operation and laundering money, proving Joe Biden’s open borders are a goldmine for criminals,” Blue Lives Matter, a Facebook page with over 2 million followers, posted based on the list. “Make him famous!”

But Filip was not “caught in New Jersey” — he was serving prison time at Federal Correctional Institution, Fort Dix, a prison in New Jersey, before DHS removed him from jail. Court records suggest Filip committed the crimes in Romania, from where he was likely extradited.

The list has been peppered with errors and inaccuracies.

While the list is billed as showcasing the “worst of the worst” — individuals with convictions for things like violent crime and drug trafficking — there are some individuals who don’t fit that mold.

An investigation from ABC News found the inclusion of a person who had never been convicted of any crime. DHS subsequently removed the individual from the site.

An investigation from CNN found that multiple individuals on the list had never been accused of violent crimes, and were on the list for infractions like marijuana possession and illegal reentry. DHS attributed the errors to a glitch and removed multiple individuals from the site, saying the error was fixed. But NOTUS still found examples of individuals on the list whose only crime was illegal reentry.

NOTUS found other inconsistencies as well. DHS included an individual on the list for “smuggling.” But the individual was accused of smuggling not humans or drugs but baby turtles, which are valuable on the black market in China.

Reichlin-Melnick, the fellow at the American Immigration Council, said that DHS’s effort to generate support for its immigration-enforcement agenda is eclipsing the details and backgrounds of the individuals being deported.

“I think that nuance about who is being targeted by ICE, you know, why people who have criminal records might be in the country undocumented, is something that the administration is actively seeking to erase because it undermines their much more simple message of, ‘Look at all the criminals that we’re kicking out of the country,’” he said.

The Trump administration is seeking to change its approach to deportations by lowering the operation’s profile, The Wall Street Journal reported, which is a shift that may not satisfy some proponents of the mass deportations Trump campaigned on.

“If we don’t open up the aperture and really target anyone who is here illegally, then the entire package of immigration laws, and the process we utilize to enforce them, is meaningless,” Morgan, the former CBP leader, said. “It’s literally meaningless.”