ICE Arrests Illegal Alien With Alleged Ties To The Assassination Of Conservative Leader

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have arrested Ecuadorian national Xavier Edmundo Jordán Mendoza, who allegedly played a role in the 2023 assassination of Ecuadorian presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.

Jordán was taken into custody Thursday in Doral, Florida. Video circulating on social media showed masked ICE personnel taking a man matching Jordán’s description into custody along with a woman identified as his wife.

“Xavier Edmundo Jordan Mendoza, a criminal illegal alien with prior arrests for grand theft and organized fraud, as well as a warrant for organized crime from his home country of Ecuador,” an ICE spokesperson said following the arrest.

Jordán’s Ecuadorian attorney, Juan Carlos Salazar, and his U.S. attorney, Richard Díaz, confirmed the arrest was an immigration action. Salazar said Jordán had applied for asylum in the United States and had a hearing scheduled for May 2027.

Ecuador’s National Court of Justice formally requested his extradition in July 2026 in connection with both the Villavicencio case and a separate organized-crime investigation known as Metástasis. Ecuadorian law does not permit trial in absentia for the assassination charges, so the domestic criminal process against him had been suspended.

POLL: Will You Support Trump And His Candidates In The Midterms?

Ecuadorian prosecutors have accused the man of funding a political assassination in 2023.https://t.co/8WajFQ4wiA

— Miami New Times (@miaminewtimes) September 17, 2026

Jordán is an Ecuadorian businessman who left the country around February 2, 2020, and has resided in the United States since then. Ecuadorian prosecutors name him as one of seven alleged intellectual authors of the 2023 killing of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio. Prosecutors have described Jordán as being involved in financing plans for the killing.

The other defendants named in the same charging documents include former interior minister José Serrano, former legislator Ronny Aleaga, businessman Daniel Salcedo, and senior members of the Los Lobos criminal organization. A judge ordered pre-trial detention for Jordán in September 2025.

He also faces separate accusations of organized crime and corruption-related offenses in Ecuador.

Fernando Villavicencio, 59, was a former investigative journalist and member of Ecuador’s National Assembly. He had published reports on official corruption and alleged connections between politicians and criminal groups. After the dissolution of the National Assembly in 2023, he ran for president with the Movimiento Construye party in snap elections.

On August 9, 2023, eleven days before the first-round vote, he was shot in the head while entering a vehicle after a campaign rally at Colegio Anderson in northern Quito. Attackers also threw a grenade that failed to detonate.

Six Colombian nationals were arrested shortly afterward, though they were later found dead in prison in October 2023. In 2024 a Quito court sentenced Los Lobos member Carlos Angulo and Laura Castillo to 34 years in prison for ordering the attack and sentenced three others to 12 years. Prosecutors later charged additional suspects, including Jordán, with planning and financing the killing.

A protected witness later testified that the order originated with drug trafficker Leandro Norero after an alleged payment intended to suppress an investigation was not followed by the expected silence.