ICE Arrests Suspect in Conservative Leader Assassination Probe

ICE arrested Ecuadorian national Xavier Edmundo Jordán Mendoza in Doral, Florida. Authorities described him as a criminal illegal alien with prior U.S. arrests for grand theft and organized fraud and a warrant from Ecuador for organized crime.

Video showed masked officers taking a man matching his description into custody with a woman identified as his wife. His lawyers said the arrest was an immigration action and that he had an asylum hearing set for May 2027.

Ecuador’s National Court of Justice requested extradition in July 2026. Prosecutors name Jordán as one of seven alleged intellectual authors of the 2023 assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio and say he helped finance the plot.

A judge ordered pre-trial detention for him in September 2025. Ecuadorian law does not allow trial in absentia on the assassination counts, so that case had been paused while he remained abroad.

Villavicencio, a former journalist and lawmaker, was shot in the head on Aug. 9, 2023, after a Quito rally, 11 days before a snap election. Attackers also threw a grenade that did not detonate.

Six Colombians were arrested soon after and later died in prison. In 2024 a Quito court sentenced Los Lobos member Carlos Angulo and Laura Castillo to 34 years for ordering the attack.

A protected witness later said the order came from trafficker Leandro Norero after an alleged payoff failed to buy silence. Jordán left Ecuador around February 2020 and had been living in the United States.

He also faces separate organized-crime accusations in the Metástasis case. Other names in the assassination file include a former interior minister, a former legislator, another businessman, and senior Los Lobos figures.