For a year, Mexican justice has been searching for Manfred Quintanilla, the Mexican businessman detained by ICE in the United States.

For the past week, Mexican businessman Manfred Mauricio Quintanilla Hernández has been sleeping in the Adelanto, California, processing center under the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Linked to the Grupo Transportistas Unidos Mexicanos, a company dedicated to the transport of goods by road, he had been on the run for more than a year from Mexican justice, who was looking for him for alleged crimes of false declarations and operations with resources of illicit origin.

According to several media outlets, Quintanilla Hernández has been outside Mexico since mid-2024, when various arrest warrants were issued against him for false declaration crimes. A few months later, The Mexican sun reported that new reports had arrived regarding operations with resources of illicit origin linked to Quintanilla Hernández and his entourage. This media assures that these charges are linked to the company Energía del Valle de México, which would have been a contractor for the Mexico government through the Federal Electricity Commission.

Another of the scandals to which this businessman is linked is linked to the publication in February 2024 in the news agency. ProPublica of a leak from the US anti-drug agency, the DEA, according to which Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s presidential campaign in 2006 had benefited from contributions from criminal groups. According to what was published, the contacts between the criminals and the team of the then candidate were established by Mauricio Soto Caballero, businessman and political operator.

Since 2002, Soto Caballero and Quintanilla Hernández were partners in the company Arte y Creatividad Digital SA de CV, which had contracts with the public administration of the capital, in particular with the passenger transport network. This was carried out by Rafael Marín Mollinedo, cousin of Nicolás Mollinedo, confidant of López Obrador and described by ProPublica as “responsible for campaign logistics”.

A column, in Millenniumspeculates that a conflict over this company and its contracts led Quintanilla Hernández to be “one of the creators of the published version that organized crime in 2006 gave money for AMLO’s campaign to Nicolás Mollinedo and businessman Mauricio Soto Caballero.”

Also a few days ago it was published in Process that Quintanilla Hernández is involved in more than 60 legal proceedings, both federal and local, with protections, complaints, commercial and civil trials… between 2024 and 2025 alone. They also questioned whether companies linked to it, such as Grupo TUM, continued to receive public contracts. The last significant amount came from the Mexican Postal Service: more than 1,000 million pesos to operate a series of delivery routes.

Mauricio Quintanilla Hernández is the son of Miguel Quintanilla Rebollar, founder of Grupo TUM, a company that operates cargo transportation services by land and air. She is the heir to Auto Express Mexicano, created in post-revolutionary Mexico by Marcelo Quintanilla Soberanes. It maintains several contracts with the Mexican government, notably related to the Mexican postal service. Its current director is Miguel Quintanilla Hernández, who signed a statement in which the company distances itself from the legal situation of Mauricio Quintanilla. “It seems that the situation reported in the media has no connection with Grupo TUM,” they say.

“Mr. Mafred Mauricio Quintanilla participates only in the share capital of Grupo TUM as heir to part of his father’s property. For 15 years, the link has been strictly corporate and patrimonial, without management, administrative or operational functions within the company, since in fact for seven years he has been residing abroad,” the press release said.