A Chinese citizen has been sentenced to 12 years in prison after being convicted of conspiring to import cocaine, conspiring to launder drug money, and providing material support to a terrorist organization, the Justice Department told The Epoch Times in an exclusive statement.
Xu Wenshen, 52, a Honduras-based Chinese national extradited from Guatemala, was sentenced to 12 years in prison followed by five years of supervised release, the Department of Justice (DOJ) told The Epoch Times on Oct. 29. The case was prosecuted in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Xu was arrested in Guatemala City on July 17, 2025, at the request of the United States and extradited to the United States on Jan. 30.
The DOJ said the judge also ordered Xu to pay $22 million, which is about the amount his network laundered from cocaine and fentanyl sales. The monetary judgment can be enforced against any assets he has or acquires in the future.
From around November 2023 until his arrest, Xu and his co-conspirators imported more than 450 kilograms of cocaine into the United States and coordinated the laundering of over $22 million from illegal drug sales by drug trafficking organizations, according to court documents. The money laundering network used cryptocurrency money transfers, trade-based money laundering, and encrypted communications platforms to conceal its activities.
The DOJ said Xu’s network agreed to transport cocaine for a representative of an individual who claimed to represent the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG), a highly militarized, transnational criminal organization based in Jalisco, Mexico. The U.S. Department of State officially designated the CJNG as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization in February 2025.
“This defendant conspired to help international drug trafficking organizations bring illegal drugs into the United States and tens of millions of dollars in dirty money out of the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
“Every case the Justice Department prosecutes as part of the Homeland Security Task Force to dismantle transnational criminal organizations and identify money launderers that prop up designated terrorist organizations makes America safer.”
Frank Fang contributed to this report.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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