A federal judge has ordered the immediate release of a man once responsible for moving 50 tons of drugs across the border, citing a “confluence of circumstances” involving life-threatening health issues and a total breakdown in medical communication.
Pedro Alejandro Rubio-Perez, 61, was granted compassionate release by U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell on May 4, 2026, just twelve weeks shy of his scheduled July release date.
While his crimes were massive in scale, the court found that the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) could no longer guarantee his safety due to a lack of Spanish-language interpreters for his critical medical care.
Rubio-Perez, who speaks very limited English, underwent emergency surgery last year to remove his gallbladder following a bout of acute pancreatitis. According to court records, he was not provided an interpreter at the hospital and remains “not entirely clear on what type of surgery was performed on him.”
The defense argued that a March 2025 change in federal policy—specifically the revocation of Executive Order 13166—led to a shift toward “English-only services” within the Department of Justice.
Rubio-Perez’s legal team claimed this left him unable to describe his symptoms or understand his treatment, essentially flying blind during a major health crisis.
Judge Howell noted that the inmate’s abdominal pain went largely untreated for three months before he developed jaundice and dark urine. The medical unit had initially dismissed the pain as “musculoskeletal,” likely because they could not accurately understand his complaints without a translator.
The decision to release Rubio-Perez early wasn’t based solely on his health. The court looked back at his history, noting that while he led a drug trafficking organization (DTO) that shipped 450 kilograms of cocaine and 50 tons of marijuana between 1999 and 2009, he walked away from the life years before his 2013 arrest.
He reportedly left the cartel after his father was killed in gang-related violence and was working as a law-abiding rancher and farmer in Mexico when authorities finally caught up with him.
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“He voluntarily extricated himself from the drug trade several years before his arrest,” Judge Howell wrote, noting this as a significant mitigating factor.
With less than three months left on his 180-month sentence, the court ruled that keeping him behind bars posed a greater risk to his life than his release would pose to the public.
Rubio-Perez won’t be a free man immediately, however. Because of his immigration status, he is being transferred directly from the Federal Medical Center in Rochester to the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for mandatory deportation to Mexico.
The judge concluded that the risk of “serious deterioration in health or death” outweighed the need for the final twelve weeks of his decade-long incarceration.
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