Mexico's Attorney General's Office has confirmed that television host Inés Gómez Mont was taken into custody in Miami, Florida, on Friday, after an exchange of information with the United States government. She was wanted in Mexico under an outstanding arrest warrant over her alleged part in an aggravated tax-fraud scheme, and the office released her custody photograph as it announced the arrest, saying further information would follow.
By Saturday morning she had passed into the hands of U.S. immigration enforcement. Reforma reported that Gómez Mont is now in ICE custody in Miami, after her tourist visa expired.
The arrest ends more than five years as a fugitive. A Mexican judge issued arrest warrants in September 2021 for Gómez Mont and her husband, Víctor Manuel Álvarez Puga, over alleged money laundering: prosecutors accuse the couple of diverting nearly 3 billion pesos of public money from the Secretariat of the Interior through a web of public contracts. Álvarez Puga was arrested in the United States last year and reportedly regained his freedom after posting bail, and his position is again in question now that his wife has been taken.
The capture also came weeks after Interpol withdrew its red notices against the couple, a step President Claudia Sheinbaum publicly criticised. It made no difference in the end: the arrest was carried out through direct cooperation between the two governments, not the Interpol alert. A photograph said to show the moment of the arrest — Gómez Mont handcuffed and escorted by federal officers — circulated widely in Mexican media.
The Attorney General's own notice carries the standard caution: Gómez Mont is presumed innocent and is to be treated as such unless a court rules otherwise. What happens next — whether she is removed to Mexico to face the warrants — now runs through the U.S. courts and the immigration process.
For ordinary taxpayers, the case is a simple one: money meant for public services is alleged to have been siphoned off through government contracts, and the Miami arrest shows that leaving the country, and even the lapse of an Interpol notice, does not put a fugitive beyond the reach of two governments working together.
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