Upon his capture outside the city of Monterrey, Nuevo León, the drug lord was flown to Mexico City where U.S. federal agent took him on a private plane to Houston, Texas. Wearing slacks and a striped shirt, García Ábrego was immediately extradited to the United States where he was interviewed by an FBI agent, and confessed to have "ordered people murdered and tortured," bribed top Mexican officials, and smuggled tons of narcotics into the United States. His prosecutors, however, tried García Ábrego as a U.S. citizen because he also had an American birth certificate, although Mexican authorities claimed the certificate was "fraudulent." He also had an official birth certificate that claimed García Ábrego was indeed born in Mexico. According to "The Brownsville Herald", García Ábrego went into the courtroom grinning and talking animatedly with his lawyers who helped him translate his words from Spanish into the English language. Hours after the judge told García Ábrego that he was going to spend the rest of his life in prison, the death penalty was out of the question for the prosecutors.