A federal court in Seattle sentenced 32-year-old Mexican national Daniel Ibarra Loera to eight years in prison after he pleaded guilty to selling cocaine and fentanyl to homeless individuals in “The Jungle” encampments and the Chinatown-International District. U.S. District Judge Tana Lin handed down the sentence after Ibarra Loera admitted to leading a drug trafficking network that operated in Seattle between 2023 and 2025, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington dated September 9, 2026.
The case against the Mexican national was part of a broader investigation that led to charges against 14 individuals and the arrest of eleven of them in May 2025, according to a previous statement from the same U.S. Attorney’s Office issued on June 2, 2025. That investigation identified two interconnected networks trafficking cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine from California to Western Washington.
The investigation began in November 2023 following incidents of violence in the encampments
Official reports from the U.S. Department of Justice detail that the investigation began in November 2023, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) started intercepting the flow of dangerous drug doses into the International District and Seattle’s homeless encampments. W. Mike Herrington, the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Seattle field office, explained that federal agents maintained continuous surveillance of the criminal network from that time onward.
