A Brooklyn federal judge has rejected the pleas by notorious Mexican cartel drug boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán for more contact with his wife and kids — telling the kingpin to take it up with the Bureau of Prisons.
Guzmán, 67, serving a life-term and currently housed in the Florence, Colo., supermax federal lockup, wrote a letter to Judge Brian Cogan begging him to increase the calls and visits with his wife Emma Coronel Aispuro and their twin daughters.
“Since May of 2023, the facility stopped giving me calls with my daughters. And I haven’t had calls with them for seven months,” the Sinaloa cartel drug lord told the judge.
“I ask that you please authorize [my wife] to visit me and to bring my daughters to visit me,” Guzmán wrote in the letter dated March 20 and made public last week.
“I ask for your intervention, since it is unprecedented discrimination against me.”
Cogan responded in an order from last Wednesday saying there was nothing he could do since the BOP is now in charge of Guzmán’s fate and told him to take it up with the agency.
“After his conviction, the Bureau of Prisons became solely responsible for his conditions of his confinement, and this Court has no power to alter the conditions that the Bureau of Prisons has imposed,” Cogan wrote, in a letter first reported by Law & Crime Tuesday.
Guzmán claimed he used to get two 15-minute calls a month but said that “staff here told me that the FBI agent who monitors the calls does not answer.”
The judge responded by clarifying that the call schedule was put in place for Guzmán’s trial, but once the kingpin was convicted, the BOP took over his conditions.
Guzmán’s lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman told The Post by email that his client is subject to “the most onerous conditions” he’s ever seen for an inmate “in any American prison.”
The lawyer said Guzmán is kept in solitary confinement and he has not contact with his wife and “rarely gets to see his children or speak to them.”
Lichtman said Cogan was correct in noting that it’s an issue for the BOP, not for the judge.
“Mr. Guzman will address this issue with the BOP which will undoubtedly refuse to ease any of the severe and unnecessary conditions imposed on him, now years after he was first placed in solitary confinement,” the lawyer said.
Guzmán made a similar request of Cogan in August when Aispuro, 34, was slated to get released from prison after serving three years for drug trafficking and money laundering conspiracy.
At the time he asked that former beauty queen be allowed to visit with their pre-teen twin daughters Email Guadalupe and Maria Joaquina.
The narco king was convicted in February 2019 on a slew of drug-trafficking charges for running a multibillion-dollar operation.
In January 2023, Chapo sought help from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to have him returned home, claiming he was being subjected to “cruel and unfair” conditions in the American prisons.
The BOP didn’t return a request for comment Wednesday.
