LOS ANGELES (AP) — Famed Mexican boxer Julio César Chávez Jr. has been arrested for overstaying his visa and lying on a green card application and will be deported to Mexico, where he faces organized crime charges, U.S. federal officials said Thursday.
The arrest came only days after the former middleweight champion lost a match against influencer-turned-boxer Jake Paul in Anaheim, California. The Department of Homeland Security said officials determined Chávez should be arrested on June 27, a day before the fight. It was unclear why they waited to act for days after the high-profile event.
Click to Gallery
A person records the residency of Mexican boxer Julio César Chávez Jr., Thursday, July 3, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. arrives for his cruiserweight boxing match against Jake Paul on Saturday, June 28, 2025, in Anaheim, Calif. (AP Photo/Etienne Laurent)
Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., center, poses during a weigh-in ahead of his cruiserweight boxing match against Jake Paul, Friday, June 27, 2025, in Anaheim, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., right, punches Jake Paul during their cruiserweight boxing match on Saturday, June 28, 2025, in Anaheim, Calif. (AP Photo/Etienne Laurent)
The 39-year-old boxer, according to his attorney Michael Goldstein, was picked up Wednesday by a large number of federal agents while he was riding a scooter in front of a home where he resides in the upscale Los Angeles neighborhood of Studio City near Hollywood.
“The current allegations are outrageous and simply another headline to terrorize the community,” Goldstein said.
Many people across Southern California are on edge as immigration arrests have ramped up, prompting protests and the federal deployment of National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to downtown Los Angeles.
Goldstein did not know where Chávez was being detained as of Thursday morning, but said he and his client were due in court Monday in connection with prior gun possession charges.
Chávez’s family issued a statement Thursday afternoon in support of him, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“We have full confidence in his innocence,” the statement said. “We firmly believe that the proper course is to allow the competent authorities to carry out their work without external pressure or speculation.”
Before his bout with Paul on Saturday, Chávez had fought just once since 2021, having fallen to innumerable lows during a lengthy boxing career conducted in the shadow of his father, Julio César Chávez, one of the most beloved athletes in Mexican history and a member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame who won championships in several weight classes.
The son, who has battled drug addiction for much of his career, has been arrested repeatedly. In 2012, he was convicted of drunk driving in Los Angeles and sentenced to 13 days in jail and in January 2024 he was arrested on gun charges. Police said he possessed two AR-style ghost rifles. He was later freed on a $50,000 bond and on condition he went to a residential drug treatment facility. The case is still pending, with Chávez reporting his progress regularly.
He split his time between both countries. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained Chávez for overstaying a tourist visa that he entered the U.S. with in August 2023 and expired in February 2024, the Department of Homeland Security said.
The agency also said Chávez submitted multiple fraudulent statements when he applied for permanent residency on April 2, 2024, based on his marriage to a U.S. citizen, Frida Muñoz. She is the mother of a granddaughter of imprisoned Sinaloa cartel kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
U.S. officials said he is believed to be an affiliate of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel that is blamed for a significant portion of Mexico’s drug violence.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services flagged Immigration and Customs Enforcement about Chávez on Dec. 17, saying he “is an egregious public safety threat,” and yet he was allowed back into the country without a visa on Jan. 4 under the Biden administration, the agency said.
Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office said that an arrest warrant against “Julio “C was issued in Mexico in March 2023 in an investigation of organized crime and arms trafficking allegations and that Mexico on Thursday initiated extradition proceedings.
A federal agent who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter confirmed to The Associated Press that “Julio C” is Chávez. The agent declined to explain why Chávez was not arrested earlier in Mexico despite going back and forth between the two countries multiple times.
In Mexico, word of U.S. agents arresting a well-known athlete prompted mixed feelings.
Martín Sandoval Peñaloza, a newspaper seller in Mexico City, said he believes President Donald Trump wanted to make him an example.
“I think that the U.S. government - in this case, Trump – is up to something," he said, adding that it was “to attract media attention.”
Oscar Tienda, a Mexico City storekeeper, said he wasn't surprised given the boxer's troubles.
“I think it was predictable because he has had a lifetime of drug use," he said.
Despite widely being criticized for his intermittent dedication to the sport, Chávez still rose to its heights. He won the WBC middleweight title in 2011 and defended it three times. Chávez shared the ring with generational greats Canelo Álvarez and Sergio Martinez, losing to both.
Chávez claimed to be clean for the Paul fight. He looked in his best shape in years while preparing for the match.
Chávez said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times ahead of his fight with Paul that he and his trainers were shaken by the immigration arrests.
“There are a lot of good people, and you’re giving the community an example of violence,” Chávez said. “After everything that’s happened, I wouldn’t want to be deported.”
—-
Associated Press journalists Carlos Rodriguez, Fabiola Sanchez and Martín Silva in Mexico City contributed to this story. Watson reported from San Diego.
A person records the residency of Mexican boxer Julio César Chávez Jr., Thursday, July 3, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. arrives for his cruiserweight boxing match against Jake Paul on Saturday, June 28, 2025, in Anaheim, Calif. (AP Photo/Etienne Laurent)
Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., center, poses during a weigh-in ahead of his cruiserweight boxing match against Jake Paul, Friday, June 27, 2025, in Anaheim, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)
Julio Cesar Chavez Jr., right, punches Jake Paul during their cruiserweight boxing match on Saturday, June 28, 2025, in Anaheim, Calif. (AP Photo/Etienne Laurent)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
