Detained religious leader Apollo Quiboloy could be sent to the United States to answer a federal indictment, after Washington moved to secure his surrender through Philippine authorities.
Jose Manuel Romualdez, the Philippine ambassador to the US, said American officials had forwarded the paperwork tied to the request. “The formal request has been transmitted to the Department of Justice,” he told ABS-CBN News. He has said the documents reached the DOJ as early as June 2025.
Quiboloy, the 75-year-old founder of the Davao City–based Kingdom of Jesus Christ, was named in a 2021 indictment handed up by a federal grand jury in the US District Court for the Central District of California. The charges against him include conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion, the sex trafficking of children, and bulk cash smuggling. A federal arrest warrant followed on November 10, 2021, and the preacher was later placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list.
American prosecutors have tied the case to an alleged scheme in which followers were brought into the US on fraudulently obtained visas and then pressed into raising money for what authorities describe as a sham charity. According to reporting by the South China Morning Post, investigators say the proceeds financed church operations and the comfortable lifestyles of its leadership.
Any transfer, however, runs into an unresolved question at home. Quiboloy is currently held at the Pasig City Jail and faces separate Philippine prosecutions, among them non-bailable qualified human trafficking along with child and sexual abuse charges, with proceedings pending in Pasig and Quezon City. Romualdez has said the decision on whether local trials would be paused to allow the US case to proceed first rests with Justice Secretary Jesus Crispin Remulla.
The 1994 Philippines–US extradition treaty offers one path around that conflict. Under Article 11, the requested government may agree to a “temporary surrender” of a person who is being prosecuted or serving a sentence locally, on the understanding that the individual would be returned once the foreign proceedings conclude.
There has been public disagreement over the paperwork’s status. While Romualdez pointed to documents already lodged with the DOJ, the Department of Foreign Affairs said then–Secretary Ma. Theresa Lazaro had not received an extradition request, noting that any such request would ordinarily arrive through diplomatic channels rather than going straight to the justice department. GMA News Online reported that the US Embassy in Manila deferred questions to the US DOJ, which in turn pointed only to its 2021 indictment announcement and the FBI’s wanted notice.
The scrutiny has reached Congress. Akbayan Party-list Rep. Perci Cendaña asked the House justice committee to open an inquiry into how the government would handle the matter, seeking assurances of transparency and compliance with the country’s treaty commitments. That request has since been folded into a broader review covering Presidential Decree 1069 and other laws governing extradition.
Quiboloy was taken into custody in September 2024 following a nearly two-week police operation around the sprawling KOJC compound in Davao City, a city long associated with former president Rodrigo Duterte, whose family the preacher has closely aligned himself with over the years.
