[6] This was confirmed almost seven years later in August 2022, when a collective of conservation groups announced that he had been photographed using a motion-detecting camera, on November 27, 2021, in the central part of the state of Sonora.

[13] A video[14] from Conservation CATalyst with shots from different days gained much attention in the news when it was jointly released with the Center for Biological Diversity.

On August 3, 2022, a collective of conservation groups named Borderlands Linkages Initiative, coordinated by Wildlands Network, announced through a news release shared with the Arizona Daily Star[15] that one of their member groups, Protección de la Fauna Mexicana, A.C. PROFAUNA, had obtained two pictures of El Jefe in an undisclosed location of central Sonora.

The pictures had been taken several months earlier, on November 27, 2021, but identification –conducted by Northern Jaguar Project, a third member of the collective– was only made on the last week of July 2022 because of the time it took to retrieve the camera data, process it and compare it to an existing database of known individuals in the borderlands region.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service has since drafted an area that includes the Santa Rita mountains as the critical habitat for the species' recovery in the United States.

The appearance of El Jefe in the Santa Rita Mountains prompted several groups to increase their opposition of the Rosemont Copper mining project still in the permitting process.

The increasing infrastructure and the waivers approved, releasing the Department of Homeland Security from adhering to any environmental law in its progress towards building more walls, have been cited as a major concern for recovery of the species in the United States.

Wildlands Network, a conservation group focused on preserving connectivity for large carnivores, has alerted of the need to include wildlife crossings on the expanded stretches of road to provide room to roam for jaguars and other animals.