Last December, the White House moved swiftly to free former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández after President Donald Trump granted him an unexpected pardon for his 2024 conviction on bribery and drug-trafficking charges.
Few would’ve predicted what happened next.
New reporting by ProPublica reveals that, on the day Hernández was slated to be released, he had an immigration detainer waiting for him—a request to law enforcement that he be held onsite until U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could take him into custody.
In the hours leading up to his release, the Federal Bureau of Prisons scrambled to have the detainer lifted so Hernández could walk out of custody rather than be transferred to the agency, according to the report.
But the preferential treatment did not stop there. Despite facing budgetary shortages and persistent understaffing, prison officials paid a “tactical team overtime to drive Hernández from a high-security facility in West Virginia to the famed five-star Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City,” according to ProPublica, which cited records and three individuals familiar with the matter.
While still under prison custody, Hernández used the captain’s government-issued phone to speak with Joshua Smith, the federal prison system’s deputy director and, like the former Honduran leader, a recipient of a Trump-issued pardon for a drug-trafficking conviction, the news outlet said. Trump pardoned Smith in 2021.
That Hernández was effectively chauffeured from a prison to a luxury hotel in Manhattan has drawn the ire of bureau staff, according to the report, which also noted that a standard room at the Waldorf Astoria can cost more than $1,000 per night.
“The [prisons bureau] administration rolled out the red carpet for him,” Joe Rojas, a retired prison worker who has been speaking to the media on behalf of bureau officials, told ProPublica. “The staff are disgusted.”
One official who spoke to the news outlet on the condition of anonymity described the preferential treatment received by Hernández as “absolutely fucking nuts.”
“I don’t even think that’s ever been done, not just for a pardoned inmate but for anyone who’s been released,” the person said.
Hernández, who has long faced allegations of corruption in Honduras, was convicted in 2024 and sentenced to 45 years in prison for accepting bribes and allowing narcotraffickers to move more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. U.S. law enforcement arrested his younger brother, Tony, in 2018 on weapons and drug-trafficking charges, the news outlet said.
Read more at ProPublica