For months, President Donald Trump has denounced Latin American narcoterrorists who are flooding the United States with “deadly poison.” He has used the scourge of drug trafficking as justification for dozens of military strikes against suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, which have left more than 140 people dead.
Last month, Trump praised the military assault by U.S. forces that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and took them to the United States to face charges related to cocaine trafficking. Maduro, Trump saidled a “vicious cartel” that “flooded our nation with a deadly poison responsible for the deaths of countless Americans.”
But when it comes to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, tried and sentenced in the United States in 2024 and sentenced to 45 years In prison for accepting bribes and allowing traffickers to export more than 400 tons of cocaine to the United States, Trump adopted a decidedly softer tone.
Hernández, he said, was “treated very harshly and unfairly” — so unfairly that on Dec. 1, Trump pardoned the former president after serving less than four of those 45 years.
But the magnanimity of the federal government does not stop there. On the day he was scheduled to be released, records show, Hernández had set up an immigration detainer — a request to law enforcement to detain noncitizens for pickup by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Here, too, the Trump administration’s treatment of Hernández differed from its public goals. Other non-citizens caught up in recent waves of immigration – the vast majority of which not have a criminal record – have faced rapid efforts to expel them, even to countries where they could be threatened. But in Hernández’s case, the Federal Bureau of Prisons rushed to have its inmate deported so he could be released.
And Hernández didn’t just get out of prison. Despite the persistence lack of budget and staffprison officials paid overtime to a specialized tactical team to drive Hernández from a high-security facility in West Virginia to the famed five-star Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, according to news reports and three people familiar with the situation. Before he left, Hernández was allowed to use the captain’s government phone to speak to the deputy warden of the federal prison system, Joshua Smith, who was previously convicted of drug trafficking conspiracy. Trump pardoned him in 2021.
“THE [prisons bureau] “Staff are disgusted.”
Renato Stabile, the court-appointed lawyer representing Hernández — who has long maintained his innocence – said his client’s treatment was appropriate.
“It would be particularly cruel to grant someone a pardon and have them released from prison — only to immediately send them back to a place like Honduras where they would have immediately arrested them or they would have killed them on sight by criminal elements who wanted to do them harm,” Stabile told ProPublica. Through his lawyer, Hernández declined to comment.
ICE referred all questions to the White House, which responded with a link to a November report. social media post announcing the president’s intention to pardon Hernández. Smith did not respond to an emailed request for comment. A BOP spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the office does not discuss prison conditions or security procedures and that employee standards of conduct prohibit staff from giving preferential treatment to prisoners. “Violators may be subject to disciplinary action, including removal from federal office and criminal prosecution,” the statement said.
The investigation that ultimately ensnared Hernández spanned several U.S. presidencies. Despite looming legal problems in the United States and widespread corruption allegations in his country, Hernández – often known by his initials JOH – was considered a key ally of the United States under the Obama and Trump administrations, apparently due to its apparent desire to help combat drug trafficking and migration issues.
In 2012, while president of the National Congress of Honduras, he passed a bill legal change allowing the extradition of accused criminals to the United States – a reform that his lawyer said was ironically later used to extradite him.
But in 2018, less than halfway through Hernández’s second presidential term, the The Drug Enforcement Administration arrested his younger brotherformer Honduran MP Tony Hernández, in Miami on a series of weapons and drug trafficking charges. A jury convicted him the following year in a federal trial in Manhattan in which Emil Bove — the federal prosecutor who would later become Trump’s personal defense attorney — gave a final argument filled with allegations implicating the Honduran president in criminal schemes. (Bove could not be reached for comment.)
Although this broad criminal case focused on drug trafficking issues, Juan Orlando Hernández’s political career was peppered with other aspects. Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz who studies Hondurasdescribed him as a “repressive criminal on multiple fronts.”
While in Congress in 2012, he led a “technical coup” In overthrow the Supreme Courtshe said. Then he ran for re-election as president in 2017 “completely violation of the constitution“, she said. During the protests that followed, security forces shot dead at least 16 people, including two children, among other human rights violations. a United Nations report revealed. Hernández has not said much publicly, but his government told the UN it would review the cases. His party tweeted that he has an “unwavering commitment to democracy and freedom.”
Weeks after Hernández left office in 2022, he was arrested at his home in Honduras and extradited to the United States to face drug and weapons trafficking charges. Prosecutors said he financed his political career with millions of dollars he received from “violent drug trafficking organizations” in exchange for allowing them to “move mountains of cocaine” out of the country.
Stabile told ProPublica that the case against his client was always weak, relying heavily on the word of unreliable drug dealers with wild stories and little hard evidence.
Yet the government’s arguments were enough to convince a jury to convict Hernández after just over eight hours of deliberationsand in June 2024 he was condemned to 45 years in federal prison. Subsequently, Stabile and his client began working on a callwhich at that time seemed to be Hernández’s only chance to regain freedom.
Early last year, prison officials transferred Hernández out of the federal detention center in Brooklyn, which largely holds inmates. prisoners in pre-trial detentionand sent him to the high-security Hazelton Penitentiary in West Virginia. Nicknamed “Misery Mountain,” the notoriously violent prison is the same facility where mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger was beaten to death in his cell hours after his arrival in 2018.
Yet prison sources said Hernández appeared to do his time quietly, eventually landing in the coveted housing reserved for a year. therapeutic program used to treat drug addiction, mental illness, and “criminal thinking errors.”
But after Trump returned to power last year, a much quicker path to freedom suddenly appeared possible: a pardon.
Like Trump, Hernández was a member of his country’s right-wing party. And, like Trump, he believed he had been targeted by left-wing forces. He also had other reasons for hope.
During his tenure, Hernández had championed the creation of special economic zones capable of setting their own taxes and regulations, a move that benefited Trump-aligned Silicon Valley titans who invested there, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. But the law was repealed by his successor, center left party Xiomara Castro, member of Libre, jeopardizing the projects of the zones. (Andreessen responded to a request for comment with a link to a social media post disavow any involvement in forgiveness. Thiel could not be reached for comment, although he previously said he wasn’t involved either.)
Roger Stone, a longtime political operative, also suggested in a blog post co-wrote with conservative activist Shane Trejo in January 2025 that pardoning Hernández could have political benefits for Trump. In their article, Trejo and Stone – who was pardoned by Trump five years ago after being convicted of obstructing a Congressional investigation into Russian election interference – urged the president to “crush socialism and save a city of freedom in Honduras” with a “timely pardon” that “could be the fatal blow to [Xiomara] Castro” in the 2025 elections.
Eventually, Stone took a more direct role in advocating for clemency when he gave Trump a four page letter Hernández had written to the US president asking for forgiveness and arguing that his conviction was “political persecution” by the Biden administration. In a text message with ProPublica, Stone said he received the letter from a reporter who obtained it from the family. He repeatedly stressed that he was not paid for his involvement.
“I read the letter, then did my own research and chose to send the letter to President Trump,” Stone wrote. “In fact, I have had no contact with JOH or anyone in his family until after grace.
On November 28, two days before the Honduran presidential election, Trump announced his intention to pardon Hernández. Stabile said he only learned the news when Ana García Carías, the former president’s wife, called him in tears:
“He lets him out! Trump pardons Juan Orlando!”
She sent Stabile a screenshot of Social truthwhere Trump wrote that he would grant him a “full and complete pardon.”
The decision sparked a bipartisan reaction from lawmakers. Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, called the unexpected reprieve “disgusting and incomprehensible”, while s that Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, described it as “terrible optics.”
In his message, Trump also urged Hondurans to vote for National Party candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura. who was behind in several pollsadding what, in the eyes of observers of Latin American politics, was a thinly veiled threat: If Asfura did not win, Trump said, the United States “would not spend money after money” to support Honduras.
The message was obvious, experts said. “That the pardon was a clear green light for the National Party to manipulate the vote,” a former high-ranking US diplomat told ProPublica.
In the end, Asfura narrowly beat center-right candidate Salvador Nasralla and handily defeated the ruling Free Party. But the count was plagued by delays, reports of voter intimidation And fraud allegationsand Nasralla later officially contested the result.
On December 1 – while votes were still being counted in Honduras – Trump posted again on Truth Social in support of Asfura. “It looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of its presidential election. If it does, there will be hell to pay!” The former president’s pardon was officially announced the same day.
That evening in Hazelton, after the prisoners had already eaten, corrections officers showed up at the housing unit to look for Hernández. Smith, the deputy director of the office, wanted to speak with him. The newly pardoned inmate was escorted to the captain’s office, where he used the captain’s phone to speak to Smith, his pardoned colleague, according to a source familiar with the matter. The decision shocked current and former prison staff.
Hernández was also allowed to speak with his family, who then called Stabile to tell him the good news. Within the hour, Stabile said, he received a call from Smith, asking for a release plan.
“I’m in Manhattan and he’s in West Virginia,” Stabile told Smith. “It would take me six hours to pick him up. Can you transport him?”
Since most inmate releases occur during the day, prison staff have had to be called back to handle the paperwork and logistics of releasing an inmate. But there was a problem: Hernández had an immigration station.
When noncitizens are convicted of crimes in the United States, immigration officials routinely sign detainees asking jails and prisons to turn them over to ICE for possible deportation proceedings after their release date. In Hernández’s case, records show immigration officials sent a detainer’s detention notice in February 2025, two months after he was sentenced in court.
For several hours on the evening of his release, prison officials rushed to have the inmate deported so he could go free, according to several sources familiar with the matter.
“This is definitely special treatment. That’s not normally how it happens,” said Lena Graber, senior attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. “Most people with drug convictions would never have their ICE detainer removed simply because the conviction was pardoned.”
Records show immigration agents released Hernández’s detainer just after 11 p.m.
Typically, according to a source familiar with the matter, prisoners released from Hazelton in bad weather or when it is too late in the day to catch a plane or bus home are housed at the Microtel Inn and Suites at the base of the hill. It is a two-star hotel where a room costs $69 per night. In the morning, they receive a ticket and are sent away.
But for Hernández, prison officials activated a four-man tactical team, paying at least three of them overtime to drive him to the luxury Manhattan hotel, according to government records and law enforcement. A standard room there costs more than $1,000 per night. Stabile declined to comment on where Hernández stayed, but said the government did not pay for it.
It’s another decision that stunned Bureau of Prisons staff. One official called it “completely crazy,” adding: “I don’t even think that’s ever been done, not just for a pardoned inmate but for anyone who’s been released.” Another acknowledged it was unprecedented: “Usually they get a crappy bus ride or a cheap plane ticket. We don’t roll out the rug for them.”
The whereabouts of the former president are currently unknown. A few days after his release, Hernández said in Spanish in a social media post that he had “no intention of returning to Honduras” immediately because he and his family would be in “grave danger given the obvious persecution and weaponization of justice against me.”
If Hernández is in the United States, it is unclear what his immigration status is.
Meanwhile, Honduran officials have issued a warrant for Hernández’s arrest over years-old fraud allegations and, in a social media post, called on Interpol and other international allies to honor him. But a law enforcement official familiar with the situation told ProPublica that there is currently no Interpol Red Notice asking law enforcement to arrest him. The only request the network received to issue such an opinion, the official said, was denied while Hernández was still in prison.
