A federal lawmaker is pushing for a provision that would prohibit the Federal Bureau of Prisons from offering taxpayer-funded VIP perks to pardoned drug lords and child traffickers.
Rep. Norma Torres, a California Democrat, introduced the measure last month as an amendment to a House appropriations bill, telling colleagues that “there should never be preferential treatment for narco executives.”
The move follows ProPublica’s reporting on the special treatment given to high-profile pardon recipient: former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernándezwho was released from a federal penitentiary late last year. Less than 18 months earlier, Hernández was sentenced to 45 years in prison for accepting bribes and allowing drug traffickers to export more than 400 tons of cocaine to the United States. while he was in office.
But after President Donald Trump pardoned him in December, the Central American strongman — who has long maintained his innocence — benefited from what Torres and others described as the “red carpet” treatment. On the day of his release, ProPublica found, Hernández had set up what’s known as an immigration detainer, a formal request to law enforcement agencies to detain noncitizens for pickup by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Yet instead of detaining him, the Federal Bureau of Prisons rushed to have the inmate deported so he could go free. Then, instead of giving him a bus ticket or plane ticket to go home on his own, prison officials paid overtime to a four-man tactical team to drive him six hours from a high-security facility in West Virginia to the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan, New York, according to records and three people familiar with the situation.
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Torres sought to end this kind of treatment with a narrowly focused amendment prohibiting the bureau and several other agencies from using taxpayer dollars to grant convicted drug traffickers and child traffickers — even those who have been pardoned or received sentence commutations — special accommodations or transportation, as well as lifting “any detainees not provided to other detainees.”
Last month, the amendment hit its first stumbling block when the House Appropriations Committee voted along party lines against its inclusion in its 2027 spending bill.
“Taxpayer dollars should not be used to grant convicted felons special accommodations, waived legal withholdings, or government-funded transportation,” Torres said in a press release. After. “We should enforce the law, not hand out favors. I’m shocked that my Republican colleagues don’t agree with this common-sense idea.”
But that doesn’t necessarily mean the proposal is dead. Last week, in a statement to ProPublica, Torres — a Guatemalan immigrant who last year criticized the pardon decision Hernández — said she plans to raise the issue before the Rules Committee, which can decide whether previously rejected amendments will still get a vote in the House.
“I’m not giving up,” she said, adding, “The American people deserve a government that enforces the law fairly and holds powerful criminals accountable, no matter who pardons them.” »
A Bureau of Prisons spokesperson declined to comment on the measure out of respect for members of Congress. Previously, a spokesperson said the office does not discuss prison conditions or security procedures and that employee standards of conduct prohibit staff from giving preferential treatment to prisoners. ICE previously submitted questions to the White House, which did not respond this week to a request for comment.
Long before his arrest and controversial release, Hernández was a polarizing figure, plagued by allegations of corruption in his country. Still, he was seen as a key U.S. ally during the Obama and Trump administrations, in part because of his apparent interest in combating drug trafficking and migration issues.
But in 2018, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration arrested his younger brother, former Honduran Congressman Tony Hernández, on weapons and drug trafficking charges. The following year, a the jury found Tony Hernández guilty in a federal lawsuit in Manhattan.
And weeks after the elder Hernández left office in 2022, he was arrested in Honduras and extradited to the United States to face drug and weapons charges. Prosecutors said Juan Orlando Hernández financed his political career with money he received from “violent drug trafficking organizations” in exchange for allowing them to “move mountains of cocaine” out of the country. At one point, they said during the trial, he bragged that he would “shove the drugs up to the gringos’ noses.”
After a federal jury voted to convict him in early 2024, Hernández was sent to a notorious high-security penitentiary in West Virginia to serve his sentence. Last year, he appealed to Trump for sympathy by writing a four page letter framing his case as “political persecution” by the Biden administration.
In November – two days before the Honduran presidential election that returned Hernández’s right-wing National Party to power – Trump announced plans to pardon his former Central American counterpart. Experts said the timing sent a clear message on the eve of a close race; as a former senior American official A diplomat previously told ProPublica that the pardon was a show of support that served as a “clear green light for the National Party to manipulate the vote.”
(THE narrow victory for Nasry “Tito” Asfura, who was lagging behind several surveyscame in the middle reports of voter intimidation And fraud allegations. After the elections, Asfura promised “work tirelessly for Honduras.”)
On Dec. 1, Trump officially granted Hernández a full pardon, and by the end of the day, he was on his way to the posh five-star hotel in New York, ProPublica reported. A few days later, Renato Stabile, Hernández’s court-appointed lawyer, filed a request to vacate the judgment and dismiss the indictment in light of the presidential pardon. The prosecutors having not filed a response to object, a federal court agreed at the request of Stabile.
Stabile previously told ProPublica that his client’s treatment during the release process was appropriate because Hernández could have been arrested or killed if he had been deported to his home country. He also declined to comment on where Hernández stayed, but said the government did not pay the bill. Hernández had declined to comment through his lawyer.
At the time, Joe Rojas, a retired prison worker and former union leader, said BOP staff were “disgusted” after the agency “rolled out the red carpet” for Hernández.
Last month, when the amendment was debated before the 63-member House Appropriations Committee, Torres held up a printed copy of the ProPublica investigation ” as she told her colleagues about the special treatment Hernández received and how the prison agency used “our hard-earned taxpayer dollars” to pay for his transportation to New York.
“These actions can never happen again,” she said.
Two other lawmakers spoke in favor of the measure. One of them, Representative Hal Rogers, a Republican from Kentucky, opposed it, call the amendment “performative and unnecessary.” He did not explain his reasoning to the committee, and his office did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Ultimately, 31 Republicans opposed the amendment and 27 Democrats supported it. None of the Republican members who voted against the amendment responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment.
Although Torres plans to raise the issue again this summer before the Rules Committee, the 9-4 Republican majority makes it unlikely the measure will garner enough support to move forward now.
But if the House can’t agree on spending bills before the end of this Congress, the November elections could shift the balance of power and give Democrats more say over amendments that come up next year.