A federal lawmaker is pushing for a provision that would bar 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 her colleagues that there “should never be preferential treatment for narco leaders.”

The move comes in response to ProPublica reporting on the special treatment extended to one high-profile pardon recipient — former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was released from a federal penitentiary late last year. Less than 18 months earlier, Hernández had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for taking bribes and allowing drug traffickers to export more than 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S. while he was in office.

But after President Donald Trump pardoned him in December, the Central American strongman — who has long maintained his innocence — got what Torres and others have described as the “red carpet” treatment. On the day of his release, ProPublica found, Hernández had in place what’s known as an immigration detainer, a formal request for law enforcement agencies to hold noncitizens for pickup by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Yet instead of holding him, the Federal Bureau of Prisons scrambled to get the detainer removed so he could walk free. Then, instead of giving him a bus ticket or airfare to get home on his own, prison officials paid a four-man tactical team overtime to drive him six hours from a West Virginia high-security facility to the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan, New York, according to records and three people familiar with the situation.

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Amid Mass ICE Arrests, Trump Pardon Recipient Juan Orlando Hernández Given Special Treatment

Torres sought to stop that sort of treatment........

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