Category Archives: Honduras

Trump frees ex-Honduran president from prison as country awaits knife-edge election result

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Release of convicted cocaine trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández is latest US interference in election and comes despite Trump’s apparent ‘war on drugs’

A former president of Honduras who was convicted of drug trafficking has walked free from a US prison after receiving a pardon from Donald Trump, as the country’s presidential election remained on a knife edge with the US-backed candidate leading by 515 votes.

Juan Orlando Hernández, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison for allegedly creating “a cocaine superhighway to the United States”, was released from a West Virginia prison after Trump’s intervention, Hernández’s wife confirmed on Tuesday.

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Trump’s pardon of Honduras’s ex-president shows counter-drug effort is ‘based on lies and hypocrisy’

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Why has Trump blown up alleged narco boats in the Caribbean and at the same time decided to let a big time trafficker off the hook?

He was a Latin American president accused of colluding with some of the region’s most ruthless narco bosses to flood the United States with cocaine.

“[Let’s] stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,” the double-dealing politician once allegedly bragged as he lined his pockets with millions of dollars in bribes and turned his country into what many called a narco-state.

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Trump to pardon ex-Honduras leader serving drug trafficking sentence in US

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Hernández was convicted in 2024 of accepting millions in bribes to protect cocaine shipments

Donald Trump has said he will grand a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US on drug trafficking and weapons charges.

“I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” Trump said Friday in a post on Truth Social.

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College student deported when flying home for Thanksgiving, despite court order

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Student ‘heartbroken’ after being sent to Honduras while trying to travel from Boston to Texas, attorney says

A college freshman trying to fly from Boston to Texas to surprise her family for Thanksgiving was instead deported to Honduras in violation of a court order, according to her attorney.

Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, 19, had already passed through security at Boston Logan international airport on 20 November when she was told there was an issue with her boarding pass, said attorney Todd Pomerleau. The Babson College student was then detained by immigration officials and within two days sent to Texas and then Honduras, the country she left at age seven.

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Honduran immigrant dies while fleeing ICE, bringing raids death toll to three

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Jose Castro Rivera, 24, was killed Thursday morning after running onto a highway and being struck

A 24-year-old Honduran man died while trying to flee Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Virginia, bringing the death toll among those trying to escape detention in the Trump administration’s mass deportation crackdown to at least three people.

Jose Castro Rivera was killed on Thursday morning after running onto a busy highway and being struck and fatally injured while trying to evade ICE agents, local authorities said.

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US court allows Trump officials to end protected status for 60,000 migrants

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Administration officials given legal right to move towards deportation of people from Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua

A federal appeals court on Wednesday sided with the Trump administration and halted for now a lower court’s order that had kept in place temporary protections for 60,000 migrants from Central America and Nepal.

This means that the Republican administration can move toward removing an estimated 7,000 people from Nepal whose temporary protected status designations expired on 5 August. The TPS designations and legal status of 51,000 Hondurans and 3,000 Nicaraguans are set to expire 8 September, at which point they will become eligible for removal.

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Ice deported boy with cancer and two other US citizen children to Honduras, suit alleges

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Suit filed in Louisiana says agency didn’t give parents choice as to whether children should be deported with them

A lawsuit filed in Louisiana on behalf of two mothers and their four minor children, including one with cancer, claims the two families were unlawfully denied due process and deported by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to Honduras in April 2025.

The lawsuit, which names the attorney general, Pam Bondi, Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, and various Ice officials as defendants, alleges Ice violated its own policies, and multiple federal laws, when officers secretly detained the families, denied access to counsel and swiftly deported them to Honduras, ignoring legal filings.

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Trump ends deportation protections for people from Honduras and Nicaragua

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DHS said it would terminate temporary protected status for an estimated 72,000 Hondurans and 4,000 Nicaraguans

The Trump administration has ended temporary protections for people from Honduras and Nicaragua in the latest phase of its effort to expel undocumented people from the US.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it would end temporary protected status (TPS) for an estimated 72,000 Hondurans and 4,000 Nicaraguans in moves that will come into effect in about 60 days.

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‘Handcuffed like we’re criminals’: Ohio teen soccer star recounts deportation

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Emerson Colindres reflects on ‘traumatizing’ ordeal after Ice sent him to Honduras despite having no criminal record

The Ohio high school graduate and soccer standout who was recently deported from the US to Honduras despite having no arrest record has described being “handcuffed like we’re some big criminals” for the entirety of his deportation flight.

“To me, it was kind of more traumatizing because I haven’t been to my birth country in years,” Emerson Colindres, 19, who was brought from Honduras to the US by his family at age eight, said to the Cincinnati news station WCPO in an interview over the weekend.

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Trump officials deport two-year-old US citizen and mother of one-year-old girl

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Lawyers in both cases, one in Louisiana and another in Florida, say clients arrested at routine Ice check-ins

The Trump administration has removed a two-year-old US citizen from the country “with no meaningful process”, according to a federal judge, while in a different case the authorities deported the mother of a one-year-old girl, separating them indefinitely.

Lawyers in the two cases, the first in Louisiana and the second in Florida, say their clients were arrested at routine check-ins at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) offices and were given virtually no opportunity to speak with them or family members.

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Leading Garifuna musician reportedly among 12 dead in Honduras air crash

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Aurelio Martínez believed killed after plane crashed while taking off from Roatán island in Caribbean

At least 12 people, including a prominent member of the Garifuna music scene have died after a small plane crashed into the sea while taking off from a Caribbean island off Honduras, officials said.

The Lanhsa airlines plane departed at nightfall on Monday from Roatán, one of the Central American country’s main tourist destinations, heading for the port of La Ceiba, on the mainland.

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Trump is making Central America become a dumping ground for US immigrants

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President bullying countries’ leaders into collaborating with his deportation agenda that critics say violates rights

Central America has long been a source of immigrants, and in recent years, it’s also become a major transit route for those from around the world heading to the United States.

That shift led to record numbers of immigrants arriving at the US border, and contributed to the supposed crisis that helped Donald Trump win the election this past November.

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Weather tracker: Tropical Storm Sara and Super Typhoon Man-yi wreak havoc

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Powerful storm systems bring heavy rainfall, widespread flooding and landslides to Central America and Asia

Tropical Storm Sara has caused significant disruption across Central America in recent days after forming in the Caribbean Sea on Thursday afternoon. It is the 18th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season and the third this month. The large number of tropical storm and hurricane formations this season can be attributed to the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico being warmer than average, thus providing more energy for the development and intensification of these systems.

Since its formation, Sara has affected Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Belize and Guatemala, bringing heavy rainfall, widespread flooding and landslides. The slow-moving nature of the storm has exacerbated the damage, prolonging the duration of its impact. However, Sara is losing strength; initially it had sustained winds of 45mph on Thursday but weakened slightly after moving inland, with winds dropping to 40mph by Sunday. According to the National Hurricane Centre, Sara is expected to dissipate into an area of low pressure as it moves north-west toward the southern region of the Yucatan peninsula on Monday.

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‘We are going to be left with nothing’: Indigenous communities battle deforestation in Honduras

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Miskito and other groups face a dire challenge as illegal deforestation threatens their ancestral lands and culture

Avilés Morphy pulled out his mobile phone and swiped through the photos until he reached a shot showing fallen trees in what looked like the aftermath of a hurricane. “That was a big forest and look how it is now: everything’s been destroyed,” he says. “And these are the coordinates.”

Then he played a video. The camera focused on a startled man wearing a red track-and-field shirt, resting his back against a post as he responded to questioning.

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Ex-president of Honduras sentenced to 45 years in US prison for drug trafficking

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Juan Orlando Hernández said all Honduran political parties accepted drug money, but denied taking bribes himself

Juan Orlando Hernández, the disgraced former president of Honduras, has been sentenced to 45 years in prison for enabling drug traffickers to use his military and national police force to help ship tons of cocaine into the United States.

US federal judge P Kevin Castel sentenced Hernández to 45 years in a US prison and fined him $8m. A jury convicted him in March in a Manhattan federal court after a two-week trial, which was closely followed in his home country.

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Rare birds at risk as narco-gangs move into forests to evade capture – report

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Cocaine traffickers have put two-thirds of Central America’s key habitats for threatened birds under threat, study finds

Cocaine consumption is threatening rare tropical birds as narco-traffickers move into some of the planet’s most remote forests to evade drug crackdowns, a study has warned.

Two-thirds of key forest habitats for birds in Central America are at risk of being destroyed by “narco-driven” deforestation, according to the paper, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature Sustainability.

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Honduran city’s air pollution is almost 50 times higher than WHO guidelines

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San Pedro Sula is rated ‘dangerous’ as effects of forest fires, El Niño and the climate crisis cause a spike in respiratory illnesses

The air quality in San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras, as been classified as the most polluted on the American continent due to forest fires and weather conditions aggravated by El Niño and the climate crisis.

IQAir, a Swiss air-quality organisation that draws data from more than 30,000 monitoring stations around the world, said on Thursday that air quality in the city of about 1 million people has reached “dangerous” levels.

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Honduras referred to UN human rights committee over total abortion ban

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Petition filed on behalf of woman known as as Fausia, who underwent a forced pregnancy after being raped

Honduras is being taken to a global human rights body for the first time over its total abortion ban, which campaigners say violates women’s fundamental rights and the country’s international commitments.

The Center for Reproductive Rights and the Honduras-based Centro de Derechos de la Mujer (Center for Women’s Rights, CDM) filed a petition with the UN human rights committee this month on behalf of a woman known as Fausia, who underwent a forced pregnancy after being raped and denied an abortion under Honduras’ draconian laws.

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‘He paved a cocaine superhighway’: ex-Honduran president convicted in New York trafficking trial

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Juan Orlando Hernández, 55, once a US ally in the ‘war on drugs’, found guilty on three counts and faces 40 years in prison

The former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández has been convicted of cocaine trafficking, securing a place in infamy for the one-time US ally in the war on drugs.

Hernández is the first former head of state to be found guilty of drug trafficking in the United States since Panamanian strongman Gen Manuel Noriega was convicted in 1992.

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People displaced by climate crisis to testify in first-of-its-kind hearing in US

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Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will hear how climate is driving forced migration across the Americas

Communities under imminent threat from rising sea level, floods and other extreme weather will testify in Washington on Thursday, as the region’s foremost human rights body holds a first-of-its-kind hearing on how climate catastrophe is driving forced migration across the Americas.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) will hear from people on the frontline of the climate emergency in Mexico, Honduras, the Bahamas and Colombia, as part of a special hearing sought by human rights groups in Latin America, the US and the Caribbean.

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