freed

President Trump this week pardoned a San Diego-area woman whose sentence he commuted during his first term but who shortly wound up back in prison for a different scheme.

In 2016 a federal jury convicted Adriana Camberos and her then-husband, Joseph Shayota, on conspiracy charges in connection with an elaborate scheme to sell millions of bottles of counterfeit 5-Hour Energy shots in the United States. She was sentenced to 26 months in prison and served barely more than half of that time when Trump commuted her sentence in 2021.

But her freedom proved fleeting. In 2024, Camberos and her brother, Andres, were convicted in a separate case that involved lying to manufacturers to purchase wholesale groceries and additional items at big discounts after pledging that they were meant for sale in Mexico or to prisoners or rehabilitation facilities. The siblings then instead sold the products at higher prices to U.S. distributors, prosecutors said.

To avoid detection, prosecutors said, Camberos and her brother committed bank and mail fraud. Prosecutors said the pair made millions in illegal profits, funding a lavish lifestyle that included a Lamborghini Huracan, multiple homes in the San Diego area and a beachside condominium in Coronado.

The decision to pardon Camberos came amid a flurry of such actions from Trump in recent days, including for the father of a large donor to his super PAC and the former governor of Puerto Rico, who pleaded guilty last August to a campaign finance violation in a federal case that authorities say also involved a former FBI agent and a Venezuelan banker.

The president has issued a number of clemencies during the first year of his second term, many for defendants in criminal cases once touted by federal prosecutors. The moves come amid a continuing Trump administration effort to erode public integrity guardrails — including the firing of the Justice Department’s pardon attorney.

Among those granted relief of their prison sentences are defendants with connections to the president or to people in his orbit.

Administration officials have not offered a public explanation for Trump’s decision to pardon Camberos. But a White House official, speaking on background, said the administration felt it was correcting an earlier wrong by pardoning Camberos, arguing that she and her brother were unfairly targeted and subject to a political prosecution under the administration of former President Biden. The official alleged the Biden administration targeted the Camberos family in response to the earlier conviction and that the conduct was a typical part of the Camberos’ wholesale grocery business.

Ahead of her first conviction, authorities said Camberos and her then-husband operated a company called Baja Exporting, which contracted with the distributors of 5-Hour Energy to sell the product in Mexico. However, the company then altered the goods’ Spanish-language packaging and labeling and instead distributed them in the U.S. at well below the company’s normal retail price, prosecutors alleged.

That relabeling effort involved 350,000 bottles sold from late 2009 through 2011 at 15% below normal retail prices, according to authorities. The couple then took things a step further, joining with other defendants in Southern California and Michigan to manufacture a bogus concoction bottled and labeled to mimic the authentic product, according to court records. The scheme transformed the following year into one that produced and marketed several million bottles of counterfeit drink that was mixed under unsanitary conditions by day laborers, prosecutors said.

Six other defendants pleaded guilty to similar charges in connection with the scheme.

It wasn’t clear whether any consumers were harmed. The Food and Drug Administration, which regulates 5-Hour Energy as a dietary supplement, has investigated at least eight deaths and a dozen life-threatening reactions involving energy shots before and during the time period of the counterfeiting.

The recent wave of clemencies joins previous Trump pardons of former Democratic Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and former Republican Connecticut Gov. John Rowland, whose promising political career was upended by a corruption scandal and two federal prison stints.

Trump also pardoned former U.S. Rep. Michael Grimm, a New York Republican who resigned from Congress after a tax fraud conviction and made headlines for threatening to throw a reporter off a Capitol balcony over a question he didn’t like. Reality TV stars Todd and Julie Chrisley, who had been convicted of cheating banks and evading taxes, also received pardons from Trump.

Times staff writer Ana Ceballos and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

The country has seen a wave of recent mass abductions, as it suffers from multiple interlinked security concerns.

Nigerian authorities have secured the release of 130 kidnapped schoolchildren taken by gunmen from a Catholic school in November, according to a presidential spokesman, after 100 were freed earlier this month.

“Another 130 Abducted Niger State Pupils Released, None Left In Captivity,” Sunday Dare said in a post on X on Sunday.

In late November, hundreds of students and staff were kidnapped from St Mary’s co-educational boarding school in north-central Niger State.

The attack came amid a wave of mass abductions reminiscent of the 2014 Boko Haram kidnapping of schoolgirls in the town of Chibok.

The West African country suffers from multiple interlinked security concerns, from armed groups in the northeast to armed “bandit” gangs in the northwest.

The exact number of children taken from St Mary’s has been unclear throughout the ordeal.

Initially, the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) said that 315 students and staff were unaccounted for after the attack in the rural hamlet of Papiri.

About 50 of them escaped immediately afterwards, and on December 7, the government secured the release of about 100 people.

That would leave about 165 thought to be still in captivity before Sunday’s announcement that 130 were rescued.

However, a UN source told the AFP news agency that all those taken appeared to have been released, as dozens thought to have been kidnapped had managed to run off during the attack and make their way home.

The accounting has been complicated because the children’s homes are scattered across swaths of rural Nigeria, sometimes requiring three or four hours of travel by motorbike to reach their remote villages, the source said.

The source told the AFP that “the remaining set of girls/secondary school students will be taken to Minna”, the capital of Niger State, on Monday.

“We’ll have to still do final verification,” Daniel Atori, a spokesman for CAN in Niger State, told the AFP.

Mass kidnappings

It has not been made public who seized the children from their boarding school, or how the government secured their release.

Kidnappings for ransom are a common way for criminals and armed groups to make quick cash in Nigeria.

But a spate of mass abductions in November put an uncomfortable spotlight on the country’s already grim security situation.

Assailants kidnapped two dozen Muslim schoolgirls, 38 church worshippers, and a bride and her bridesmaids, with farmers, women and children also taken hostage.

The kidnappings also come as Nigeria faces a diplomatic offensive from the United States, where President Donald Trump has alleged that there have been mass killings of Christians in Nigeria that amounted to a “genocide”, and he threatened military intervention.

Nigeria’s government and independent analysts reject that framing, which has long been used by the Christian right in the US and Europe.

One of the first mass kidnappings that drew international attention was in 2014, when nearly 300 girls were seized from their boarding school in the northeastern town of Chibok by the Boko Haram armed group.

A decade later, Nigeria’s kidnap-for-ransom crisis has “consolidated into a structured, profit-seeking industry” that raised some $1.66m between July 2024 and June 2025, according to a recent report by SBM Intelligence, a Lagos-based consultancy.