Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio returned home Wednesday to Miami two days after he was released from a federal prison when President Donald Trump granted clemency to him and more than 1,500 of the Jan. 6 rioters.
Wearing a black “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, Tarrio was greeted by his family, friends and a crush of reporters after he landed.
“I think I love my family,” Tarrio said before he was whisked away in a black SUV.
Former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio arrives at Miami International Airport in Miami on Wednesday.
Earlier, before boarding his flight, Tarrio told reporters at Dallas Love Field Airport that his conviction on seditious conspiracy in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack was a “miscarriage of justice.”
“If we would have gotten a fair trial, I wouldn’t have been in a position where I needed a pardon,” he told a CBS News reporter.
One of four members of the far-right group found guilty of seditious conspiracy in May 2023, Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison — the longest Jan. 6 sentence — even though he was not in Washington for the attack.
Tarrio, who had been arrested and ordered to stay away from the capital, was convicted of planning and organizing Proud Boys members to assault the Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s election as president.
Earlier this month, his lawyer, Nayib Hassan, wrote a letter to Trump on the fourth anniversary of the attack asking for “a full and complete Presidential Pardon.”
Hassan called Tarrio, 42, a “young man with an aspiring future ahead of him” who was “portrayed throughout the Government’s case as a right-wing extremist that promoted a neo-fascist militant organization,”
But Tarrio, according to Hassan, is “nothing more than a proud American that believes in true conservative values.”
Trump, who has continued to make false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him, had made pardoning the rioters a major campaign theme and began calling them “hostages.”
And in one of his first acts as president, Trump commuted the sentences of individuals associated with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Trump then issued “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
Those individuals included people who assaulted law enforcement officers.
Tarrio was released late Monday from FCI Pollock, a medium-security federal prison in Louisiana, his family said after he was pardoned. It was not immediately clear why it took him two days to get home.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
