The deal involved Venezuela taking them in exchange for “political prisoners,” El Salvador’s president said. Ten American nationals were also released by Venezuela.
More than 200 Venezuelan immigrants whom the Trump administration had sent to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador have been flown to Venezuela, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said in a post on X.
The move was part of a prisoner swap in which the Venezuelan government released “a considerable number of Venezuelan political prisoners … as well as all the American citizens it was holding as hostages,” Bukele said, in exchange for the Venezuelan nationals who had been imprisoned in El Salvador.
In a post of his own, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “Thanks to @POTUS’s leadership, ten Americans who were detained in Venezuela are on their way to freedom.”
Rubio also praised Bukele for “helping secure an agreement for the release of all of our American detainees, plus the release of Venezuelan political prisoners.”
The Venezuelan immigrants were deported from the U.S. under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a rarely employed wartime law.
The Trump administration has declared a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, an invading force, and used the act to deport Venezuelan immigrants who it says have ties to the gang.
More than 200 men — some of them asylum-seekers who said they were at risk of persecution in Venezuela — were sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in March.
Family members of several men believed to be held there have denied they had ties to the gang and pleaded for them to be returned to Venezuela, rather than in El Salvador’s prison system, which is known for human rights abuses.
In a video provided by the Salvadoran government on Friday, several Venezuelan men can be seen leaving a charter bus with their hands zip-tied as they walk past a line of national police guards and into a plane set to take them back to their home country.
Two of the men could be heard hurling expletives as they were loaded on to the plane.
“Damn dogs, all of you,” one man, who also gave a middle finger to the camera, said in Spanish.
Venezuelan Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace Diosdado Cabello, said the government there would continue to try to bring home Venezuelans imprisoned in the U.S. and El Salvador.
“We will keep demanding the return of all the Venezuelans kidnapped by the government of the United States, kidnapped by the government of El Salvador,” Cabello said in televised remarks. “All of them, we demand that they return them to our country. To their home country.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act in March, told NBC News it had not been told about the CECOT detainees’ release before it happened.
Responding to reporting from Reuters earlier Friday about the prisoner swap agreement, the ACLU’s Lee Gelernt, the lead counsel in the litigation, criticized the Trump Administration.
“The government allowed these individuals to languish in a notorious gulag for more than four months with zero due process and, with this latest maneuver, appears to be trying to avoid all court rulings,” Gelernt said.
He added, “Whether these individuals are in El Salvador or Venezuela, the use of the Alien Enemies Act by our government during peacetime was illegal. Period!”
