More than 200 Venezuelan immigrants whom the Trump administration had sent to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador have been flown to Venezuela.
The move, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said in a post on X, was part of a prisoner swap in which the Venezuelan government agreed to release “a considerable number of Venezuelan political prisoners … as well as all the American citizens it was holding as hostages” in exchange for the Venezuelan nationals who had been detained in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT.
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.
“I want to thank my team at the @StateDept & especially President @nayibbukele for helping secure an agreement for the release of all of our American detainees, plus the release of Venezuelan political prisoners.”
The CECOT detainees were deported from the U.S. under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a rarely employed wartime law. The Trump administration has declared that Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, is an invading force, and it has been using that declaration and the act to quickly 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 CECOT in March. Family members of several men believed to be in CECOT have denied they had any ties to the gang and have pleaded for them to be returned back to Venezuela.
“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,” Venezuelan Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace Diosdado Cabello said Friday 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 said in a statement, “We were not informed in advance and don’t know the details but assuming the rumors are true, 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.”
