Venezuela releases 10 jailed Americans in deal that frees migrants deported to El Salvador by U.S.
CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela released 10 jailed Americans on Friday in exchange for getting home scores of migrants deported by the United States to El Salvador months ago under the Trump administration's immigration crackdown, officials said.
The arrangement represents a diplomatic achievement for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, helps President Donald Trump in his goal of bringing home Americans jailed abroad and lands El Salvador a swap that its president had proposed months ago.
'Every wrongfully detained American in Venezuela is now free and back in our homeland,' Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement in which he thanked El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
Bukele said his country had handed over all the Venezuelan nationals in its custody. The Venezuelan government said it had paid a 'steep price' by having to release the U.S. nationals but was pleased to have its own jailed citizens back.
Central to the deal are the more than 250 Venezuelan migrants being freed by El Salvador, which in March agreed to a US$6 million payment from the Trump administration to house them in a notorious Salvadoran prison.
The arrangement drew immediate blowback when Trump invoked an 18th century wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to quickly remove men his administration had accused of belonging to the violent Tren de Aragua street gang. The administration did not provide evidence to back those claims.
The Venezuelans have been held in a mega-prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, which was built to hold alleged gang members in Bukele's war on the country's gangs. Human rights groups have documented hundreds of deaths and cases of torture inside its walls.
Among the Americans freed Friday was 37-year-old Lucas Hunter, whose family says he was kidnapped in January by Venezuelan border guards from inside Colombia, where he was vacationing.
'We cannot wait to see him in person and help him recover from the ordeal,' said his younger sister Sophie Hunter.
The release of the Venezuelans is an invaluable win for Maduro as he presses his efforts to assert himself as president despite credible evidence that he lost reelection last year. Long on the receiving end of accusations of human rights abuses, Maduro for months used the men's detention in El Salvador to flip the script on the U.S. government, forcing even some of his strongest political opponents to agree with his condemnation of the migrants' treatment.
The migrants' return will allow Maduro to reaffirm support within his shrinking base, while it demonstrates that even if the Trump administration and other nations see him as an illegitimate president, he is still firmly in power.
The release comes just a week after the State Department reiterated its policy of shunning Maduro government officials and recognizing only the National Assembly elected in 2015 as the legitimate government of the country. Signed by Rubio, the cable said U.S. officials are free to meet and have discussions with National Assembly members 'but cannot engage with Maduro regime representatives unless cleared by the Department of State.'
Venezuelan authorities detained nearly a dozen U.S. citizens in the second half of 2024 and linked them to alleged plots to destabilize the country.
'We have prayed for this day for almost a year. My brother is an innocent man who was used as a political pawn by the Maduro regime, said a statement from Christian Casteneda, whose brother Wilbert, a Navy SEAL, was arrested in his Caracas hotel room last year.
Global Reach, a nonprofit organization that had advocated for his release and that of several other Americans, said Venezuelan officials initially and falsely accused him of being involved in a coup but backed off that claim.
The Americans were among dozens of people, including activists, opposition members and union leaders, that Venezuela's government took into custody in its brutal campaign to crack down on dissent in the 11 months since Maduro claimed to win reelection.
The U.S. government, along with several other Western nations, does not recognize Maduro's claim to victory and instead points to tally sheets collected by the opposition coalition showing that its candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, won the July 2024 election by a more than a two-to-one margin.
The dispute over results prompted immediate protests, and the government responded by detaining more than 2,000 people, mostly poor young men. Gonzalez fled into exile in Spain to avoid arrest.
Despite the U.S. not recognizing Maduro, the two governments have carried out other recent exchanges.
In May, Venezuela freed a U.S. Air Force veteran after about six months in detention. Scott St. Clair's family has said the language specialist, who served four tours in Afghanistan, had traveled to South America to seek treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
St. Clair was handed over to Richard Grenell, Trump's envoy for special missions, during a meeting on a Caribbean island.
Three months earlier, six other Americans whom the U.S. government considered wrongfully detained in Venezuela were released after Grenell met with Maduro at the presidential palace.
Grenell, during the meeting in Venezuela's capital, Caracas, urged Maduro to take back deported migrants who have committed crimes in the U.S. Hundreds of Venezuelans have since been deported to their home country, but more than 200 deported from the U.S. have been held since mid-March at the prison in El Salvador.
Lawyers have little access to those in the prison, which is heavily guarded, and information has been locked tight, other than heavily produced state propaganda videos showing tattooed men packed behind bars.
As a result, prominent human rights groups and lawyers working with the Venezuelans on legal cases had little information of their movement until they boarded the plane.
Tucker reported from Washington and Janetsky from Mexico City. Associated Press writers Matt Lee and Seung Min Kim in Washington contributed to this report.
By Regina Garcia Cano, Eric Tucker and Megan Janetsky.
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Winnipeg Free Press
7 hours ago
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But she added that Trump 'has built the best and most beautiful world-class golf courses anywhere in the world, which is why they continue to be used for prestigious tournaments and by the most elite players in the sport.' Trump family's new golf course has tee times for sale Trump went to Scotland to play his Turnberry course during his first term in 2018 while en route to a meeting in Finland with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This time, his trip comes as the new golf course is about to debut and is already actively selling tee times. It's not cheap for the president to travel. The helicopters that operate as Marine One when the president is on board cost between $16,700 and nearly $20,000 per hour to operate, according to Pentagon data for fiscal year 2022. The modified Boeing 747s that serve as the iconic Air Force One cost about $200,000 per hour to fly. That's not to mention the military cargo aircraft that fly ahead of the president with his armored limousines and other official vehicles. 'We're at a point where the Trump administration is so intertwined with the Trump business that he doesn't seem to see much of a difference,' said Jordan Libowitz, vice president and spokesperson for the ethics watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. 'It's as if the White House were almost an arm of the Trump Organization.' During his first term, the Trump Organization signed an ethics pact barring deals with foreign companies. An ethics frameworks for Trump's second term allows them. Trump's assets are in a trust run by his children, who are also handling day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization while he's in the White House. The company has inked many recent, lucrative foreign agreements involving golf courses, including plans to build luxury developments in Qatar and Vietnam, even as the administration continues to negotiate tariff rates for those countries and around the globe. Trump's first Aberdeen course has sparked legal battles Trump's existing Aberdeenshire course, meanwhile, has a history nearly as rocky as the area's cliffs. It has struggled to turn a profit and was found by Scottish conservation authorities to have partially destroyed nearby sand dunes. Trump's company also was ordered to cover the Scottish government's legal costs after the course unsuccessfully sued over the construction of a nearby wind farm, arguing in part that it hurt golfers' views. And the development was part of the massive civil case, which accused Trump of inflating his wealth to secure loans and make business deals. Trump's company's initial plans for his first Aberdeen-area course called for a luxury hotel and nearby housing. His company received permission to build 500 houses, but Trump suggested he'd be allowed to build five times as many and borrowed against their values without actually building any homes, the lawsuit alleged. Judge Arthur Engoron found Trump liable last year and ordered his company to pay $355 million in fines — a judgment that has grown with interest to more than $510 million as Trump appeals. Golfers-in-chief Family financial interests aside, Trump isn't the first sitting U.S. president to golf in Scotland. That was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who played in Turnberry in 1959. George W. Bush visited the famed course at Gleneagles in 2005 but didn't play. Many historians trace golf back to Scotland in the Middle Ages. Among the earliest known references to game was a Scottish Parliament resolution in 1457 that tried to ban it, along with soccer, because of fears both were distracting men from practicing archery — then considered vital to national defense. The first U.S. president to golf regularly was William Howard Taft, who served from 1909 to 1913 and ignored warnings from his predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt, that playing too much would make it seem like he wasn't working hard enough. Woodrow Wilson played nearly every day but Sundays, and even had the Secret Service paint his golf balls red so he could practice in the snow, said Mike Trostel, director of the World Golf Hall of Fame. Warren G. Harding trained his dog Laddie Boy to fetch golf balls while he practiced. Lyndon B. Johnson's swing was sometimes described as looking like a man trying to kill a rattlesnake. Bill Clinton, who liked to joke that he was the only president whose game improved while in office, restored a putting green on the White House's South Lawn. It was originally installed by Eisenhower, who was such an avid user that he left cleat marks in the wooden floors of the Oval Office by the door leading out to it. Bush stopped golfing after the start of the Iraq war in 2003 because of the optics. Barack Obama had a golf simulator installed in the White House that Trump upgraded during his first term, Trostel said. John F. Kennedy largely hid his love of the game as president, but he played on Harvard's golf team and nearly made a hole-in-one at California's renowned Cypress Point Golf Club just before the 1960 Democratic National Convention. 'I'd say, between President Trump and President John F. Kennedy, those are two of the most skilled golfers we've had in the White House,' Trostel said. Trump, Trostel said, has a handicap index — how many strokes above par a golfer is likely to score — of a very strong 2.5, though he's not posted an official round with the U.S. Golf Association since 2021. That's better than Joe Biden's handicap of 6.7, which also might be outdated, and Obama, who once described his own handicap as an 'honest 13.' The White House described Trump as a championship-level golfer but said he plays with no handicap. ___ Associated Press writer Chris Megerian in Washington contributed to this report.
