Venezuela Releases Jailed Americans in Deal That Also Frees Migrants Deported to El Salvador by Us
El Salvador will send back some 300 Venezuelan migrants after the Trump administration agreed to pay $6 million to house them in a notorious Salvadoran prison. The arrangement drew immediate blowback when Trump invoked an 18th-century wartime law to quickly remove men his administration had accused of belonging to the violent Tren de Aragua street gang. 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 Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele's war on the country's gangs. Human rights groups have documented hundreds of deaths and cases of torture inside its walls.
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 US 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.
Venezuelan authorities detained nearly a dozen US citizens in the second half of 2024 and linked them to alleged plots to destabilize the country. They were among the 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 US 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 González 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 2000 people, mostly poor young men. González fled into exile in Spain to avoid arrest.
Despite the US not recognizing Maduro, the two governments have carried out other recent exchanges. In May, Venezuela freed a US 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 US 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 US.
Hundreds of Venezuelans have since been deported to their home country, but more than 200 deported from the US 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.
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