The more than 200 Venezuelan migrants who were deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador’s mega-prison in March have left El Salvador to be sent to Venezuela as part of a prisoner swap that included Americans being held in Venezuela, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele announced on X.
The deal included the release of 10 Americans held in Venezuela, according to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said the result was that “every wrongfully detained American in Venezuela is now free and back in our homeland.” In addition, the deal included the release of some “Venezuelan political prisoners and detainees” being held by the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the U.S.
Regarding the return of Venezuelan migrants being held in the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, Bukele said in the post on X: “Today, we have handed over all the Venezuelan nationals detained in our country, accused of being part of the criminal organization Tren de Aragua. As was offered to the Venezuelan regime back in April, we carried out this exchange in return for a considerable number of Venezuelan political prisoners, people that regime had kept in its prisons for years, as well as all the American citizens it was holding as hostages.”
It is not clear if the deportees have landed in Venezuela. Bukele’s post on X includes a video of what appears to be the deportees boarding a plane.
In a statement, Venezuela’s government confirmed the release of 252 prisoners from CECOT.
The Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador after the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act — an 18th century wartime authority used to remove noncitizens with little-to-no due process — to deport two planeloads of alleged migrant gang members to El Salvador by arguing that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is a “hybrid criminal state” that is invading the United States.
Many families and attorneys of the Venezuelans have denied they have gang ties and in April an official for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a sworn declaration submitted in federal court that many of the noncitizens who were deported did not have criminal records in the United States.
“While it is true that many of the [Tren de Aragua gang] members removed under the AEA do not have criminal records in the United States, that is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time. The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat,” the official said in the filing in March.
The migrants were sent to CECOT as part of a $6 million deal the Trump administration made with Bukele to house migrant detainees as part of Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Over the past several months, Trump and administration officials said they were unable to return any of the migrants sent to CECOT because the migrants were under El Salvador’s authority.
But in court filings submitted last month, the government of El Salvador told a United Nations working group that the Venezuelans sent to CECOT were the responsibility of the United States.
In a statement to ABC News, Lee Gelernt, lead counsel in the CECOT litigation for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the administration appears to be “trying to avoid all judicial accountability.”
“The administration sent these individuals to languish for months incommunicado in one of the most notorious prisons in the world without any due process and now appears to with this latest maneuver to be trying to avoid all judicial accountability,” Gelernt said.
ABC News’ Shannon Kingston and Aicha Elhammar contributed to this report.
