More than 200 Venezuelan immigrants whom the Trump administration had sent to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador have been flown to Venezuela, El Salvador’s 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 Friday, "Thanks to @POTUS’s leadership, ten Americans who were detained in Venezuela are on their way to freedom."
The U.S. nationals were back in the U.S. as of Saturday night, according to a U.S. official.
They are Wilbert Joseph Castaneda, Jorge Marcelo Vargas, Lucas Hunter, Jonathan Pagan Gonzalez, Ronald Oribio Quintana, Erick Oribio Quintana, Fabian Buglione Reyes, Renzo Humanchumo Castillo, Juan Jose Faria Bricen and Danud Hanid Ortiz, according to another U.S. official.
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. They have pleaded for the men to be released from El Salvador's prison system, which is known for human rights abuses, and returned to Venezuela.
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 onto the plane.
“Damn dogs, all of you,” one man, who also gave a middle finger to the camera, said in Spanish.
Venezuela’s minister of the 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.”
A senior administration official said the swap was “down to the wire.”
“We’re dealing with a regime in which, you know, there’s always a degree of uncertainty on their side, a degree of uncertainty from our side and things that you would normally expect to move in in a normal way tend to not move in a normal way,” the official said.
“The United States continues to support the restoration of democracy in Venezuela and calls for the release of all the remaining political prisoners,” they added.
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!”
As news of the prisoner exchange spread, the family members of men suspected of being held in CECOT said they were anxiously waiting for the plane carrying the prisoners to land in Venezuela.
Ringniber Rincon, the 18-year-old daughter of suspected detainee Ringo Rincón, told NBC News that she and her two siblings were eager for their father to return to their hometown of Maracaibo.
Rincon wrote that she was “anxious to know more about my dad and know how he is as he is coming out of four horrible months.” But she added that she was hopeful “he is coming here and I will be with him again.”
