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.
The resolution represents a diplomatic achievement for the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, helps Donald Trump in his goal of bringing home Americans jailed abroad and lands El Salvador a swap that it had proposed months ago.
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, thanked Trump and the Salvadorian president, Nayib Bukele, for securing the agreement.
"Ten Americans who were detained in Venezuela are on their way to freedom," Rubio tweeted.
El Salvador will send back about 300 Venezuelan migrants after the Trump administration agreed to pay $6m to house them in a notorious Salvadorian 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 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 re-election 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 countries 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 re-election.
The US government, along with several other western countries, 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 2,000 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.