A Venezuelan migrant who was jailed in El Salvador gestures as he will get off a airplane at Simon Bolívar Worldwide Airport in Maiquetía, Venezuela on Friday. El Salvador freed scores of Venezuelans deported from the USA to a infamous most safety jail, the result of a extremely coordinated prisoner swap between Caracas and Washington.
Federico Parra/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
cover caption
toggle caption
Federico Parra/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Venezuela has freed 10 People in alternate for Venezuelans whom the USA had despatched to a jail in El Salvador, the U.S. and Salvadoran governments stated Friday.
Venezuela additionally launched an unspecified variety of Venezuelan political prisoners as a part of the deal.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele confirmed the alternate in a message on X, saying his authorities handed over Venezuelans accused of being a part of a gang in alternate for “a substantial variety of Venezuelan political prisoners” in addition to People.
A social media account belonging to the State Division’s hostage affairs workplace posted a photograph of the boys it stated had been launched from detention in Venezuela on a airplane.
In a assertion, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated the USA welcomed the discharge of 10 People and of Venezuelan political prisoners.
The governments didn’t identify the folks launched.
A State Division official advised NPR that the folks free of Venezuela included U.S. residents and everlasting residents who had been designated as “wrongfully detained” lower than a yr in the past. The official, who spoke on situation of anonymity as a result of they weren’t approved to talk publicly, stated the listing included Wilbert Joseph Castañeda and Lucas Hunter.
In March, the Trump administration despatched about 250 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, whose authorities was paid to deal with them in a most safety jail, often known as CECOT.
The USA accused lots of the males of being gang members and deported them beneath the Alien Enemies Act, which had not been invoked since World Struggle II.
Legal professionals for the Venezuelan deportees argue their switch to El Salvador was unlawful. Dozens of them had been in the midst of asylum circumstances, and had been held in U.S. detention facilities for months.
On Friday, Bukele printed a video of males in handcuffs he stated had been being handed over to Venezuela, as they boarded a airplane taking them to the South American nation.
Right this moment, we’ve got handed over all of the Venezuelan nationals detained in our nation, accused of being a part of the prison group Tren de Aragua (TDA). Lots of them face a number of fees of homicide, theft, rape, and different severe crimes.
As was supplied to the Venezuelan… pic.twitter.com/teuIT4GiRT
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) July 18, 2025
Later, Venezuelan information outlet TeleSur broadcast what it stated was the arrival of a airplane carrying a gaggle of the Venezuelan migrants dwelling.
Bukele stated the prisoner swap was the results of “months of negotiations.” It was stored secret till Friday — and a few of the kin of the Venezuelan migrants say they came upon about it on social media.
Gabriela Mora, whose husband Carlos Uzcategui was one of many males despatched by the U.S. to El Salvador, tells NPR she was at an occasion at her daughter’s college in Venezuela when she discovered in regards to the information.
“This makes us very pleased,” she advised NPR by telephone from Lobatera, a city in Venezuela’s Tachira state. “We have now waited for at the present time for too lengthy.”
Uzcategui, a coal miner from Tachira, entered the U.S. in December after he acquired an appointment, by the U.S. authorities’s CBP One app, to cross the border and make his case for asylum within the nation.
He was then held in a detention middle in Texas. U.S. immigration officers alleged that tattoos of crowns and stars on his chest had been linked to the Tren de Aragua gang. Uzcategui’s household says he obtained the tattoos 15 years in the past, earlier than the gang had even been established.
“He’s not a gang member,” Mora stated in an interview in Might. “Only a arduous working man who needs to offer for his household.”
NPR’s Michele Kelemen contributed reporting from Washington, D.C.
