A prisoner exchange is set to return to Venezuela hundreds of migrants and asylum-seekers whom President Donald Trump sent to one of the most notorious prisons in El Salvador.
The exchange swapped Venezuelans being held in el Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, for Americans who were seized by Venezuelan authorities. The former CECOT detainees are expected to land in Venezuela later Friday.
The Venezuelans in CECOT were sent there by the Trump administration for indefinite imprisonment on the United States’ behalf — without charge, trial or sentencing. Rather, they were punished for having attempted to come to the United States. Many followed legal pathways. About half were accused of being “alien enemies” under the Alien Enemies Act, meaning the Trump administration claimed, largely without evidence, they were not only gang members but akin to members of an invading army.
The Venezuelan government said in a statement on Friday that 252 Venezuelans had been released from CECOT. The Associated Press reported that 10 Americans were freed from Venezuela in exchange. The U.S. government has never disclosed the total number of Venezuelans it has sent to CECOT.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele confirmed the prisoner swap on Friday afternoon in a social media post, stating he had handed over “all of the Venezuelan nationals detained in our country, accused of being part of the criminal organization Tren de Aragua” in exchange for “a considerable number of Venezuelan political prisoners” and “all of the American citizens it was holding as hostages.”
The supposed threat posed by Tren de Aragua, a gang originating in Venezuela that now has a presence in several countries, formed the basis of the Trump administration’s CECOT expulsions. Often with no evidence at all aside from common tattoos, like crowns and clocks, the administration accused the Venezuelans it sent to CECOT of being gang members. They were never afforded the opportunity to respond to that accusation before being indefinitely banished to the infamous Salvadoran prison.
Michelle Brané, a former U.S. government immigration official who is now executive director of the group Together and Free, which has worked with many families of CECOT detainees, said the group had heard from several of those families who were on their way to Caracas after hearing from Venezuelan government officials.
“Mothers that got calls are on their way to Caracas,” Brané said in a brief phone call midday Friday. “[The Venezuelan government] called some families. They said that they weren’t calling everybody, so they were sort of creating a phone tree.”
“At least one family confirmed that the government confirmed to her that her son was on the plane,” Brané said, noting that a case manager at Together and Free had spoken to the family in question.
The mother of one of the Venezuelan CECOT detainees sent HuffPost footage of a bus full of detainee family members en route to Caracas.
Many of the CECOT detainees were Venezuelans seeking asylum in the U.S. because of fear of violence or persecution back home. Some had pending asylum cases in U.S. immigration court when the Trump administration disappeared them to the Salvadoran prison. ProPublica reported Friday, based on a case-by-case analysis of over 230 of the Venezuelan men sent to El Salvador, that “most of the men were not hiding from [U.S.] authorities but were instead moving through the nation’s immigration system” and that “more than 60 of them had pending asylum claims, including several who were only days away from a hearing where a judge could have ruled on whether they would be allowed to stay.”
The departments of State and Homeland Security did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s inquiry about how they determined who would be included in the swap and whether they had sought safety protections for those who had previously fled Venezuela.
CECOT is known for allegations of torture and inhumane treatment, and has been used to jail tens of thousands of Salvadorans. Bukele, who has described himself as the “world’s coolest dictator,” has governed under a “state of exception,” in which constitutional due process guarantees have been suspended and human rights advocates and journalists have been targeted by the Salvadoran government.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man from El Salvador who was sent to CECOT based on an “administrative error,” described in a recent court filing being beaten, kicked and subjected to psychological abuse while in the megaprison. Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S. last month, months after the Supreme Court ordered the U.S. government to facilitate his return — though the Trump administration brought him back to purportedly face criminal charges for allegedly transporting unauthorized migrants within the U.S. He has pleaded not guilty.
Previous prisoner swap negotiations fell through, in part because of competing efforts by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump’s envoy to Venezuela, Richard Grenell, The New York Times reported last week. While Rubio was working on a deal to free Americans held in Venezuela in exchange for about 250 Venezuelan migrants the U.S. had sent to El Salvador, Grenell was pursuing a separate deal in which Venezuela would release American prisoners in exchange for allowing Chevron to continue operating in Venezuela. Rubio confirmed the return of 10 Americans in a Friday statement, thanking Bukele for his work on the deal.
The White House repeatedly claimed it did not have authority over the people it sent to CECOT, despite paying the Salvadoran government millions of dollars to detain non-U.S. citizens. Salvadoran officials told the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances that “the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these [Venezuelan detainees in CECOT] lie exclusively with the competent foreign authorities, by virtue of international agreements signed and in accordance with the principles of sovereignty and international cooperation in criminal matters.”
The prisoner swap suggests the Trump administration did indeed have control over those imprisoned in CECOT — and opted to use them as political bargaining chips.
It’s unclear exactly how many Venezuelans the Trump administration sent to Salvadoran prisons. Neither the U.S. nor Salvadoran governments have released a full list of detainees, and the governments’ refusal to acknowledge the detainees, combined with the detainees’ imprisonment in an unconfirmed location, led human rights experts to call the detentions “enforced disappearances.”
When the first detainees were transferred in March, CBS News published an internal government list of 238 names of Venezuelan detainees who had been flown to El Salvador. Subsequent transfers brought the estimated number up to 252 Venezuelans in Salvadoran detention, with 36 additional Salvadoran immigrants to the United States who were believed to have been transferred to CECOT.
But 404 Media, reporting on hacked material from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement aviation contractor, reported Thursday: “The flight manifests for three legally contested deportation flights from Texas to El Salvador contain dozens of additional, unaccounted for passengers than a previously published Department of Homeland Security (DHS) list of people deported from the United States on those flights.” The outlet published the additional names it had reviewed.
The fight over CECOT detainees’ legal rights has played out in both U.S. and international courts. In May, four human rights groups filed an emergency complaint against the detentions with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, saying they violated regional and international human rights laws and agreements. The groups sought “precautionary measures,” which are urgent steps IACHR can request of states to protect human rights. In recent days, El Salvador was due to respond to the commission’s request for further information, though the response would not have been public.
On Friday, in response to reports of the detainee exchange, the groups behind the IACHR complaint emphasized the need for accountability from the United States and Salvadoran governments, and raised concerns that Venezuelans would be sent back to the country many of them had fled.
“Even if detention at CECOT ends for some Venezuelan migrants today, they are returning to and at grave risk of harm in a regime that systematically violates human rights,” Julio Henriquez, an attorney with Boston University International Human Rights Clinic, wrote in a statement.