Prisoner swap frees Americans in Venezuela for migrants held in El Salvador

In an undated photo via Sophie Hunter, Lucas Hunter, one of the Americans Venezuela’s government began detaining and imprisoning late last year. A deal freed Americans detained in Venezuela for Venezuelan migrants imprisoned in El Salvador after being expelled from the U.S. (via Sophie Hunter via The New York Times)

By Julie Turkewitz and Hamed Aleaziz

Ten Americans and U.S. permanent residents who had been seized by Venezuelan authorities and held as bargaining chips were freed late last week in exchange for the release of more than 250 Venezuelan migrants whom the Trump administration sent to a prison in El Salvador.

The release of the Americans and permanent residents was described by the State Department, while the release of the Venezuelans was announced by the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, on the social platform X.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement that the 10 U.S. citizens and permanent residents had been arrested and jailed in Venezuela “without proper due process” and called for the “restoration of democracy in Venezuela.”

The capture and imprisonment of the Americans had been part of the Venezuelan government’s efforts to gain an upper hand in negotiations with the Trump administration, while the detention of the Venezuelans in El Salvador played a high-profile role in President Donald Trump’s promise to deport millions of immigrants.

Trump had invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime power, to detain and expel many of the migrants sent to El Salvador. That set off a legal battle, with critics accusing the president of ignoring the law’s intent to fulfill a campaign promise.

The Trump administration has accused the men it sent to El Salvador — 252 people in all — of being dangerous criminals and members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, though it has provided little evidence to back this up. Their lawyers say they were summarily deported from the United States without due process.

The U.S. government sent the men to a maximum-security prison El Salvador in March, along with around two dozen Salvadorans, including Kilmar Abrego García, a man U.S. officials later admitted had been mistakenly deported.

Officials in the Trump administration had previously argued that they had no authority over the men once they landed in El Salvador and that it would be Bukele’s decision whether or not to release them.

Venezuela’s government began detaining and imprisoning foreigners late last year. Among them was Lucas Hunter, now 37, a U.S. and French citizen who had traveled to Colombia to go kite surfing, according to his family.

In an interview, his sister, Sophie Hunter, said he was still in Colombia — close to its border with Venezuela — when he was nabbed by the Venezuelan authorities in early January. She has been working for his release ever since.

“We have prayed for this day for almost a year,” she said Friday.

Six other American prisoners returned from Venezuela in late January, their freedom secured after an unusual and highly public visit by a Trump administration official to Venezuela.

After their release, some of them spoke at length with The New York Times about their detention and described being seized, hooded and handcuffed by Venezuelan authorities. Some Americans in the Venezuelan prison were confined to cement cells, beaten, pepper-sprayed and subjected to what one prisoner called “psychological torture.”

Negotiations around Friday’s exchange had been underway since at least May, according to four people with knowledge of the talks. But the conversations between U.S. and Venezuelan officials stalled in part because two U.S. officials made different offers to the Venezuelans, leaving them unsure whom to trust, the people said.

Families of the Venezuelan migrants sent to El Salvador had been lobbying for months for the release of their relatives, organizing marches in front of the Salvadoran Embassy in Caracas and traveling to Geneva to speak with representatives to the United Nations.

On Friday, an aunt of one of the men, Widmer Josneyder Agelviz, 24, said she wanted to be grateful to the United States for his release but mostly felt angry at U.S. officials.

“From the beginning, they knew that they were not capturing criminals,” said the aunt, Jhoanna Sanguino, 35, who lives in Colombia.

The Trump administration has said that the men are criminal gang members and that their deportation and imprisonment in El Salvador are part of an effort to make the United States safer.

But a Times investigation found serious criminal accusations for only 32 of the men. Most of the 252 men did not have criminal records in the United States or elsewhere in the region, beyond immigration offenses, the investigation found.

Many of their family members have said the men were being used as political tools by Trump, who wants to demonstrate a hard line on migration.

Agelviz has no criminal record in Venezuela or in Ecuador, where he lived previously, according to government documents reviewed by the Times. He arrived in the United States in September 2024, his aunt said, and had been living in North Carolina when U.S. immigration authorities detained him this year.

The exchange Friday also included the release of 80 Venezuelans held by the Venezuelan government, according to Venezuela’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello.

The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the Trump administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act to detain and expel Venezuelans, and litigation is ongoing.

On Friday, Lee Gelernt, a lawyer for the ACLU, said the organization would ask a judge to order the government to explain if it intends to bring the Venezuelans back to the United States. Many of them had active immigration cases when they were imprisoned, including requests for asylum.

“If the government gets away with sending people to what’s essentially a gulag in a country with which they have no connection, then we are no longer talking about the immigration system we’ve known for more than a century,” he said. “This is a whole new unlawful and gratuitously cruel phase.”

Many of the men were rounded up at their homes or in the streets in the weeks after Trump took office, according to dozens of interviews conducted by the Times.

It was unclear how long the men were supposed to stay in the Salvadoran prison, known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, had said she believed they should be there “for the rest of their lives.”

In Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro is facing major economic problems and a lack of legitimacy and has been trying to get the United States to ease oil sanctions, a move he needs to help the economy and his popularity.

His government has also made the defense of the Venezuelans detained in El Salvador a cause celebre, saying their detentions point to democratic violations committed by the United States.

On Friday, the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry confirmed the exchange, saying the Venezuelan men had been “kidnapped and subjected to forced disappearance in a concentration camp known as CECOT” and said that Maduro had swooped in to “rescue” them.