Major Prisoner Swap Frees Americans in Venezuela for Migrants in El Salvador

Ten Americans and U.S. permanent residents who had been seized by the Venezuelan authorities and held as bargaining chips were freed Friday in exchange for the release of more than 200 Venezuelan migrants whom the Trump administration sent to a prison in El Salvador this year.

The release of the Americans and permanent residents was described by a senior administration official and the release of the Venezuelans was described by the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, on X.

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 Venezuelan migrants in El Salvador played a high-profile role in President Trump’s promise to deport millions of immigrants.

The Trump administration has accused the men it sent to El Salvador — roughly 250 people — of being 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 Trump administration sent the men to a maximum-security prison El Salvador in March, along with several Salvadorans, including Kilmar Abrego García, a man the U.S. government later admitted it had mistakenly deported.

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 government in early January. She has been working for his release ever since.

Six other American prisoners came home 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 the Venezuelan authorities. Some of the Americans in the Venezuelan prison were confined to cement cells, beaten, pepper-sprayed and subjected to what one prisoner called “psychological torture.”

Negotiations around the exchange on Friday 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 criminals and members of the Tren de Aragua and that their deportations 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 250 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 Mr. Trump, who wants to demonstrate a hard line on migration.

Mr. 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 earlier this year.

The Venezuelans were sent from the United States to El Salvador in mid-March, many of them under the Alien Enemies Act, a power typically used by presidents during war to detain people who pose a danger to the nation.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights groups have argued that the use of the act to detain the men was illegal.

Many of the men were rounded up at their homes or in the streets in the weeks after Mr. Trump took office, according to dozens of interviews conducted by The New York 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 security, 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 weakened mandate, 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 célèbre, saying their detentions point to democratic violations committed by the United States.

Mr. Maduro’s government began imprisoning foreigners in large numbers last year, a tactic security analysts say was designed to help Mr. Maduro gain leverage over U.S. officials and other foreign governments. The Venezuelan watchdog group Foro Penal says there are 88 people with foreign citizenship detained in Venezuela, among a total of 948 political prisoners.

The Americans imprisoned by the Venezuelan government also included Wilbert Castañeda, 37, whose brother Christian said he last heard from him in late August 2024.

Mr. Castañeda had served in the U.S. Navy for 18 years, spending much of it as a “breacher” for the Navy Seals, his brother said. The job meant Wilbert occasionally used explosives to help his unit break through barriers.

The family believes that Mr. Castañeda suffered from traumatic brain injuries from his time in the military — and that this might have factored into his decision to travel to Venezuela to meet a romantic partner, despite the nation’s track record of detaining Americans.

When Mr. Castañeda called his brother in the middle of the night on Aug. 28, he told him he was being detained. “If I can’t communicate back with you or am not home by Monday,” his brother recalled him saying, “than that means things are really, really bad.”

Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting from Washington.

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