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

Boston Globe

18-07-2025

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 Donald Trump's promise to deport millions of immigrants.
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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 in El Salvador in March, along with around two dozen Salvadorans, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man the US 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 US 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.
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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 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 US and Venezuelan officials stalled in part because two US 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 US 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 Tren de Aragua members and that their deportations and imprisonment in El Salvador are part of an effort to make the United States safer.
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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 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 US immigration authorities detained him this year.
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 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.
Maduro's government began imprisoning foreigners in large numbers last year, a tactic security analysts say was designed to help Maduro gain leverage over US officials and other foreign governments. Venezuelan watchdog group Foro Penal says there are 88 people with foreign citizenship detained in Venezuela, among a total of 948 political prisoners.
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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.
Castañeda had served in the US 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 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 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, 'then that means things are really, really bad.'