More than 250 Venezuelan men deported by the United States to a notorious prison in El Salvador could be headed back to the United States for immigration proceedings under a three-country diplomatic arrangement revealed Friday by the Trump administration.
Under a prisoner swap between El Salvador and Venezuela, brokered in part by the United States, Venezuela has agreed to permit the 252 men to return to the United States if ordered by a court, a senior homeland security official revealed in legal papers filed to a federal judge.
Mellissa Harper, the acting assistant director of enforcement and removal operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the Trump administration “obtained assurances” from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s government that it would permit its citizens to return to the United States for legal proceedings, if required by a court.
“The Maduro regime will not impose obstacles to the individual’s travel,” Harper said in a sworn declaration Friday to U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a Maryland-based Trump appointee.
That arrangement for the Venezuelan men, many of whom were deported under President Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, will also allow the return of 10 Americans detained in Venezuela.
The Department of Homeland Security and Department of State did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
If the agreement is carried out, it appears poised to end a legal standoff in which judges have weighed ordering the return of Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador in March with little to no due process. That includes proceedings pending before Washington, D.C.’s chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who had pushed the Trump administration to find ways to return the deportees in order to provide them a chance to challenge the claim they were gang members.
Boasberg’s initial effort to block the rushed March 15 deportations — and the administration’s decision to deplane the deportees in El Salvador despite the judge’s order — provoked an extraordinary legal clash in which Trump called for Boasberg’s impeachment and Boasberg threatened to hold administration officials in contempt.
Gallagher in April ordered the return of one of those men, Daniel Lozano Camargo, finding that he had been deported to El Salvador despite being shielded from removal by a year-old legal settlement. On Friday, the Trump administration said Lozano — identified in court papers by the alias Cristian — would be free to return to the United States to continue his immigration proceedings “should he wish to return.”
The legal brawl over the Trump administration’s summary deportation of more than 130 Venezuelan men in March — after Trump invoked little-used war powers and labeled them members of the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua — had at times consumed the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. It drew attention to what courts described as the Trump administration’s flagrant abuses of due process, which may have ensnared innocent people among the larger group of deportees.
Several cases related to those men and others fearful they may face a similar fate had been advancing through the courts and led to a slew of legal rebukes, as well as a brushback from the Supreme Court, which found the men had not been provided with a meaningful chance to contest their deportation.
