On July 18, more than 250 Venezuelan immigrants held since March in a Salvadoran prison at the behest of the Trump administration were released in a prisoner swap for 10 U.S. citizens and permanent residents jailed by the Venezuelan government.
For the men and their families, it could not have been a more joyous moment. It had been months since they last heard from their loved ones, not knowing if they were alive or dead.
For the respective governments involved, it was also a time to crow.
After all, it was President Donald Trump’s “leadership and commitment to the American people” that freed the imprisoned Americans. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro called it a “perfect day” for his country, and blame for the “kidnapped Venezuelan migrants” was put on his opponents “on the Venezuelan right.”
Even self-described “world’s coolest dictator” (and apparently America’s next top jailer), Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, got a little self-love in, boasting on X of the “months of negotiations with a tyrannical regime” that El Salvador had engaged in to help get the Americans home.
Well, bully for authoritarianism.
For the rest of us — for those who believe in the rule of law and still hold out hope for the American Experiment — July 18 may be remembered as a dark day.
Unless the administration is held accountable for the blatantly illegal way it upended these immigrants’ lives, the episode will mark a new low in America’s slide toward illiberal democracy under President Trump.
Undue process
To be sure, the release of all these men is good news. Most of the freed Americans were wrongfully detained and accused of being involved in plots to destabilize Venezuela.
Their arrests were part of a transparent, cynical ploy by the Maduro regime to use these men like bargaining chips as the country struggles to get out from under oil sanctions that have contributed to the nation’s deep economic problems.
The illegal detentions were also par for the course for a government where every branch is controlled by Maduro loyalists, and which routinely jails its own dissidents. (The swap included 80 political prisoners, but there are conflicting reports on whether they have all been released.)
There is no question that Venezuela’s actions are morally and legally indefensible. But what about America’s?
The more than 250 Venezuelans who ended up in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, were sent there by the Trump administration on March 15. They were deported with little or no due process under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, accused of being dangerous criminals and members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump declared a terrorist organization.
In sending the men to a place notorious for its poor conditions and inhumane treatment of prisoners — in a $6 million deal with El Salvador’s Bukele — the administration called the detainees “the worst of the worst.”
But reporting by several media organizations quickly put the lie to those claims, with ProPublica finding the government’s own records show that it knew the vast majority of the men had not been convicted of any violent crime in the U.S., and only a few had committed crimes abroad.
Most of the men were also not very hard to find, as they were either never released from immigration custody while they pursued asylum claims or their cases were moving through the immigration system.
Take the four Venezuelans identified as having ties to Pennsylvania before they were sent to CECOT.
Joén Manuel Suárez Fuentes, 23, was detained during a traffic stop and charged with driving without a license. Ileis Villegas Freites, 28, had been sentenced to one year of probation for retail theft in Montgomery County.
Miguel Gregorio Vaamondes Barrios, 32, had a series of shoplifting arrests, including an open theft case in Pennsylvania, and was convicted of petit larceny in Nassau County, N.Y. Luis Jean Pier Gualdrón, 22, had a pending asylum application when he was deported. He had pleaded guilty to harassment in Northampton County, Pa., and was sentenced to three to six months in jail.
While some may argue that only people of unimpeachable moral character should be welcomed in America — and having a criminal record can disqualify immigrants from being granted legal status — these men were far from the “monsters” and members of a gang who the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said “rape, maim, and murder for sport.”
And even if they had been charged with being the worst of the worst, under the Constitution, the government still has to prove its case against anyone it seeks to deprive of “life, liberty, or property.”
In deporting the Venezuelans, the administration acted recklessly and lawlessly, ignoring not only the letter of the law but also directly disregarding an order from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, barring the government from transferring the men to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act.
That the men are now free — although it is highly likely some have been placed right back in the dangerous situations under an oppressive regime they were fleeing in the first place — does not absolve the Trump administration of wrongdoing.
Test case
Throughout the entire ordeal, the government has placed itself above the law.
Seeking to make good on Trump’s promise of mass deportations and tall tales of criminal immigrants running rampant, administration officials engaged in the kind of abuse of power that is un-American on its face.
The government selected a group of men under suspect criteria, identifying many of them as gang members based on the discredited belief that they had identifying tattoos. It then disappeared them, sending them to a foreign prison known for its brutal conditions, where they were unable to communicate with their families or lawyers.
To this day, officials have not even released a full list of names of the people they sent to El Salvador. What is publicly available has been cobbled together from families speaking out and media reports. It is unclear if everyone deported has been accounted for.
The government consistently defied court interventions, claiming that once the men were in El Salvador, they had no direct control over what would happen to them. The prisoner swap makes this particular lie only more blatant.
Most alarming is that there is nothing stopping them from doing it again — or keeping them from doing it to whomever they want. Already, Trump has mused about sending Americans to El Salvador.
“The homegrowns are next,” he told Bukele during the Salvadoran leader’s April visit to the White House. “You gotta build about five more places. … It’s not big enough.”
Having already violated the Fifth Amendment guaranteeing due process, it’s not much of a stretch for the administration to ignore the Eighth Amendment’s protection from cruel and unusual punishment.
America cannot move on from what happened to the Venezuelan immigrants. Their plight cannot be swept away in the flood of scandals and outrages that regularly flow from the White House.
The Trump administration cannot be allowed to do this to anyone ever again.
