After being ilegally deported and imprisoned in El Salvador, they will now be sent back to the oppressive regime they fled in the first place, in exchange for ten Americans detained by the Venezuelan government.
Some 252 Venezuelans illegally deported by the Trump Administration to imprisonment in El Salvador have now been sent back to Venezuela, in exchange for the release of ten Americans detained by the Venezuelan government. Trump had invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to do the deportations.
This is a bad deal on many levels: It incentivizes further hostage-taking by Venezuela, it returns people who fled oppression back to the very same regime that oppressed them, and it certainly does not stop the administration’s illegal and unjust invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.
I’ve said it before (e.g. – here and here), and I will say it again: hostage exchanges are a terrible idea, because they incentivize more hostage-taking. This deal is likely to incentivize Venezuela’s socialist dictatorship to seize more Americans.
In one way, this deal is actually worse than the usual hostage exchange, where a democratic state sends captured terrorists or other operatives back to a terrorist group like Hamas or an authoritarian regime like Russia. Here, the men we are sending back are innocent people who fled an oppressive government, now being forcibly returned to it.
