Venezuelans deported from the US to El Salvador in a case that has become a legal flashpoint for Donald Trump’s US administration had signed documents agreeing to be returned to their home country, according to families of some of the deportees and a campaign group.
Two families of men on the now notorious Saturday flights to El Salvador told the FT their relatives had signed what appeared to be voluntary deportation orders in exchange for returning to Venezuela sooner.
But their families later spotted them in videos posted by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele that showed them in his country in chains, claiming they were violent gang members.
Kelvi Zambrano, co-ordinator for the US-based Venezuelan non-profit Coalition for Human Rights and Democracy, said his organisation represented three more Venezuelans who signed agreements to return home and are now missing. Their names all appear on a US government list of deportees sent to El Salvador that was published by CBS News.
It is not clear how many of the 238 Venezuelans flown to a maximum security prison in El Salvador from Texas on Saturday had signed the papers to return to their home country.
The flights took off just as a US judge sought to halt the deportations, and have become the subject of a high-stakes court case in which lawyers for two civil rights groups are contesting President Trump’s use of wartime powers to accelerate the deportations and bypass due process protections.
Zambrano and the families were uncertain about the precise nature of the legal documents that the deportees had signed, though two US processes — removal orders and voluntary departures — involve people consenting to leave or be deported under specified conditions.
Greg Chen, a senior director at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said either would have been “highly unusual” in this context.
Fritzgeralth Cornejo, 26, signed a deportation agreement and called his family in Venezuela on Saturday to say he would soon be home. “We waited for him to arrive on Sunday but he never arrived,” said Fritzgeralth’s brother Carlos Cornejo. “By Monday we realised something was wrong as he was still incommunicado.”
Then a friend told them she had seen her boyfriend, another migrant and friend of Fritzgeralth, in the videos published by Bukele.
“She told us that my brother may also be in the same place, because they both made the same call on the same day [to their families in Venezuela],” Carlos said. “They were told they were going to be deported to Caracas, but they never arrived.”
Escarlet Yamarte said her nephew, Mervin Yamarte-Fernández, “said he was going to sign a voluntary deportation order to Venezuela, not El Salvador” but then was also spotted in the videos.
“He has no criminal record here or in the US,” she added. “They took him prisoner, mistaking him for someone else, and told him they would investigate him. If he had nothing to do with it, they said they would release him.”
Both Cornejo and Yamarte-Fernández appear on the US government list of deportees sent to El Salvador.
The men appear to have become a bargaining chip in tensions between Washington and Venezuela’s authoritarian regime, which previously agreed to accept deportations of migrants from the US.
That agreement fell through in recent weeks after the US cancelled a licence for Chevron to operate in Venezuela.
The three flights from Texas to El Salvador have been the subject of intense scrutiny. Two planes left while a legal hearing was in progress, while a third left shortly after an order to halt the flights.
The US government maintains that the Venezuelans were members of the Tren de Aragua drug cartel, which it has declared a foreign terrorist organisation, although it has offered no supporting evidence in court to show they belonged to the group.
Chief Judge James Boasberg of the US District Court for the District of Columbia has repeatedly pushed justice department lawyers to reveal the precise timing and passengers on the flights, calling their responses “woefully insufficient”.
The government wrote that disclosing the information risks “subjecting the diplomatic relationships at issue to unacceptable uncertainty,” and says it is still deciding whether to invoke state secrets privilege to shield it from the court.
“The secrecy is really confounding, because so much of this data is available on public sites,” said Tom Cartwright, an immigration advocate. “It’s very easy to monitor these flight activities, even in real time.”
Flight records show the three planes left Texas between 5.25pm and 7.36pm Eastern time for Soto Cano air base in Honduras, which is jointly operated by the US military. Cartwright said the stop raised questions.
“There’s really no reason for them to stop there, particularly for several hours,” he said. “These planes can easily fly directly to El Salvador, they don’t need to refuel.”
“One speculation is that there was to be a transfer to Venezuela . . . and for whatever reason, that fell apart, and the planes went on to El Salvador,” Cartwright said.
“Another explanation is that El Salvador needed more time: maybe the planes were rushed out of the US before the court hearing and they needed to be parked for a few hours while El Salvador readied their media and military apparatus.”
The White House, State Department and Department of Justice did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Videos posted by Bukele on X show heavily-armed guards leading the deportees off the planes in El Salvador, shaving their heads and placing them in the Centre for the Confinement of Terrorists, one of the world’s largest maximum security facilities, built to hold prisoners of Bukele’s crackdown on gang violence.
Many of those prisoners have been detained under emergency procedures that human rights groups say bypass due process and amount to arbitrary arrest.
The deportations were the first under an agreement between Bukele and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on February 3, in which El Salvador agreed to detain “violent illegal immigrants . . . from any country” in exchange for payment.
The White House has also pursued agreements to deport migrants to their home countries, including under a deal struck with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by US special envoy Richard Grenell on January 31. At least three flights carried deportees to Caracas in February.
Maduro halted the flights on March 8 after US cancelled the Chevron licence. On March 13, Grenell said on X the deportation agreement would be reinstated, but on Tuesday, Rubio blamed Maduro’s government for delays and threatened further sanctions.
I am pleased to announce that Venezuela has agreed to resume flights to pick up their citizens who broke U.S. Immigration Laws and entered the U.S. illegally.
The flights will resume Friday.
— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) March 13, 2025
Venezuela is obligated to accept its repatriated citizens from the U.S. This is not an issue for debate or negotiation. Nor does it merit any reward. Unless the Maduro regime accepts a consistent flow of deportation flights, without further excuses or delays, the U.S. will impose…
— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) March 18, 2025
Federal Aviation Administration flight plans show a flight by Venezuelan flag carrier Conviasa was scheduled to land Sunday morning at Biggs Army Airfield in El Paso, the headquarters of the US Border Patrol’s tactical unit and the site of many deportation operations. But the flight appears to have never left Caracas, according to flight-tracking data and departure lists.
Maduro — who was inaugurated for a third term in January after claiming victory in a vote considered fraudulent by independent observers and many western democracies — has cast himself as a defender of the deportees, many of whom originally left Venezuela to escape his government’s oppression.
He met with their family members on Thursday, while a banner headline on state TV described them as “kidnapped in El Salvador”.
Jorge Rodríguez, head of Venezuela’s National Assembly, said after the meeting: “We’ve hired the best law firms in El Salvador to defend the young people there and secure their freedom . . . Venezuela is prepared to repatriate all Venezuelan migrants deported from the United States, but face obstacles from the US administration.”
Chen said any agreements signed by deportees must be “done in a voluntary and knowing way” and questioned whether all the Venezuelans had adequate access to lawyers.
Lawyers and other advocates representing the Venezuelan deportees are working to unearth more information about their clients.
“They were detained while serving an order to appear before ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] where they were going to talk to an official about their immigration status, and when they arrived at the agency, they were arbitrarily deprived of their liberty,” Zambrano said.
He said he has been unable to contact his clients since they were deported: “No authority has provided information as to the whereabouts of these people, so we can consider this a case of forced disappearance.”
Additional reporting by James Politi and Stefania Palma in Washington; cartography by Chris Campbell
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