Venezuela sends planes to US to return migrants, signalling improving ties

Flights of Illegal Aliens to Venezuela Resume, the White House said in a post on the X platform, saying they were overseen by Richard Grennell, a top Trump advisor who recently traveled to Venezuela

Two Venezuelan planes flew to the United States on Monday and returned home with deported Venezuelans, signaling a possible improvement in relations between longtime diplomatic adversaries and a victory for President Donald Trump in his efforts to get more countries to take their people back.

The US and Venezuelan governments separately confirmed the flights by Venezuelan airline Conviasa without saying how many were aboard or disclosing their routes.

Flights of Illegal Aliens to Venezuela Resume, the White House said in a post on the X platform, saying they were overseen by Richard Grennell, a top Trump adviser who recently traveled to Venezuela.

The Venezuelan government confirmed the flights in a statement that took issue with an ill-intentioned and false narrative around the presence of members of the Tren de Aragua gang in the United States. It said most Venezuelan immigrants are decent, hard-working people and that US officials sought to stigmatise the South American country.

Deportation flights from the US to Venezuela were halted for years but restarted for a short time under the Biden administration in October 2023 when a jet transported about 130 migrants home. Venezuelans began showing up at the US border with Mexico in large numbers in 2021 and are currently one of the largest nationalities entering illegally. 

Monday's flights came days after the first flights of immigrants to a US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio struck agreements with El Salvador and Guatemala for those countries to take people who were not their citizens.

A federal judge in New Mexico on Sunday preemptively blocked the transfer of three Venezuelan men to Guantanamo Bay. In their request for a temporary halt, lawyers for the men said their clients fit the profile of those the administration has prioritised for detention in Guantanamo, i.e. Venezuelan men detained in the El Paso area with (false) charges of connections with the Tren de Aragua gang.

Trump wrote after Grennell's visit that the Maduro government had agreed to receive "all Venezuela illegal aliens who were encamped in the US, including gang members of Tren de Aragua," and pay for their transportation. Six Americans held in Venezuela were released at the time.

In its statement Monday, the Venezuelan government didn't comment on any future flights.