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what could go wrong: deporting refugees from a dictatorship back to the dictator [1]
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Date: 2025-02-10
Two deportation flights are set to arrive in Venezuela on Monday, the first to land in the South American country since the Trump administration’s agreement last month with the authoritarian government of Nicolás Maduro.
The Maduro government sent two planes from the Venezuelan airline Conviasa to pick up deported Venezuelans and return them to their home country, according to a Maduro government statement. In its agreement with the Trump administration’s special missions envoy, Richard Grenell, the Maduro government agreed to send Venezuelan planes to transport the deportees, Maduro officials said.
The Maduro government said it had been informed by the Trump administration that some of the returning Venezuelans have links to criminal groups, including the Tren de Aragua gang. Those people “will be subjected to a rigorous investigation as soon as they set foot on Venezuelan soil,” the Maduro government said in a statement.
More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country since Maduro took office in 2013, fleeing from economic, political and humanitarian turmoil. Hundreds of thousands of them have migrated to the United States.
Venezuela stopped accepting deportations last year after the Biden administration reimposed sanctions it had briefly lifted against the government.
The Trump administration cast Grenell’s trip as a win, both because Maduro agreed to accept deportation flights and because the special missions envoy returned with six Americans who had been detained in the United States. But critics argued the trip helped legitimize an autocratic regime.
Human rights defenders and even some members of the Trump administration have said deporting Venezuelans to the authoritarian state would put them at risk of violence and political repression.
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