Deportation flights carrying Venezuelan migrants were scheduled to resume from the United States to the authoritarian country on Wednesday, officials in Caracas said, despite President Donald Trump’s warning over the weekend that Venezuela’s airspace should be considered closed as the threat of a U.S. attack loomed.
Caracas said it granted a request for an Immigration and Customs Enforcement flight to land, marking a rare moment of cooperation between the Trump administration and Venezuelan authorities amid weeks of rising tensions.
According to a Telegram post from Venezuela’s foreign minister, a deportation flight carrying 379 people operated by Eastern Airlines was granted permission to land at Simón Bolívar International Airport near Caracas on Wednesday.
Trump has used increasingly combustible rhetoric to describe Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in recent weeks, refusing to rule out sending U.S. troops to the country and continuing to conduct military strikes against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea. The administration has alleged that Maduro and his aides are the leaders of a drug cartel that is sending narcotics to the United States. Last month, the State Department designated the “Cartel de los Soles,” which is neither a formal organization nor a cartel, as a foreign terrorist organization, potentially paving the way for a legal justification to launch strikes against Venezuelan government targets.
On Saturday, Trump said commercial airlines should consider Venezuelan airspace closed, further ramping up pressure on Maduro. The White House does not have the legal authority to close another country’s airspace, though such a move can be a precursor to airstrikes.
Venezuelan authorities said Trump’s directive — which it described as illegal — had effectively also suspended the deportation flightsnegotiated by the White House with the Maduro governmentthis year. Since February, Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry said nearly 14,000 Venezuelans had been returned to the country from the United States on 75 flights under that agreement.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Wednesday.
In announcing the deal in February, Trump said his administration would prioritize deporting criminals and gang members but could eventually include hundreds of thousands of others. Last month, the Trump administration revoked the temporary protected status granted by the Biden administration to over 600,000 Venezuelans living in the United States, subjecting them to potential deportation proceedings.
Last year, Maduro, who has been in power since 2013, claimed victory in the country’s presidential election despite accusations of brazen fraud. The Biden administration said there was “overwhelming evidence” that opposition leader Edmundo González had won, and a Washington Post review of tallies collected by the opposition found that González probably received twice as many votes as Maduro. In an interview with The Washington Post in January, the exiled González — whom the United States considered to be Venezuela’s president-elect — said he and his team had urged U.S. officials to send Venezuelan deportees to a third country rather than striking a deal with Maduro.
The Trump administration’s push to deport Venezuelans also marks a reversal from his first term, when his administration largely granted the group a reprieve while declaring Maduro illegitimate and promoting a previous opposition leader as the rightful president. At the time, Trump called the situation in their country “catastrophic.” As a senator in 2022, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in letter that deporting Venezuelans would be a “death sentence.”
The United States began amassing military forces and assets in the region in August, raising the specter of an attack. Since September, U.S. forces have killed more than 80 people in strikes on boats in the Caribbean that the administration alleges are ferrying drugs to the United States — raising bipartisan concerns over their legality. This week, the family of a 42-year-old Colombian fisherman killed in one strike filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, alleging the U.S. committed an “extra-judicial killing.”
In an attempt to provide legal justification for the strikes, the Trump administration notified Congress in October that the U.S. is in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels. Officials have said the actions against the alleged traffickers are “fully consistent” with the laws of war and “taken in defense of vital U.S. national interests.”
The post Venezuela lets deportation flights resume despite Trump’s airspace threat appeared first on Washington Post.
