The Trump administration resumed deportation flights to Venezuela on Monday, sending two planeloads of illegal migrants and gangbangers back for the first time in nearly a year — but there’s plenty more to go.
“Repatriation flights to Venezuela have resumed, with Ambassador @RichardGrenell overseeing the first two flights. MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN,” the Trump White House tweeted.
Roughly 200 Venezuelans were sent home on the flights.
But the one-way tickets back are just a drop in the bucket in terms of what could come — given that the Biden administration ushered in more than 1 million Venezuelan migrants, including Tren de Aragua gang members, across the southern border.
The number of Venezuelan migrants roaming the US with deportation orders remains unknown, but there are roughly 600,000 who could be kicked back to their home country since President Trump recently revoked their temporary protected status as part of his massive immigrfation crackdown.
Venezuela sent its own planes from its national airline Conviasa to carry Monday’s deportees, who included members of the prison gang Tren de Aragua, from El Paso, Texas, the Maduro regime said.
Venezuela said the planes also carried people who fled the South American nation “because of economic sanctions and the campaigns of psychological warfare against our country.”
Images shared by the Venezuelan government showed some men stepping off the planes with their hands in the air in apparent jubilation.
But Venezuelan dissident Patricia Andrade, who runs the Miami-based Venezuela Awareness Foundation, told The Post that the display was all part of a Maduro regime “show” that appeared to be “directed at the Trump administration to avoid any measures and sanctions.
“They tried to create a spectacle, pretending to show another face of the regime that is murderous and a violator of human rights … We must remain alert,” she said.
The Maduro regime had blocked deportation flights from the US for nearly a year as waves of Venezuelan migrants and TdA members poured into America.
Andrade said many of the gangbangers had fled to the US after Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro let them out of the country’s prisons.
“Many came to the US taking advantage of Biden’s open border policies,” Andrade said.
TdA’s presence expanded its presence across the US, establishing sex and gun trafficking rings, carrying out high-profile murders, including the killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, and smuggling pink cocaine, known as “Tusi.”
In an effort to crack down on the gang, the Trump administration started sending planeloads of Tren de Aragua members to Guantanamo Bay to ready them for deportation flights.
President Trump recently announced the US’s agreement with Venezuela to resume removal flights carrying deportees — including the gangbangers.
“We are in the process of removing record numbers of illegal aliens from all countries, and all countries have agreed to accept these illegal aliens back,” the president wrote on Truth Social on Saturday.
“Venezuela has agreed to receive, back into their country, all Venezuela illegal aliens who were encamped in the U.S., including gang members of Tren de Aragua.”
The flight deal came out of a recent meeting US envoy Richard Grenell had with Maduro in Venezuela. When Grenell returned from the meeting, he brought back six American citizens who had been held by the dictatorship.
“The only award for Maduro was my physical presence, the first senior US official to visit the country in years,” Grenell told the Washington Post over the weekend. “It was a big gift to him to have a visit by an envoy of President Trump.”
The previous last US deportation flight to Venezuela was in January 2024, just before the Madura regime blocked the flights in the face of new sanctions from the Biden administration, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. Before that, the feds were deporting between six and seven thousand Venezuelans back home each month.
The Trump administration’s new deal with Venezuela marks a major step in its mass deportation effort, which included the arrests of 11,000 people in its first 18 days.
“I have a feeling that we’re going to be able to remove a lot more people a lot more quickly,” a senior ICE official recently told The Post.
