More than 250 Venezuelans deported in March by the Trump administration and flown to El Salvador’s high security “counterterrorism” prison were sent home Friday in exchange for 1o U.S. citizens imprisoned in Venezuela by the government of President Nicolás Maduro.

In a carefully coordinated series of events following months of negotiations by the State Department, the Venezuelans were bused from the prison to El Salvador’s international airport Friday morning and picked up by an aircraft sent from Venezuela.

Simultaneously, a U.S.-chartered Gulfstream plane departed a small Georgia airport carrying U.S. diplomatic officials and medical personnel en route to Caracas.

In a statement to reporters as the U.S. aircraft cleared Venezuelan airspace at around 3:30 p.m., a senior administration official said, “Thanks to the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Rubio, 10 U.S. nationals who were detained by the Maduro regime are on their way home.”

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the White House, said that there are now no more Americans detained in Venezuela. Although charges against them were unclear in some cases, Maduro has often accused the CIA and American mercenaries of infiltrating Venezuela in plots to overthrow his government. Their names were not immediately released.

The State Department has never provided a complete list of U.S. citizens deemed unjustly imprisoned by Caracas. It has long warned against travel to Venezuela, where such arrests are frequently used as bargaining tools by Maduro. Ten Americans were freed in late 2023 in exchange for the Biden administration’s release of a U.S. imprisoned close ally of Maduro. Seven - six in February and one in May - have previously been freed this year in deals negotiated by the Trump administration.

Earlier Friday, a plane arrived in Caracas carrying seven young children that Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said had been “kidnapped” by the United States when they were separated from their deported parents. The plane was one of twice-weekly U.S. deportation flights that Cabello, who welcomed the children at the airport, said had returned more than 7,000 Venezuelans this year. Return of the children was part of the exchange agreement, according to one person informed of the deal who was not authorized to discuss it.

The senior official said the swap also included the release of an unspecified number of domestic political prisoners inside Venezuela.

Friday’s swap was a remarkable development after President Donald Trump did not follow a court order - issued as the planes were in flight or preparing for takeoff - to halt and reverse most of the removals in a high-stakes early bid to claim executive power and prove he was serious about ridding the country of illegal migrants. The administration never provided a complete list of their identities, and told a series of courts it had no power to force or even ask El Salvador to return them.

Many of the Venezuelan prisoners were sent on the March 15 flights within days of being rounded up at their U.S. homes or workplaces. They arrived in shackles at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center under an unpublicized agreement between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whose government was paid to incarcerate them.

The senior official said that Bukele’s offer provided the “opportunity” to initiate negotiations for an exchange.

Their removal launched a torrent of legal challenges to Trump’s sudden invocation of a 1798 wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to justify more than half of the removals. Federal courts have halted deportations under the act now, although they have issued differing opinions on whether Trump has the power to use it. The Supreme Court has not ruled on the question but has said that the law requires potential deportees be given an opportunity to challenge their removal.

The rest of the deported prisoners were sent to El Salvador under regular deportation procedures. The administration said, without presenting evidence, that many were violent criminals. As the Venezuelans simply disappeared, none was given an opportunity challenge their detention or deportation and family members were not informed. Inmates at the prison are not allowed any contact with the outside world.

Maduro had demanded the return of the Venezuelans, whom he charged had been “kidnapped,” as a point of national honor, after Bukele offered in April to send them home if Maduro would free all U.S. citizens he was holding as well as dozens of imprisoned domestic political opponents.

But an exchange being negotiated by the State Department in May was scotched when it collided with separate negotiations being secretly conducted by presidential envoy Richard Grenell, who told Trump he had persuaded Maduro to resume suspended deportation flights to Caracas in return for release of the Americans. The State Department eventually resumed talks leading to the final deal.

For the returned Venezuelans, the agreement ended four months of confinement in what both Salvadoran and U.S. human rights groups have called one of the most brutal facilities in the hemisphere, deprived of access to lawyers or their families. Questioned about his justification days after the deportations, Trump told reporters the Venezuelans were “bad people … When you look at the crimes they have committed, you don’t get worse than that. These are … drug dealers, drug lords, people from mental institutions.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, on a visit to the prison in late March, filmed and posted a video warning potential migrants of their fate as she stood before dozens of shirtless men with shaved heads, stacked on three levels of shelves inside a cell. They should remain in the megaprison, built to house 80,000, “for the rest of their lives,” she later said.

Trump claimed authority to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, which requires invasion by a foreign power, by saying most of the deportees were members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang active in the United States that he had designated as a terrorist group. The administration said its activities constituted an invasion under the act since the gang was under the control of the Maduro government - something U.S. intelligence later put in doubt.

In the Friday briefing, the senior administration official said “all” of the 252 deportees returned to Venezuela were “members of Tren de Aragua,” a sweeping assertion for which the administration has never provided evidence.

But numerous news and court filings have indicated that many of the Venezuelans were not violent criminals, much less members of the gang. Some had been legally living in the United States - including Kilmar Abrego García, one of 23 Salvadorans included on the flights. When a federal judge in Maryland ordered him returned, the administration said it had no power to do so, since all of the deportees were now under the “custody of a foreign nation” and the matter was out of U.S. hands.

Abrego, a Maryland resident, was returned to the United States last month, only to face federal charges of migrant smuggling, which he denies. U.S. court filings last week by lawyers for more than 100 Venezuelans challenging their deportations and imprisonment in El Salvador included an acknowledgment by Bukele officials that the United States, not El Salvador, has “the jurisdiction and legal responsibility” for them.

Schmidt reported from Milwaukee. Justin Jouvenal and Maria Sacchetti contributed to this report.