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Rubio rejects judge's options for Venezuelans illegally deported from US
He said the United States doesn't want to complicate issues with the new leadership.
Rubio rejects judge’s options for Venezuelans illegally deported from US - POLITICO
— (@oc88.bsky.social) 2026-01-13T09:57:56.191Z
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Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday that it is impossible for the United States to retrieve 137 Venezuelan men who were illegally deported in March after President Donald Trump invoked wartime powers to deliver them abruptly to El Salvador.
Those men were subsequently sent to their native Venezuela in a prisoner swap last July. And the United States’ decision to surgically remove Nicolas Maduro from power earlier this month has left relations between the two countries in a “delicate” state of flux, the top U.S. diplomat wrote in a two-page legal declaration.
Rubio said any effort to inject the fate of the 137 men into nascent negotiations with Venezuela’s new leader, Delcy Rodriguez, would “risk material damage to U.S. foreign policy interests.”
“The United States remains involved to see changes in Venezuela that are beneficial to the United States and that it also expects will be beneficial for the people of Venezuela, who have suffered tremendously. These efforts entail ongoing, intensive, and extraordinarily delicate engagement with elements within the regime of Maduro’s successor, so-called Acting President Delcy Rodríguez,” Rubio wrote, without offering further detail on how U.S. interests were likely to be undercut by negotiating over the deportees.
The secretary’s characterization of the fraught relationship between Venezuela and the United States came in response to an inquiry from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ruled last year that the abrupt deportation of the 137 men violated their due process rights and defied his own order to keep them in U.S. custody. Boasberg has ruled that despite the men’s return to Venezuela, they must be afforded the due process they were denied last year.
Those men were subsequently sent to their native Venezuela in a prisoner swap last July. And the United States’ decision to surgically remove Nicolas Maduro from power earlier this month has left relations between the two countries in a “delicate” state of flux, the top U.S. diplomat wrote in a two-page legal declaration.
Rubio said any effort to inject the fate of the 137 men into nascent negotiations with Venezuela’s new leader, Delcy Rodriguez, would “risk material damage to U.S. foreign policy interests.”
“The United States remains involved to see changes in Venezuela that are beneficial to the United States and that it also expects will be beneficial for the people of Venezuela, who have suffered tremendously. These efforts entail ongoing, intensive, and extraordinarily delicate engagement with elements within the regime of Maduro’s successor, so-called Acting President Delcy Rodríguez,” Rubio wrote, without offering further detail on how U.S. interests were likely to be undercut by negotiating over the deportees.
The secretary’s characterization of the fraught relationship between Venezuela and the United States came in response to an inquiry from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ruled last year that the abrupt deportation of the 137 men violated their due process rights and defied his own order to keep them in U.S. custody. Boasberg has ruled that despite the men’s return to Venezuela, they must be afforded the due process they were denied last year.
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