Venezuela on Thursday flew home hundreds of citizens from Mexico, most of them US-bound migrants whose journey came to a premature end as Washington cracks down on undocumented foreigners.
A plane operated by sanctioned state airline Conviasa touched down at Maiquetia International Airport in the morning, AFP observed.
Venezuela’s government said there were 311 migrants on board.
It was the fourth group of Venezuelan migrants to return home since US President Donald Trump took office in January.
Under the government’s “Vuelta a la patria” (Return to the Homeland), two planes brought migrants home from Texas, and another from Honduras — some 600 people in total.
The Honduras group had first been sent by the United States to its military base in Guantanamo, Cuba.
Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro met Trump envoy Richard Grenell in Caracas in January, agreeing to receive deported migrants and offering to provide the transport.
The agreement was interpreted as a shift towards pragmatic engagement with Washington, with which Caracas severed ties in 2019.
Soon after the Grenell meeting, however, the Trump administration accused Maduro of reneging on the deal and canceled permission for US oil giant Chevron to operate in Venezuela.
And last weekend, Trump invoked rarely used wartime legislation to fly 238 Venezuelans to a notoriously harsh prison in El Salvador, alleging they were members of a violent gang.
The deportations took place despite a US federal judge granting a temporary suspension of the expulsion order.
Maduro on Monday urged the United Nations to protect the rights of the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador, who he said had been “kidnapped”.
On Thursday, the State Department said on X that Maduro “must stop misleading and schedule consistent, weekly, repatriation flights.”
Some eight million Venezuelans are estimated to have left the country since 2014 in search of a better life.
Venezuela’s economy contracted 80 percent in ten years under Maduro, who blames US sanctions against his government — widely regarded as illegitimate after two successive election he is alleged to have stolen.
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