The White House confirmed on Monday the resumption of repatriation flights of Venezuelan migrants directly to Venezuela, after the agreement reached with the Venezuelan government.
The White House reported on its social networks that President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Ambassador Richard Grenelll, personally supervised the first two flights.
“Let’s make the United States safe again,” said the White House in his message, in which they shared a photograph of the moment when the first deportees are uploaded to a plane of the Venezuelan state airline, Conviasa.
The White House attached a photograph that shows Grenell by watching how a group of Venezuelan migrants, with handcuffed hands, board an airline of the Venezuelan airline conviesa, monitored by migration agents.
He also said that after the conversations between the Venezuelan government and Grenell, it was always made clear that “any transfer of Venezuelans should be done with absolute respect for their dignity and human rights.”
“Consequently, we formulate the proposal that we would have Venezuelan airplanes to search and transfer migrants who return to their homeland,” added the text.
The Ministry also reported that it was notified by the United States government that “some people” who travel back to the South American country, “are allegedly linked to criminal activities, or would be involved in the actions of the criminal band of Aragua.”
On January 31, Grenell went to Caracas after requested an audience with the President of the Republic, Nicolás Maduro. The meeting addressed issues of “migration, negative impact of economic sanctions against Venezuela and American citizens involved crimes in the national territory and integrity of the Venezuelan political system”, according to a statement released in its telegram channel by Venezuelan Chancellor, Yván Gil.
On the other hand, Tom Homan, appointed by President Donald Trump to address migratory affairs, advanced the previous week that deportation flights could start at a maximum period of 30 days. “It will happen within the next 30 days, and I cannot tell him how many; we are still working on all those details,” he said in an interview with The New York Times.
At the same time, Maduro said that in the meeting with Grenelll, he raised the construction of Zero Agenda with the North American Nation, which allows to define “a new beginning in bilateral relations”, broken since 2019, when the White House decided to ignore the local authorities in POST of an ‘interim’ government headed by the fugitive of justice, Juan Guaidó.
