‘I looked at Mr. Maduro, and I said, “We’d like to have our hostages home, and I want to bring home six today,”’ Grenell said.
OXON HILL, Md.—The Trump administration did not give Venezuela anything in exchange for the six American hostages that were freed last month, Presidential Envoy for Special Missions Richard Grenell said on Feb. 20.
Speaking with The Epoch Times at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Grenell described his visit to Caracas with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. He said his goals were to free the prisoners and get Venezuela to accept and pay for repatriation flights of its illegal immigrants from the United States.
“I went down for the day and tried to, through diplomatic means, get the Venezuelans to pay for planes that would come up to the United States to take their citizens who are in our country illegally, who crossed the southern border illegally,” Grenell said. The Trump administration, he added, had isolated roughly 250 Venezuelan illegal immigrants who were suspected members of the Tren de Aragua gang.
“At the same time, I looked at Mr. Maduro, and I said, ‘We’d like to have our hostages home, and I want to bring home six today,’” Grenell said.
While Maduro had initially told him to wait until the morning to discuss the hostages, Grenell replied that he would be boarding his Air Force plane soon, “and I hope that you can look this list over and deliver six.”
Within roughly two and a half hours, cars arrived carrying six of the American prisoners, still wearing black hoods over their heads.
“They pulled the black hood off [a hostage’s] head. I could see it in his eyes that he was very afraid. Didn’t know what was happening. He would later tell me that he didn’t know if he was going to get shot … if he was going to another prison, he didn’t know what was happening,” Grenell said.
After telling the man he was an American diplomat here to take him home, the man burst into tears and hugged Grenell.
“It was probably the greatest day of my 25-year career, to be able to be there and see humanity in such a low place, and to be so excited to have their situation changed in an instant from what they thought,” he said.
By Jacob Burg and Jan Jekielek
