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What Next - How Trump Brought Home a Murderer

Slate Daily Feed

Slate

Society & Culture, News, Business

3.9 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Characteristic of this administration’s over-the-top but never-thought-out immigration enforcement, Trump traded more than 250 Venezuelans who had been deported to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison for 10 Americans who were being held prisoner in Venezuela—including a man convicted of a triple homicide. 

Guest:  Jonathan Blitzer, staff writer at the New Yorker and author of Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis.

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Podcast production by Ethan Oberman, Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.



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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi, this is Ava from Vanta.

0:05.0

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0:10.1

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0:16.0

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0:20.2

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0:21.3

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0:28.0

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0:37.1

It was a classic Summer Friday news dump.

0:40.7

This time last month, several outlets started reporting that the United States government

0:45.1

had planes in the air. There was a massive prisoner swap underway. More than 250 Venezuelan

0:53.1

migrants who had been sent from the U.S. to a prison in El Salvador

0:57.4

were being freed in exchange for 10 American citizens and permanent residents who were imprisoned in Venezuela.

1:05.1

People read about or saw or heard in some way about this prisoner exchange that resulted in the release of these men

1:12.5

to Venezuela and think in some sense that that is the end of this story.

1:21.1

That's Jonathan Blitzer. He is an immigration reporter for the New Yorker.

1:25.0

The story he's talking about is one of the first major

1:28.6

scandals of Donald Trump's second term. Earlier in the spring, the Trump administration seemed to

1:35.0

defy a court order deporting these men to El Salvador. My big fear in this is that people kind of

1:41.9

see a loop being closed when these men are released.

1:46.8

But I actually think that that news really just compounds all of the questions on the table.

1:52.1

In the month since these men have been returned to Venezuela, we're getting first-hand accounts

1:56.5

of what it was like inside Sikont.

...

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