Samantha Schmidt

President Donald Trump’s announcement marked an abrupt reversal of his administration’s outreach to Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.

Trump’s hard-line immigration policies have sparked a reverse migration wave, with migrants traveling south through Panama and Colombia.

Some of the hundreds of Colombians deported in the first weeks of Trump’s presidency said they had only seen the United States from the inside of detention centers.

The fighting between two armed drug trafficking groups — fueled and financed in part by a booming global cocaine business — has left former rebels vulnerable. 

Richard Grenell, President Donald Trump’s special missions envoy, tweeted that he was returning from his trip to Caracas with the six Americans.

The unusually deadly violence delivers a devastating blow to the “total peace” program of the country’s first leftist president, Gustavo Petro.

Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro began a third term as president on Friday, cementing his increasingly authoritarian rule.

The Maduro government says it has arrested at least nine U.S. citizens in the months since Venezuela’s widely discredited presidential election. 

Machado was released after a brief detention while leaving a protest in Caracas Thursday on the eve of President Nicolas Maduro’s inauguration.

Officials in Paraguay, a major cocaine transit country, announced the reversal after a wave of local and international criticism in recent days.