President Trump told reporters on Tuesday that he will secure the release of all political prisoners of the socialist regime in Venezuela.
“We’re going to get them all out,” Trump told reporters before departing for China. “As you know, we’ve already freed many political prisoners, and the rest will be released too.”
Throughout the nearly three decades that it has been in power, the Venezuelan socialist regime has unjustly detained thousands of individuals — including minors — and kept them as political prisoners, often accusing them of “treason,” “conspiracy,” and other spurious charges. The Venezuelan non-governmental organization Foro Penal denounced this month that it has documented 19,092 instances of political detentions since 2014.
Foro Penal, whose data is often cited by the Organization of American States (OAS), and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), detailed this year that it had documented and confirmed that there were 857 political prisoners in Venezuela by the end of 2025.
Following the arrest of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro in a U.S. law enforcement operation in Caracas on January 3, the Venezuelan regime, now under the leadership of “acting President” Delcy Rodriguez, began collaborating with the United States. As part of the collaboration, the regime began releasing some of its political prisoners. At press time, hundreds of political prisoners remain unjustly imprisoned in Venezuelan detention centers.
According to Foro Penal, there are 457 confirmed political prisoners remaining in Venezuela as of last week, 42 of whom are foreigners or Venezuelans with dual citizenship. Of the total, 414 are men and 43 are women, and 293 of those remain imprisoned without any conviction.
Despite the widely documented and confirmed existence of political prisoners in Venezuela, several members of the Venezuelan socialist regime, such as lawmaker and former Penitentiary Services Minister Iris Valera, have repeatedly denied the existence of any political prisoner in Venezuela. On Tuesday, Valera repeated her assertions during an interview with VTV, the Venezuelan regime’s flagship news channel.
“There are no political prisoners in Venezuela. No one is imprisoned for holding different views in Venezuela. It is a different matter if they are politicians who have committed a crime,” Valera said. “And crimes can be forgiven, because crimes are forgiven. That is what amnesty laws are for: to forgive crimes.”
Some of the Venezuelan political prisoners who were released over the past months did so through a purported “amnesty law” that the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) expeditiously approved in February. Rather than a full-fledged amnesty, the legislation limited its benefits to specific moments of Venezuela’s nearly three-decades-old political crisis. Despite its limited scope, members of the Venezuelan regime have publicly claimed that “over 8,600” individuals were benefited with amnesty through the law, a number that Venezuelan opposition members and dissidents have strenuously questioned.
President Trump’s remarks come right as Venezuela finds itself in a state of shock after the regime admitted that one of its hundreds of political prisoners, Víctor Hugo Quero Navas, has been dead since 2025. For 16 months, Quero Navas’ elderly mother, 82-year-old Carmen Teresa Navas, desperately searched through Venezuelan prisons in search of her missing son, who was detained in early January 2025. Since then, neither his mother, nor any other members of his family had any contact with Quero Navas.
The Venezuelan regime claimed through an official statement that Quero Navas died under state custody of “acute respiratory failure secondary to pulmonary thromboembolism.” His body was buried on July 30, 2025.
Quero Navas’ case, and the still-unclear circumstances surrounding his death, have sparked new concerns over the fate of other political prisoners in Venezuela deemed missing by their families. Last week, 83-year-old Venezuelan Beatriz de Marino spoke with the outlet El Pitazo and denounced that since 2019 she has had no information on the whereabouts of her son, maritime rescue expert Hugo Marino. Marino is a Venezuelan-Italian dual national who was reportedly arrested in April 2019 by members of the Venezuelan regime’s General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM). De Marino denounced that, since then, her son has been under conditions of forced disappearance. She last saw him when he disembarked from an international flight seeking to spend time with his family in Venezuela.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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