Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has demanded El Salvador release hundreds of Venezuelans who were deported from the United States, who he described as being “kidnapped,” after his Salvadoran counterpart earlier proposed a prisoner swap.

Speaking on a television broadcast on Monday, Maduro demanded that Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele “provide proof of life for all the kidnapped young people,” allow their families and lawyers to visit the mega-prison where they’re being kept, and to release them “unconditionally.”

El Salvador's president has offered to repatriate 252 Venezuelans deported by the US and imprisoned in his country - if Venezuela releases the same number of political prisoners.

Nayib Bukele appealed directly to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a post on social media.

He said many of the Venezuelan deportees had committed "rape and murder", while Venezuelan political prisoners were jailed only because they opposed Maduro, whose re-election last year is widely disputed.

The self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator,” El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, is offering Venezuela’s president a prisoner swap — 252 detainees, including many deported to El Salvador from America, in exchange for 252 of Nicolás Maduro’s political prisoners. 

‘The only reason they are imprisoned is because they opposed you and your electoral fraud,’ Nayib Bukele wrote in a taunting post to Nicolás Maduro about detainees in Venezuela.

El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele offered to swap 252 detained Venezuelans for political prisoners and foreign nationals held in Venezuela. He framed the deal as a humanitarian gesture aimed at freeing opposition figures and journalists.

Venezuela pushed back, demanding legal records and accusing El Salvador of violating human rights.

The U.S. has backed El Salvador’s detentions, but courts recently paused further deportations amid legal and political backlash.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal immigrant with alleged ties to a violent gang who was deported to El Salvador, had been transferred from the country's notorious mega prison, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), days before U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., arrived in the country last week to push for his freedom.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who flew to El Salvador this week to meet with deported illegal alien Kilmar Abrego Garcia before being denied multiple times, was granted his request on Thursday night.

A US senator has met a man who Trump administration officials have acknowledged was deported in error from Maryland to a mega-prison in El Salvador.

Senator Chris Van Hollen said on Thursday night that he had met in San Salvador with Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whose wrongful deportation to El Salvador last month has become a flashpoint in the immigration debate and fueled a standoff between the Trump administration and the courts.

A majority of the people agree with what Donald Trump is doing to secure the border, according to the latest CBS News poll. That has liberals seething. They are desperate to fabricate a scandal they can exploit to restore the flood of illegal aliens into the country.

At a hearing Tuesday, Rep. Jamie Raskin demanded the return of “people unlawfully taken to El Salvador on that so-called plane full of gangbangers.”

The Trump administration released documents Wednesday that revealed new details in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man deported to El Salvador a month ago in what a government lawyer called an “administrative error.” 

The documents were released after weeks of pressure on the government to prove its contention that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang. The Trump administration sent him to a notorious megaprison in the Central American country as part of its promised deportation program of alleged criminals.