President Donald Trump met a group of returning American detainees on the South Lawn on Saturday afternoon, hours after a Qatari-brokered exchange in Doha released roughly forty foreign nationals held in Iran and the remains of eleven U.S. service members killed during the six-week Gulf war, while Senate Democrats opened a parallel push to compel the administration to disclose what Washington gave up to get them home.

Three U.S. citizens — two dual-national businesspeople and a freelance journalist detained in Tehran in 2024 — stepped off a C-32A at Joint Base Andrews shortly after 10 a.m. Eastern, accompanied by their families and by Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Adam Boehler. The aircraft carrying the eleven flag-draped transfer cases landed earlier at Dover Air Force Base in a ceremony attended by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the families of the fallen, the Pentagon said.

“These are Americans who should never have been held, and these are heroes who should never have been lost,” Trump told reporters from the South Portico, flanked by the three returnees. “We brought them home. We brought every one of them home.” Asked whether any of the Iranian or Hezbollah-linked detainees released by the United States and Israel would be permitted to leave the region, the president said only, “They are not our problem anymore.”

The terms of the exchange, mediated by Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, were not made public in full. A joint statement issued in Doha said Iran had released “approximately forty” detained foreign nationals, including citizens of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, Canada, Belgium and Sweden, along with the U.S. service members’ remains. In return, the United States and Israel released an undisclosed number of Iranian and Hezbollah-affiliated detainees, most of them held since the conflict began on March 1. No criminal tribunal or war-crimes process was established as part of the deal.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer welcomed the returns but said the administration owed Congress a written account of who the United States had freed, where they had been transferred, and what commitments the two governments had exchanged in writing. “Every family on that tarmac this morning deserved this moment,” Schumer said in a statement. “Every family that wasn’t on that tarmac also deserves to know what the terms were.”

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said her panel would request a closed briefing from Boehler, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and a senior representative of the intelligence community no later than next Thursday. “We will not turn this into a partisan fight on the day eleven families finally lay their loved ones to rest,” Shaheen said. “We also will not pretend that exchanges of this scale carry no policy consequences.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the administration would brief the relevant committees “promptly and fully” but declined to commit to a written deliverable. Leavitt said the released Iranian nationals included no individuals “with active warrants for crimes against American persons,” and that all transferred detainees had been screened by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Defense before being moved.

Senate Republicans largely closed ranks behind the president. Majority Leader John Thune called the exchange “an unalloyed good” and said it “vindicates the strategy of negotiating from a position of strength.” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a frequent Iran hawk, said in a Saturday morning statement that he had “questions about the back end” but would not air them publicly until he had been briefed.

The political dynamics drew comparisons inside the Capitol to past hostage-release controversies. Rep. Mike McCaul of Texas, the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told an interviewer Saturday that the speed of the Doha track had been “extraordinary,” but cautioned that “every deal of this kind has a tail” that emerges weeks or months later. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, asked about McCaul’s remarks, said the House would press for the same briefings the Senate had requested.

The returns coincided with the third full day of the Islamabad ceasefire, which has so far held despite a Houthi rocket intercepted Wednesday evening and a separate launch from an Iran-aligned militia in Iraq that fell in open desert. The State Department said two American citizens were still believed to be held in Iran on charges unrelated to the war, and that talks on their cases were ongoing on a separate track.

Family members of the eleven fallen service members, most of whom were killed in the late-March strikes on the U.S. carrier strike group Eisenhower and at al-Udeid Air Base, were given a private meeting with the president and the first lady at the White House on Saturday afternoon. Two of the families requested no public statements be made on their behalf. A third, the family of Petty Officer 2nd Class Jasmine Reyes of San Diego, issued a brief note thanking the Qatari government and the U.S. Navy for what it called “an unwavering effort to bring our daughter home.”

The Saturday returns are likely to reshape the Senate’s war powers debate, which Sens. Tim Kaine and Chris Murphy have pressed since Thursday. Aides to both senators said the resolution would still be brought to the floor as scheduled but acknowledged that the imagery of the South Lawn ceremony would complicate any near-term effort to portray the administration’s conduct of the war as unaccountable. “Today is not the day to make our argument,” a Murphy aide said Saturday afternoon. “Tuesday is.”

Boehler, speaking briefly on the tarmac at Andrews, said the United States expected “no further announcements this weekend” but that work on the remaining detained Americans would continue through diplomatic channels. Officials said additional briefings for the Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees would be scheduled before the end of next week.