He is an autocrat condemned inside and outside his country as having stolen the nation’s last election. Yet on Friday, Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president who has overseen his country’s dramatic decline — including runaway inflation, blackouts, hunger, mass migration and the unraveling of the nation’s democracy — is set to be sworn in for a third term in office.

If he serves the full six years, it will extend his party’s reign into its third decade.

Mr. Maduro will return to Miraflores, the presidential palace in Caracas, even after millions of Venezuelans used the ballot box to express a desire for change. And he will do so amid his harshest crackdown yet, with the police and military in riot gear blanketing the streets of the capital; journalists, activists and community leaders in prison; and a broad expansion of his surveillance apparatus.

The man the United States and others say won the election, Edmundo González, remains in exile, forced to flee to Spain or face arrest, while the country’s most important opposition leader, María Corina Machado, has been in hiding inside Venezuela.

On Thursday she emerged for the first time since August, joining street protests against Mr. Maduro in Caracas, the capital. She stood atop a truck while thousands of supporters, all risking detention, shouted “freedom! freedom! freedom!”

There have been few other recent protests against the government, and the ever-present threat that security forces will imprison civilians is likely to make it difficult for Ms. Machado to continue to rally supporters to the streets.

Mr. González has said he will return to Venezuela on Friday for his own swearing in — but the government has placed a $100,000 bounty on his head, and it’s unclear how he plans to avoid arrest if he does so.

For his part, Mr. Maduro faces the possibility that President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has filled his foreign policy team with Maduro foes, will take a hard line against him, possibly imposing more economic sanctions.

In response, the Venezuelan leader has spent the last six months amassing a cache of foreign prisoners, which analysts and former U.S. diplomats say he hopes to use as a bargaining tool in negotiations with the United States and other nations.

Since July, Venezuelan security forces have picked up about 50 visitors and dual-passport holders from more than a dozen countries, according to the watchdog group Foro Penal.

“They are pawns to be exchanged,” said Gonzalo Himiob, a founder of Foro Penal.

Mr. Maduro wants the removal of U.S. sanctions, which have battered the Venezuelan economy, and international recognition, among other policy changes.

Venezuelan officials say they have detained at least nine people with American citizenship or resident status, with officials accusing some of them of plotting to kill Mr. Maduro.

The United States has no diplomatic presence in Venezuela, and a State Department representative said the U.S. government was not even sure where its citizens were being held.

Relatives of three detained U.S. citizens said that they had not heard from their loved ones since they disappeared months ago and have received only limited communication from their own government.

David Estrella, 64, a father of five, had crossed into Venezuela by land from Colombia on Sept. 9, according to his former wife, Elvia Macias, 44.

Ms. Macias, who is close to her ex-husband, described him as an “adventurer” who — full of optimism that the situation in Venezuela was “not that bad” — had gone to visit friends.

He worked in quality control for pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey, was preparing to retire and had already visited Venezuela once before, she said.

Ms. Macias cried as she recounted celebrating Christmas without him.

“This situation has had a tremendous impact on our lives,” she said.

Mr. Maduro’s socialist-inspired movement has run the country since 1999, when his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, took office. In July, Mr. Maduro faced his most difficult electoral challenge yet, facing off against Mr. González, a former diplomat who became the surrogate for Ms. Machado when the government barred her from running.

Even amid a stepped-up repression campaign, many Venezuelans came out in force to support Mr. González. And in the days after the election, the opposition collected thousands of vote tally sheets, publishing them online and saying they showed that Mr. González had won by a landslide.

Mr. Maduro nevertheless declared victory, an assertion questioned by independent observers, including the Carter Center, the United Nations and a member of the country’s electoral council.

The United States has recognized Mr. González as the winner — and even Maduro allies like presidents Gustavo Petro of Colombia and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, both leftist neighbors of Venezuela, have distanced themselves.

Neither will attend the inauguration.

Mr. Maduro has held foreigners for political purposes before. But never has his government held so many at once, according to Foro Penal, the watchdog group.

Some analysts said Mr. Maduro had decided to arrest foreigners because he has seen that it gets him what he wants.

In 2022 and then again in 2023, the United States struck deals with the Venezuelan government, in which Washington released high-profile Venezuelan allies in exchange for U.S. citizens held by Mr. Maduro.

This was a part of a shift in American dealings with governments and others who capture Americans abroad.

In the past, U.S. policy was not to negotiate with captors, out of fear that cutting deals would encourage the taking of hostages.

But this left detained Americans with little hope of rescue, and critics said it even contributed to the deaths of people like James Foley, a journalist killed by ISIS in Syria in 2014.

The United States has since shown more willingness to negotiate. But some critics maintain that provokes the very practice Mr. Maduro is engaged in.

Tom Shannon, who served in a high-ranking State Department role in the Obama and Trump administrations, said he believed Mr. Maduro had been encouraged by recent hostage deals with Russia and Iran.

Still, he did not think cutting deals was a mistake.

“I think one of our jobs is to take care of American citizens abroad,’’ Mr. Shannon said. “And it’s very difficult just to write people off and say, ‘oh bad luck, so sorry.’”

Instead, he said the U.S. government should “inflict levels of pain on the kidnappers that make it clear that this is not going to happen again.”

Other U.S. citizens detained in Venezuela include Wilbert Castañeda, 37, a Navy SEAL who traveled to Venezuela to visit his girlfriend, according to his mother, Petra Castañeda, 60.

Mr. Castañeda, a father of four, was apprehended by the authorities in late August. By September his face had been plastered across state television, with Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s interior minister, accusing him and others of participating in a plot to assassinate the president.

Ms. Castañeda, who lives in California, said her son was innocent.

“The whole family is very worried, we are desperate,” she said. “We are clinging to the hope that the United States will be able to reach an agreement with Mr. Maduro.”

Stephen William Logan, 83, a retired teacher in West Virginia, said he did not even realize his son Aaron Barrett Logan, 34, had gone to Venezuela. Then, in September, his family got a call from State Department officials, notifying them that he had been detained.

Mr. Logan said his son worked in the United States for a major bank as a “penetration tester” — testing the bank’s security by trying to hack into its systems.

Mr. Cabello accused the younger Mr. Logan of being involved in the same assassination plot.

“I don’t even know how to visualize it,” the older Mr. Logan said of the conditions his son was living in, wondering if it was like “a concentration camp.”

Representatives of Mr. Trump’s transition team declined to comment. None of the U.S. detainees have been declared wrongfully detained by the State Department, a designation that could get them more help from within the U.S. government.

In Caracas, many attended Thursday’s anti-Maduro protest even though similar gatherings have been met with violence from security forces and ended in the deaths of participants.

Among those in the streets was Laura Matos, 21, who said “everyone” had told her “don’t go out.”

But “last night I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I said, ‘I want something to happen, I want President-elect Edmundo González to be sworn in, I want Venezuela to experience a change.’”

“We don’t deserve to be like this,” she went on, as fellow protesters blew plastic horns around her. “We deserve more, to have a better future. Young people like me deserve to be able to study and work and stay in our country.’’

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

In the days after Donald J. Trump was re-elected president, one of his most high-profile stops was at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event at Madison Square Garden.

Mr. Trump’s appearance in the front row was notable, as was the presence of some of his closest confidants, like Elon Musk, who sat alongside him. But few in attendance for the fights would have recognized the other man sitting beside the president-elect.

Yasir al-Rumayyan, the governor of Saudi Arabia’s vast sovereign wealth vehicle, the Public Investment Fund, watched the action from ringside, and is getting even closer to being part of the action. A company owned by the fund is close to creating a boxing league with TKO, the owner of Ultimate Fighting Championship. A deal for what would be a new competition, featuring up-and-coming boxers tied exclusively to the league, could be announced within weeks, according to three people familiar with the matter.

TKO said in a statement on Wednesday that it had “nothing to announce,” but that it “would evaluate any unique and compelling opportunity that could fit well in our portfolio of businesses and create incremental value for our shareholders.”

The wealth fund did not comment.

The potential investment in TKO follows a Saudi Arabian effort in June to create a multibillion-dollar boxing league that would aim to unite the world’s best boxers, who for decades have been divided by rival promoters and fighting for titles controlled by an alphabet soup of sanctioning bodies. That effort, while not completely abandoned, had proved complicated and expensive, even for a country like Saudi Arabia, which for the past half decade has disbursed billions to become a player across some of the world’s biggest sports.

The investment in the new league will be made by Sela, a subsidiary of the Public Investment Fund. TKO — which is majority controlled by the entertainment and sports conglomerate Endeavor and embodied by Dana White, the U.F.C. empresario, a longtime friend of Mr. Trump’s — would be a managing partner. In return, TKO has been offered an equity stake and a share of the revenue, according to the people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity ahead of the official announcement.

Saudi Arabia has backed some of the biggest and richest boxing bouts in history in recent years. It has played host to major title fights, most recently a face-off between Oleksandr Usyk and Tyson Fury, which ended with Mr. Usyk as the first undisputed heavyweight champion in more than a generation. Fights like that, which for years proved almost impossible to negotiate, have taken place thanks to the millions of dollars put on the table by Turki al-Sheikh, a government official with close ties to the kingdom’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

Mr. al-Sheikh, a former security guard, has become perhaps the most powerful man in boxing, seen at ringside and even inside the ring for the biggest bouts. He is also a frequent recipient of messages of thanks from some of the best-known fighters and boxing promoters, who refer to him as “His Excellency.” He pushed for a partnership with Mr. White, who over the last two decades has turned the U.F.C. from a $2 million company into one worth more than $10 billion. Talks have been taking place for more than a year in the United States, Europe and Saudi Arabia.

Mr. al-Sheikh had suggested in interviews that he was planning a new boxing venture. And he has made no secret of his frustration at the way the sport has been run, with the best fighters rarely meeting in their prime. In November, he purchased Ring Magazine — the century-old bible of the sport — and vowed to re-establish its prominence.

Mr. al-Sheikh has also teamed up with the World Boxing Council, a sanctioning organization, to create the Boxing Grand Prix, a tournament for young boxers.

For TKO, which owns both the U.F.C. and World Wrestling Entertainment, the venture has little risk, given that the Saudis are footing the bill. “If we were to get involved in boxing, we would expect to do so in an organic way, not an M&A way,” said Mark Shapiro, TKO’s president, on an earnings call in November, referring to mergers and acquisitions.

He added, “So, i.e., we’re not writing a check.”

Should the deal be completed, TKO will earn management fees of close to $30 million a year. Saudi Arabia is expected to pay significantly more in hosting fees to the league than any other country, according to details of the plan reviewed by The New York Times. Two fights there will bring in more than $40 million in fees. Other bouts are planned for the United States and Europe, where the hosting fees will be far lower.

TKO has also been talking with other parties, including other Arab nations, about the boxing league, according to one of the people familiar with the matter.

Endeavor, TKO’s parent company, has at times had a strained relationship with Saudi Arabia, and this potential partnership suggests that it has largely been repaired. In 2019, after the killing of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Endeavor returned $400 million that the Saudi sovereign wealth fund had invested in the company.

For the Saudis, getting a partner like Mr. White would come at an opportune time. He joined the board of Meta this week, and has spoken at the last three Republican National Conventions. Mr. Trump regularly hosted U.F.C. events at his properties in the organization’s early years, and he has attended many fights. Mr. Trump and Mr. al-Rumayyan are also close, with the Saudi-owned LIV golf championship holding several of its events at Mr. Trump’s courses, including one scheduled for April in Florida.

Saudi officials have described sports and entertainment as major pillars of a strategy, known as Vision 2030, to pivot their economy away from its reliance on oil exports, and as a part of efforts to liberalize society. Critics have described those efforts differently, positioning them as a way of using sports to distract the focus from Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, a tool known as sportswashing.

What TKO would get is a partnership with the biggest sports investor in the world. Saudi Arabia has invested in teams, talent and events across a wide range of sports, most recently securing rights to the 2034 men’s soccer World Cup, the most-watched event on the planet.

The U.F.C.’s U.S. media rights agreement with ESPN expires this year, as does the network’s deal with Top Rank, a top boxing promoter. TKO could try to bundle the rights to its new boxing league with the U.F.C. rights to help shore up the fledgling boxing league.

But applying the U.F.C. playbook to boxing will be extremely difficult. Boxing is a much more heavily regulated sport than mixed martial arts, with the federal Muhammad Ali Act mandating a separation in boxing between the role of manager and promoter, and the public listing of purse figures.

Unlike U.F.C., the league would not include the most prominent boxers. And they may not think there is an upside to joining it. While the fractured nature of boxing means its earning potential isn’t maximized for promoters and managers, top boxers earn far more than top M.M.A. fighters.

In October, the U.F.C. settled an antitrust lawsuit filed by former fighters — who claimed that the company illegally suppressed fighters’ pay — for $375 million. Documents submitted as evidence in that suit showed that the U.F.C. paid less than 20 percent of its revenue to its fighters.

In boxing, those figures are reversed, with fighters combining to earn well over 50 percent of the revenue from any fight.

In easier times for Egypt’s refugees, Azza Mostafa, a pro-government TV anchor, had nothing but generous words for the many thousands of Syrians who had built new lives in Egypt after their own country imploded into civil war in 2011.

“I’d like to say to our Syrian families and our brothers in Egypt,” she said in a 2019 broadcast, “you’ve truly brought light to Egypt.”

But there she was on her show in June, fulminating against Egypt’s growing number of outsiders — an echo of the country’s leaders, whose policy toward refugees and migrants has hardened as they wrestle with an economic crisis made worse by wars in neighboring Gaza, Sudan and Libya.

“This has become unbearable,” Ms. Mostafa said, accusing migrants of driving up rents and promoting female genital mutilation. “There are many acts of overstepping bounds. Is that acceptable? After we opened our country for them?”

Egypt long made it easy for foreigners of all kinds to live and work in the country, largely without interference, whether they were refugees, migrant workers or Westerners escaping coronavirus lockdowns.

The past 13 years have brought a near unbroken stream of newcomers fleeing conflict to the country that is known among Arabs as the “mother of the world.” That includes not just Syrians but also Sudanese, Yemenis, Eritreans and, most recently, Palestinians from Gaza.

Egypt’s lax immigration rules meant many never formally registered as refugees or received official permission to stay long-term, yet managed to stitch themselves almost seamlessly into the country, supporting themselves and sometimes starting businesses.

Since Sudan’s civil war drove a surge of refugees to Egypt starting in 2023, however, the impoverished government in Cairo has complained louder and louder about the burden of foreigners. It rapidly tightened its policies — hoping, analysts and diplomats say, to win more support from international backers eager to prevent migration to their own countries.

Egypt says it spends $10 billion each year on its nine million refugees, according to officials and government-controlled media (though experts say both numbers are greatly exaggerated), all while Egyptians endure soaring prices and subsidy cuts.

Years of government overspending, reliance on imports and policies that neglected private-sector growth left the country’s finances in precarious shape before the wars in Ukraine and Gaza sent them crashing. Egypt lost $7 billion in crucial revenue from the Suez Canal in 2024 as the conflict in Gaza has squeezed shipping in the Red Sea, according to government officials.

With Egypt deep in debt and hard-pressed to pay for imports such as wheat and energy, the currency has crashed, while some goods have become difficult to find.

Ahmed Abu Al-Yazid, the head of a government-owned sugar firm, the Delta Sugar Company, blamed refugees for a sugar shortage that experts link to the economic crisis. The president accused them of draining Egypt’s precious water. On social media, pro-government accounts — some of which appeared to be fake — accused Sudanese refugees of driving up rents and promoting female genital mutilation.

A crackdown soon followed the accusations, according to migrants, refugees and their advocates.

Sudanese refugees have been rounded up in police sweeps, detained and summarily deported. Syrians who have lived in Egypt for years have been told to pay thousands of dollars to stay. Many remain hesitant to return, despite the fall of the Assad regime in December, until the situation stabilizes.

Foreign workers from Asia and from other parts of Africa now face extra hurdles to keep their legal status, and in some cases, have been arrested to compel them to pay high fees, advocates say.

Last month, Egypt passed a law that would hand responsibility for screening refugees and others to the government, instead of to the United Nations refugee agency.

Government officials said the measure would ensure a wide array of refugee rights. Critics of the move, however, said that it would become far harder for refugees to gain protection or access to health care and schools. The law also empowers the government to revoke refugee status on vague grounds such as breaches of national security, political activity or violations of Egyptian social customs.

Abu Saleh, 32, a Syrian who works in a small Cairo grocery, said he had lived in the city for 13 years “without a single issue” until he discovered in July that he could no longer enroll his son in school without a residence permit.

Just to renew his family’s tourist visas, he said, he was told that he would have to return to Syria and pay $2,000 per person in fees — a process he would have to repeat every six months.

“Egypt has been there for us all along,” said Abu Saleh, who asked to be identified by the name he uses around town to avoid possible repercussions. “I’d like to appeal to the government of Egypt: Give us residence, even if it’s a little more expensive. We’re facing tough conditions.”

Egypt has not explained its hardening attitude toward foreigners. But analysts and migrant advocates tie it to the economic crisis, which has generated widespread bitterness and undermined President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s rule.

The newcomers make convenient scapegoats for Egyptians’ hardships, rights groups say. Immigration fees, charged in dollars, can supply some of the foreign currency that Egypt badly needs. And foreigners are also valuable pawns in Egypt’s quest for more financial support from its international partners, rights groups say.

“They think, ‘How can these people be useful for the government?’” said Nour Khalil, executive director of the Refugees Platform in Egypt, which advocates migrants’ rights.

The U.N. refugee agency counts about 818,000 registered refugees in Egypt, who are entitled to free public health care and education. There are likely many more unregistered refugees, though analysts and aid workers dispute the figure reaches nine million.

The benefits that registered refugees receive mean that Egypt “is treating them like Egyptians, despite the fact that we are not a rich country,” the foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty, said at a news conference last month. “There is no country in the world assuming these responsibilities and challenges like here in Egypt. We don’t have one single refugee camp — they are fully integrated in society.”

Refugee advocates agree that Egypt needs more resources. Unlike other countries in the region, including Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, where the United States, the United Nations and the European Union have poured billions into supporting refugees, Egypt has not received significant funds to help house Syrian or other refugees.

That is changing.

As the war in Gaza has pounded Egypt’s finances, Western backers have rushed to Egypt’s aid, anxious to prevent an economic collapse in the Arab world’s most populous country, analysts and diplomats say. A crash in Egypt could further destabilize the Middle East and send a deluge of migrants across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, where there is heavy public pressure to restrict migration.

The European Union pledged a fast-tracked $8 billion aid package to Egypt in March, echoing deals the bloc has struck with Mauritania, Tunisia and Turkey that funded migration enforcement in those countries.

Other backers, including the International Monetary Fund, have sent billions more to stabilize Egypt’s economy.

Critics say the European pact with Egypt, like the bloc’s other migration deals, is enabling rights abuses by rewarding Mr. el-Sisi’s authoritarianism and potentially funding the current crackdown on migrants.

Groups including Amnesty International and the Refugees Platform in Egypt have documented what they say is a pattern of mass arbitrary arrests and unlawful deportations of Sudanese refugees — some detained as they were smuggled across the border, others rounded up during random sweeps of predominantly Sudanese neighborhoods.

Some Syrians, too, have been expelled, Mr. Khalil of the refugees platform said. His group has also documented more than 50 arrests of foreign workers, some of whom already had residency, who were held until they paid $1,000 in fees and fines, he said.

An atmosphere of fear has brought throngs of Sudanese to the doorstep of the U.N. refugee agency in Cairo, seeking formal protection. But refugee status can take months, if not years, to obtain: Appointments to begin the process are not available until late 2025. And some of the Sudanese who have been detained and deported, Mr. Khalil said, held some form of U.N. identification, casting doubt on whether the organization could guarantee security.

Among those waiting outside one morning was Mohammed Abdelwahab, 36. By the time he and his family tried to cross the border from Sudan this spring, Egypt had tightly restricted what had been free-flowing movement between the two countries, so they resorted to smugglers instead.

Without legal papers, Mr. Abdelwahab and his 14-year-old son, Mohanad, collected plastic bottles on Cairo’s streets for a living. Mr. Abdelwahab was looking for better work one day in June when Mohanad disappeared.

Twenty days later, Mohanad resurfaced with a WhatsApp message: He had been rounded up with a group of other Sudanese and deported.

Mr. Abdelwahab had been looking for Mohanad in another city. When he returned to Cairo, his wife and three other children had been evicted for nonpayment.

“It’s indescribable,” he said. “Now they’re all camping out here,” he added, referring to his family and indicating the sidewalk in front of the refugee agency, where groups of other Sudanese waited listlessly in the sun.

Emad Mekay and Rania Khaled contributed reporting.

Venezuela’s popular opposition leader, María Corina Machado, was briefly detained by adversaries during an antigovernment protest in Caracas on Thursday, according to a statement on X by a political aide. But she was soon released.

Ms. Machado was “violently intercepted as she left the gathering,” her party said on X. “Regime troops shot at the motorcycles that were transporting her.”

The country’s autocrat, Nicolás Maduro, is set to be sworn in for a third term as president on Friday.

Ms. Machado had been living in hiding in Venezuela amid threats of arrest from government officials, and this was her first public appearance since August. She had called for gatherings around the country, and in cities around the world, to protest Mr. Maduro’s inauguration.

Thousands turned out to support Ms. Machado at an event in Caracas on Thursday, all risking government detention. There, the opposition leader stood atop a truck while supporters shouted, “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”

On X, the political aide, Magalli Meda, said that as Ms. Machado was leaving the gathering, she was knocked off her motorbike.

“Firearms went off at the event,” Ms. Meda said. “They took her away by force.”

During her brief detention, “she was forced to record several videos and was later released,” she added. “In the next few hours she herself will be the one to address the country to explain what happened.”

Representatives for Ms. Machado declined to say who detained her. The event was full of government security forces, who are often backed by members of armed gangs know as colectivos.

Venezuela’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, speaking in a television interview, called the capture “a lie” and accused the opposition of inventing it to attract attention.

The country’s opposition, as well as the United States and other countries, say that Mr. Maduro had stolen a recent election and that the real winner was Edmundo González, a former diplomat who has Ms. Machado’s backing.

Mr. González has been living in exile since September.

Before her detention, Ms. Machado told her followers, “This force that we have built and that grows every day has prepared us for this final phase.”

“Whatever they do tomorrow,” she said of the Maduro inauguration, “they’ve just buried themselves!”

About 2,000 people have been detained in Venezuela since the July 28 election, including, in recent days, Mr. González’s son-in-law, Rafael Tudares, as well as Carlos Correa, the director of a high-profile nonprofit organization, Espacio Público.