Three times the movement has freed its prisoners through mass campaigns rather than courts. In 1979 President Carter commuted the sentences of the four Nationalist prisoners of 1950–54 — Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irvin Flores, and Oscar Collazo — after a worldwide campaign in which the prisoners refused to request clemency themselves. In 1999 President Clinton, pressed by a coalition running from the churches to Coretta Scott King and Desmond Tutu, freed eleven FALN prisoners and cut Juan Segarra Palmer's term, over the objection of Congress and the FBI.

Oscar López Rivera, who refused the 1999 offer's conditions while co-defendants walked, became the campaign's final cause: 35 years served, twelve in Marion and ADX isolation, until President Obama commuted his sentence in January 2017 and San Juan received him — the last of the era's Puerto Rican political prisoners — with a hero's welcome.