Uncle Sam kicked them out. Nature did the rest. Hours after a deportation flight from Miami touched down in Venezuela, a pair of massive earthquakes shattered the coast, leaving more than 100 newly returned migrants missing under the ruins of a seaside hotel.
The timing was brutal. On Wednesday, the American deportation machine dumped 146 Venezuelans—including 19 women and seven children—right back where they fled. According to ICE Flight Monitor, an advocacy group tracking these flights, authorities shuttled the group straight to the Hotel Santuario La Llanada in La Guaira. Then the ground tore open. Twin quakes, registering 7.2 and 7.5, ripped through the region.
Lisbeth Portillo, 58, survived. Barely. She was on the second floor with 16 other women when the concrete started screaming. “I saw the women next to me start to fall,” she said. The roof collapsed. A heavy beam pinned her down, but a violent aftershock shifted the debris just enough for her to wiggle free. She crawled out into a nightmare. People were running through the streets naked, bleeding, and barefoot.
No phones worked. The air was thick with dust. Portillo and about 20 other dazed survivors walked five kilometers through the wreckage until they reached a National Guard post. That is where she finally made a call. “I was born again,” she wept from her home in Maracaibo. Others were not so lucky. The Venezuelan government claims the death toll has already topped 1,700.
It is a grim end to a desperate journey. Portillo had lived in South Florida for over four years after crossing the border in 2021 with a pending asylum claim. She got caught up in the Trump administration’s relentless deportation sweep. In May alone, ICE ran 12 flights to Venezuela, part of a massive global push totaling 288 flights to 38 countries. The flights to Caracas had only just resumed in February after over a year on ice.
ICE has kept quiet. No comments. Meanwhile, families are left begging for scraps of information. Jenny Rodriguez, 24, recalled being buried alive until another deportee dragged her out by her clothes. Liliana Rojas is still searching for her 33-year-old partner, who was kicked out of El Paso right into the disaster zone. Nobody will tell her if he is alive or dead. The bureaucracy does not care.
