Trump Admin Deported Migrants To Venezuela. Now More Than 100 Are Missing.

MIAMI (AP) — More than 100 people newly deported from the United States were being held in a hotel when the earthquake struck Venezuela, setting off a scramble to find survivors and bodies buried under rubble, survivors say.

A deportation plane from Miami arrived in Venezuela hours before Wednesday’s earthquakes. According to ICE Flight Monitor, a Human Rights First initiative that tracks deportation flights, there were 146 Venezuelans on board, including 19 women and 7 children. They were transferred to a hotel in La Guaira.

Lisbeth Portillo, 58, said she escaped the rubble of the hotel with 20 other exiles who walked the streets looking for help. They saw people emerging from the rubble of the building in La Guaira, one of the areas hardest hit by Wednesday’s 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes, some naked and some running barefoot.

“We walked about five kilometers and I cried and cried… there was no communication,” Portillo said in a telephone interview from her home in Maracaibo, Venezuela.

They reached the National Guard building, where they had the chance to call their relatives.

“I was born again; God gave me a second chance,” Portillo said. After pausing for a while, she cried and said, “I was traumatized.”

The Venezuelan government says more than 1,700 people have been killed.

Portillo was caught up in the Trump administration’s mass deportation drive. In May, ICE Flight Monitor tracked 288 deportation flights to 38 countries, including Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile and Ivory Coast.

The U.S. operated 12 deportation flights to Venezuela three days a week in May, according to ICE Flight Monitor. Deportation flights to Venezuela resumed in February 2025 after a 13-month hiatus.

The government took them to Hotel Santuario La Llanada, where they underwent medical examinations and received identification documents, Portillo said. They were told they would go home the next day.

Portillo was staying in a second-floor room with 16 other women. He went out to the balcony to look at the sea and saw that the sky was black; It was very hot. He returned to the room, lay down on the bed, and began to feel himself shaken.

Describing the sounds coming from the earthquake, he said, “I started hearing ‘Daddy, daddy daddy’ and saw the women next to me start to fall.” “They were all screaming for help.”

And almost immediately the second earthquake.

“I fell and I was buried and I was covered by a beam, but the shaking changed everything I was buried in and I was able to get out,” said Portillo, who had bruises all over his body.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for information from the AP.

A video posted by the Venezuelan government on social media showed images of the deportees being greeted by Venezuelan officials upon their arrival at Caracas airport on Wednesday.

Jenny Rodriguez, 24, told the Telemundo network that she was on the plane and was taken to the hotel.

“I was stuck under the debris. A colleague of mine who was on the same plane came to me, I managed to free my hand from the debris, grabbed him by his trousers and begged for help,” he said. “Thanks to God and him, I was able to get out of there.”

Liliana Rojas told Telemundo she was trying to locate her 33-year-old partner. The detention center where he is being held in El Paso, Texas, says he was only told he was being deported.

“No one is answering on anything,” Rojas said.

Portillo, who crossed the US-Mexico border in November 2021 and said his asylum request was pending, did not remember his children’s phone number. She called her husband in the United States.

“I told him, ‘Cesar, I’m alive. Help me,’ and my husband was saying, ‘This can’t happen,'” she said. “’I’m alive, I made it through the rubble, I’m alive,’ I told him.”

Her husband called her children, so they picked her up and were able to reunite with their mother the next night.

“I was born that day; I was born again on the 24th,” said Portillo, who has lived in South Florida for more than four years.

This version corrects the title to state that the hotel is in La Guaira.