Before and After the Earthquakes
The deportation the Trump administration doesn't want you to know about
Before June 24, 2026, Venezuela was already a country in crisis, economically devastated, politically broken, and hemorrhaging its people at a rate that rivals the worst refugee crises in modern history. More than 8 million Venezuelans had already left.
After June 24, 2026, Venezuela is a country in mourning. Two earthquakes — a 7.2 and a 7.5, striking just 39 seconds apart — tore through northern Venezuela in the early evening, collapsing buildings, destroying entire coastal communities, and killing nearly 2,000 people as of this writing, with tens of thousands still missing. The UN estimates the twin quakes wiped out 6% of Venezuela’s GDP in a single night.
This is a once-in-a-century catastrophe. And for Venezuelans everywhere, in the country, in the rubble, in ICE detention centers across the United States, and in our living rooms in Miami and Houston and New York, it divides our history in two.
But there is a story within this story that the world needs to hear.
On the same day the earth split open, a group of 147 Venezuelans deported from Texas landed at Simón Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetía aboard Flight 164. Among them: 146 Venezuelans, including 19 women and seven children.
They had survived ICE detention. They had survived the threat of deportation. They had made their last phone calls to their families.
From the airport, they were transported by SEBIN (the repressive arm of the regime) agents to Hotel Santuario La Llanada, a remote facility in La Guaira managed by the Venezuelan government, where they were supposedly to complete identification and medical procedures before being released to their hometowns.
At 6:04 p.m., the earthquakes hit. The building collapsed. Of the 147 deportees, only 12 survived.
Anderson, 21 years old, had called his mother from the hotel at 5 p.m. “I love you so much, Mom. See you tomorrow at home,” he told her. Today he is in a hospital, his legs amputated.
Angelo Mejía Meléndez, 27, had been building a life in Miami, working at a pier. His family identified his body by a distinctive pizza tattoo on his arm.
Daniel Núñez had lived in Jacksonville for nearly five years, working in construction, paying taxes. His mother said: “Venezuelans are not animals. They are humans, not criminals. My son paid taxes.”
When asked about the flight, the Department of Homeland Security said it “safely reached Venezuela” and that once individuals left ICE custody, ICE was no longer responsible for them.
We told them. For over a year, we told them.
The Venezuelan American Caucus has been warning the world and denouncing the Trump administration for more than a year: do not deport Venezuelans back to Venezuela. We do not have a safe country to return to. We have been persecuted. We have been imprisoned. We have been threatened. Our families live under a regime that uses hunger and fear as political weapons. There is no safety waiting for us on the other end of those deportation flights.
They did not listen. And now 135 people who survived everything — the Darien Gap, Mexican cartels, the ICE detention centers, the uncertainty — are dead. These were not criminals. These were people who tried to do everything right. Many had asylum petitions that were never resolved. Many had TPS — a legal protection this administration stripped away with the stroke of a pen. They paid taxes. They worked. They built lives. And then they were put on a plane, handed over to a regime that imprisoned them on arrival, and killed by an earthquake in a building they were never supposed to be in. Deported into the hands of two governments that failed them, and into the path of a disaster that had no mercy.
This is what we have been fighting against. And today, more than ever, this fight has entered a new and urgent phase.
What comes next cannot wait.
More than 6,000 Venezuelans remain in ICE detention centers right now, with deportation flights still planned — and now, they have been told, those flights will be military. Military flights. Back to a Venezuela that is still pulling bodies from the rubble, where hospitals are damaged and destroyed in every possible way, where bridges have collapsed, and where entire communities no longer exist. The earthquake has not stopped them. Our community here — Venezuelans who have built lives in the United States, who pay taxes, who contribute, who love this country — is living in terror. TPS is gone. Humanitarian parole is gone. The legal protections we fought so hard to build have been stripped away one by one.
We need new protections. We need TPS to be reinstated. We need Deferred Enforced Departure. We need a moratorium on deportations to Venezuela. We need Congress to act. And we need resources to keep fighting.
The Venezuelan American Caucus does this work every day — advocacy on Capitol Hill, legal support, community education, rapid response communications, and a relentless presence in every room where decisions about our community are being made.
If Flight 164 moved you. If the images from La Guaira broke your heart. If you believe that no one should be deported into a disaster zone, into a dictatorship, into the rubble of a collapsed building — please support our work.
DONATE TO THE VENEZUELAN AMERICAN CAUCUS
There is a before and an after.
We are living in the after. And we need your help.
Adelys Ferro