More than 100 Venezuelans deported from the US just hours before the earthquakes are missing

Earthquake in Venezuela: aerial image shows buildings in Caraballeda, in the state of La Guaira, Venezuela, on July 29, 2026.
Miguel Medina/AP
More than 100 people who had just been deported from the United States were staying in a hotel when earthquakes hit Venezuela and are missing, triggering a race to find survivors and bodies buried under the rubble, according to reports from survivors.
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A deportation flight left Miami and arrived in Venezuela just hours before Wednesday's earthquakes. On board were 146 Venezuelans, including 19 women and seven children, according to ICE Flight Monitor, a Human Rights First initiative that monitors deportation flights. They were taken to a hotel in La Guaira.
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Lisbeth Portillo, 58, said she managed to escape the rubble of the hotel along with around 20 other deported people, who walked the streets in search of help. They saw people running, some naked and others barefoot, as they climbed out of the wreckage of the building in La Guaira, one of the areas hardest hit by Wednesday's 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes.
"We walked about five kilometers, and I cried and cried... there was no communication," Portillo said in a telephone interview from his home in Maracaibo, Venezuela. family members.
"I was born again; God gave me a second chance," said Portillo. "I'm traumatized," she said.
The Venezuelan government claims that more than 1,700 people died.
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They survived the earthquake on the same day they were deported from the US
Portillo was arrested under the policy of mass deportations by the Trump administration. In May, ICE Flight Monitor recorded 288 deportation flights to 38 countries, including Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile and Ivory Coast.
The United States conducted 12 deportation flights to Venezuela in May, operating three days a week, according to ICE Flight Monitor. Deportation flights to Venezuela resumed in February 2025, after a 13-month break.
Portillo said the government took them to the Hotel Santuario La Llanada, where they underwent medical examinations and received identification documents. They were told they would return home the next day.
She was staying in a room on the second floor with 16 other women. He went out onto the balcony to look at the sea and noticed that the sky was dark; it was very hot. She went back to her room, lay down on a bed and started to feel everything shaking.
"I started hearing 'papa, papa papapa', and I saw the women next to me start to fall," she said, describing the sounds of the earthquake. "Everyone was screaming for help."
And almost immediately the second earthquake came.
"I fell and ended up buried under a beam, but the tremor displaced everything around me and I managed to get out," said Portillo, who was left with bruises all over her body.
The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) did not immediately respond to a request for information from the Associated Press.
A video released by the Venezuelan government on social media showed images of the deportees being received by Venezuelan authorities upon arriving at Caracas airport on Wednesday.
Jenny Rodriguez, 24, told Telemundo that she was on the flight and was also taken to the hotel.
"I was trapped under the rubble. A colleague who had been on the same flight passed by; I managed to get my hand out of the wreckage, grabbed his pants and begged for help," she said. "Thank God - and him - I managed to get out."
Liliana Rojas told Telemundo that she is trying to locate her 33-year-old partner. The detention center where he was held in El Paso, Texas, only reported that he had been deported.
"Nobody gives answers about anything," said Rojas.
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Portillo, who crossed the border between Mexico and the United States in November 2021 and said she had a pending asylum request, could not remember her children's phone number. She then called her husband, who was in the United States.
"I told him, 'Cesar, I'm alive. Help me.' And my husband kept saying, 'It can't be,'" she said. "'I'm alive, I made it out of the rubble, I'm alive,' I kept repeating."
Her husband called her children, who came to get her and were able to reunite with their mother the next night.
"I was born that day; on the 24th, I was born again," said Portillo, who lived in South Florida for more than four years.

Source: G1