venezuela, deportations, trump, earthquake

The United States deported 146 people to Venezuela on a Wednesday morning. By afternoon, twin earthquakes had killed over 1,700 in the country. The hotel where the deportees were being held collapsed.

"When an individual is no longer in ICE custody, ICE is no longer responsible for them."

— Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, after 146 deportees were buried in a collapsed hotel

A repatriation flight from Miami landed in Caracas on June 24, 2026, carrying 146 Venezuelans, including 19 women and seven children, deported under the Trump administration's mass deportation program. They were transported to the Hotel Santuario La Llanada in La Guaira, a coastal city near the capital, where they were to undergo medical screening and be released to their families.

Hours later, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck, followed seconds later by a 7.5 quake. La Guaira was among the hardest-hit areas. The hotel collapsed.

The Venezuelan government's death toll stands at 1,719 and rising, with over 5,000 injured. The United Nations estimates 50,000 people are missing. But within that staggering number is a smaller, more specific tragedy: dozens of people whose last hours in the United States were spent in immigration detention, whose first hours back in their home country were spent locked inside a building that was not their own, and who may never have been released.

Translation: the U.S. government put these people on a plane, dropped them in one of the most seismically vulnerable cities on the coast, and declared its responsibility over.

Lisbeth Portillo, 58, was in a second-floor room with 16 other women when the shaking started. She stepped onto a balcony first, saw the sky had turned black, and felt the heat rise. She returned to the room and lay down on a bed.

"I started hearing 'papa, papa papapa,' and I saw the women next to me start to fall," she told the Associated Press, describing the sounds of the earthquake. "They were all screaming for help."

The second quake hit almost immediately. Portillo was buried under a beam. The shifting rubble created a gap she crawled through. She emerged with bruises all over her body and walked five kilometers through the devastated streets, crying the entire time, until she reached a National Guard building where she could call her husband in the United States.

"I said to him, 'Cesar, I'm alive. Help me.' And my husband kept saying, 'It can't be.'"

Portillo crossed the border from Mexico in November 2021 and had a pending asylum claim. She was caught up in the Trump administration's mass deportation program, which ran 288 deportation flights to 38 countries in May alone, according to ICE Flight Monitor, a tracking initiative by Human Rights First.

Not everyone survived. Angelo Mejía Meléndez, 27, was on the flight. His mother, Luz Marina Meléndez, learned of his death from a fellow survivor who said he saw her son perish beside him in the rubble.

"I'm sad and I'm enraged," Meléndez told Noticias Telemundo. The family was scheduled to have a reunion that weekend.

Richard Pereira also died in the collapse. His wife, Johana Pineda, and their 7-year-old son, Richi, survived with minor injuries. They had been living in Tennessee since 2023, seeking asylum, when they were detained at a routine ICE check-in. The family was placed on the repatriation flight two days later.

Pineda's niece, Luisa Quintero, said she found out they were in Venezuela because she saw her little cousin in a government video posted online after the flight arrived.

"My aunt is devastated and my little cousin is traumatized," Quintero told ABC News.

Enit Hernández says her husband, José Rafael Rossi Ydrogo, called her on Tuesday to say he was being told to gather his belongings because he was leaving the next day. He was a construction worker in Fort Worth, Texas, and the father of seven. He has not been heard from since.

Another survivor, Jenny Rodriguez, 24, said she was trapped under debris and managed to free one hand. She grabbed a fellow deportee by the trousers and begged for help.

"Thanks to God, and to him, I was able to get out of there," Rodriguez told Telemundo.

Portillo, for her part, said she has a new birthday. "On the 24th, I was born again," she said. "I am traumatized."

The Hotel Santuario La Llanada was a known processing site for deportees returning to Venezuela. The U.S. ran 12 deportation flights to Venezuela in May, operating three days a week. Deportation flights to Venezuela had resumed in February 2025 after a 13-month pause. The fact that deportees were routinely sent to this specific hotel in this specific coastal city was not a matter of chance. It was a matter of established procedure.

The earthquake changed nothing about that procedure. Despite the destruction, the Trump administration has not paused deportations to Venezuela. Nonprofits and members of the Venezuelan-American community have publicly demanded that deportations be deferred until the country is more stable following the disaster. The administration has not responded.

To understand the administration's posture, it helps to understand what Trump has already done in Venezuela. In January 2026, he authorized a military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The country is under extraordinary U.S. pressure, with its government destabilized and its infrastructure devastated. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the administration has broad new authority to remove Temporary Protected Status for immigrants, putting more Venezuelans at risk of being sent home to a country still recovering from catastrophe.

Trump addressed the earthquake in a press conference last Friday. "Outside of it, it's a happy country again," he said. "The people are happy, they're dancing in the streets."

The statement was made while rescue operations were still underway and the death toll continued to climb.

Katherine Arana, a Venezuelan-American from Greenville, South Carolina, created a spreadsheet to track the deportees on the flight after she could find no official list. She has heard from relatives that at least 25 deportees were killed, 21 remain missing, and nine survived. Some bodies recovered from the rubble have not been identified.

Daniel Alejandro Núñez Ramírez, 28, was deported after agreeing to leave following his arrest for a minor traffic violation. A cousin in Chile said his mother was told he had been found alive and pulled from the rubble, but the family has not located him in any hospital.

"We feel destroyed, because it really hurts us," said Yaneth Gabriela Mejías Ramírez. "At the same time, we have faith we will find him. But even if he passed away, we want to find him."

Relatives say authorities in Venezuela are not allowing family members or independent rescue workers near the collapsed hotel, making it nearly impossible to obtain information or help with recovery efforts.

The Department of Homeland Security's response to inquiries about the flight was a single sentence: the plane "safely reached Venezuela" and all passengers had been "returned home." When an individual is no longer in ICE custody, the agency said, ICE is no longer responsible for them.

The statement has a certain bureaucratic elegance to it. The plane completed its journey. The mission was accomplished. The earthquake was an act of nature, not an act of policy.

But these people were deported to a specific building in a specific city. The building collapsed. The people inside were not yet free. They were in limbo between one government's custody and another country's chaos, and both systems told them: you are on your own.

The Venezuela earthquakes are a natural disaster on a devastating scale. The death toll, the destruction, the 50,000 missing people: these are tragedies that no government causes or can prevent. But the 146 deportees on that Wednesday flight are a different story entirely. They were placed in a hotel in a seismically vulnerable coastal city by a country that had already decided they were disposable. Hours later, the earth itself seemed to agree.

The question is not whether the earthquake killed those people. The question is why they were in that hotel at that moment, and why the system that put them there refused to acknowledge any responsibility when it collapsed.