Venezuela: They were deported from Miami hours before the earthquakes, then the hotel where they were staying collapsed

A deportation flight from Miami landed in Venezuela hours before Wednesday’s earthquakes. On board they traveled 146 Venezuelans, between them 19 women and seven children, according to ICE Flight Monitor, a Human Rights First initiative that monitors deportation flights. They were transferred to a hotel in La Guaira.

Lisbeth Portillo, 58, said she escaped from the rubble of the hotel along with 20 other deportees who walked the streets looking for help. They saw people running, some naked and others barefoot, as they emerged from the rubble of the building in La Guaira, one of the areas most affected 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.

They arrived at a National Guard building, where they had the opportunity to call their families.

“I have been born again; God gave me a second chance,” Portillo said. “I’m traumatized,” she added after a pause, through tears.

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

According to ICE Flight Monitor, The United States carried out 12 deportation flights to Venezuela in Mayoperating three days a week. Deportation flights to Venezuela resumed in February 2025 after a 13-month pause.

Portillo said that The government took them to the Hotel Santuario La Llanadawhere they underwent medical examinations and obtained identification documents. They were told that They would return home the next day.

Portillo was staying in a second floor room with sixteen 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 She began to feel herself being shaken.

“I started hearing ‘dad, dad, dad,’ 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 occurred.

“I fell and ended up buried and covered by a beambut the tremor moved everything around me and I was able to get out,” said Portillo, who has bruises all over his body.

United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond immediately responded to the AP’s request for information.

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

Jenny Rodríguez, 24 years olddeclared to the Telemundo network that she was traveling on that flight and that they took her to the hotel.

“I was trapped under the rubble. A colleague who was traveling on the same flight approached; I managed to free my hand from the rubble, “I grabbed him by his pants and begged him to help me,” he said. “Thanks to God—and him—I was able to get out of there.”

Liliana Rojas declared to Telemundo that has been trying to locate his partner, 33 years old. The detention center where he was held in El Paso, Texas, only informed him that he was deported.

“No one answers anything,” Rojas said.

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

“I told him: ‘César, I’m alive. Help me’. And my husband kept saying: ‘It can’t be,'” she said. “’I’m alive, I came out of the rubble, I’m alive,’ I told her.”

Her husband called her children, who went to look for her and were able to join 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.