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Deportation Flight Lands Hours Before Quakes; Over 100 Missing After Hotel Collapse
A U.S. deportation flight carrying 146 Venezuelans arrived in Caracas on Wednesday. Hours later, two earthquakes struck Venezuela, collapsing the hotel where authorities had taken the deportees and leaving more than 100 missing.
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A deportation flight from Miami carrying 146 Venezuelans landed at Caracas airport on Wednesday hours before two earthquakes measuring 7.2 and 7.5 struck Venezuela. More than 100 of the deportees are missing after the hotel where authorities took them collapsed.
The flight included 19 women and seven children. Deportees were taken to the Hotel Santuario La Llanada in La Guaira. Officials have not released a full list of those accounted for.
Portillo, 58, said she escaped the rubble with about 20 other deportees. They walked approximately five kilometers through La Guaira to a National Guard building where they could call relatives. Portillo was staying in a second-floor room with 16 other women when the first quake hit.
“I started hearing ‘papa, papa papapa,’ and I saw the women next to me start to fall,” she said. The second quake buried her under a beam, but shifting debris allowed her to free herself. She sustained bruises across her body. “I was born again; God gave me a second chance,” Portillo said.
She had crossed the Mexico border in November 2021 with a pending asylum claim and had lived in South Florida for more than four years. After reaching safety she called her husband Cesar in the United States. Jenny Rodriguez, 24, was on the same flight and trapped under rubble at the hotel.
She freed her hand from debris and was pulled out by another deportee who had been on the flight. “A colleague who had been on the same flight came by; I managed to free my hand from the debris, grabbed him by the trousers, and begged for help,” Rodriguez said.
Rojas is attempting to locate her 33-year-old partner, who was deported on the flight after being held at a detention center in El Paso, Texas. “No one is giving an answer about anything,” Rojas said. The Venezuelan government states that more than 1,700 people were killed in the earthquakes.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for information. Deportation flights to Venezuela resumed in February 2025 after a 13-month pause. In May, ICE Flight Monitor tracked 288 deportation flights to 38 countries, including 12 to Venezuela operating three days per week.
