They had arrived in their homeland, and their homeland had welcomed them just hours before Venezuela became a mass grave of concrete and buried bodies. They returned with nothing, barely the clothes on their backs and themselves, as they were not supposed to return from the country they had gone to in search of everything. On the morning of Wednesday, June 24, Melvin Maldonado, the head of the mission in charge of managing the national repatriation program, released a video of the 147 newly deported individuals from the United States, those from Flight 164, and boasted of how generous the homeland was in accepting them back.
The group appeared content at the Simón Bolívar International Airport, relieved to have left behind the detention centers in Texas, Georgia, or Miami. Soon, Maldonado’s post was flooded with questions: “Please, where are those who arrived? We’re looking for them. How can we find out about our families? Why haven’t they arrived home? Does anyone know about Daniel Henrique? About Johana Pineda? Where are the people from flight 164?”
“That’s my brother-in-law over there!” Verónica Nieves recognized him from behind in the video Maldonado shared. It was undoubtedly him: Yamil Caldera, 32, the man in black pants and a red sweater, eager to reach Cumaná, in the state of Sucre. He and his wife had been detained months earlier at a Walmart by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and were later transferred to the Eloy Detention Center in Tucson, Arizona. He had been deported this Wednesday; she still had a court date.
Once in Maiquetía, Caldera had time to call his family and confirm that, after several hours of flight from Texas, he had landed in his country. Anderson Antonio Pérez, 33, who had been living in Montgomery, Alabama, for a year and a half, called his family around 4:00 p.m. “He spoke with his wife, said they had arrived, and that they were going to arrange for him to be brought here to Barquisimeto the next day, but we never heard from him again,” says his sister, Yujaby Elizabeth Díaz Pérez.
From the airport facilities, the deported Venezuelans—120 men, 19 women, and seven children—were taken by the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN) to the Hotel Santuario La Llanada in La Guaira state, when no one yet knew that they were actually being taken to the very heart of the most powerful earthquakes Venezuelans had felt beneath their feet in over a century. It wasn’t yet 6:04 p.m. local time, the exact moment that would forever change their lives.
The Hotel Santuario La Llanada, a modest structure run by the Negra Hipólita Mission and located in the mountains just over half an hour from Caracas, was formerly the site of the San Benito School. It once provided services to homeless people and those struggling with addiction, and became the isolation center for travelers arriving at Maiquetía Airport infected with Covid-19 during the pandemic. Since the Trump administration and the Chavista government established a deportation agreement, the hotel has been the place where migrants have ended up. The total number of Venezuelans returned to their country by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) this year is unknown, but in 2025, the ICE Flight Monitor recorded 73 deportation flights to Venezuela, operating twice a week, carrying nearly 14,000 people.
Once at the hotel, the new arrivals would undergo certain protocols: medical checkups, vaccinations, and processing of identity cards. In one of the rooms was 28-year-old Joan, who had been detained by ICE on June 13 while on his way to work in Florida, where his six-year-old daughter and wife remained. The family was desperate for him to be released from the El Paso detention center and return to Venezuela.
“We tried to get him released on bail through lawyers, but the costs were too high; we didn’t have the resources to pay, so we decided he would sign a voluntary release, and that’s what he did,” his wife, Daniela, explained over the phone.
On Wednesday, at the hotel, Joan had showered and was going to bed after an exhausting trip. He sat down on one of the bunk beds, felt dizzy, and watched as everything around him swayed, as if the God of the world were shaking them all in a fit of rage. He managed to put on his shoes and a shirt, took three long steps, and shouted, “It’s an earthquake, it’s an earthquake!”
At that time, no one in the hotel could grasp the magnitude of the damage caused by the earthquakes, which, according to the UN, could leave some 50,000 missing. For the moment, everything that was happening was happening there, in the terracotta-roofed hotel that had collapsed on top of them. Those who could began to emerge from under the rubble; some stayed behind to help those still buried. “We survivors were helping with the rescue, but we didn’t have any tools. We’re talking about a roof weighing almost 1,000 kilos—who could handle that?” Juan Manuel Fernández Quintero, one of the 147 deportees, publicly recounted. He only later learned that he had broken four ribs in the impact.
The survivors, who barely knew each other, who were not neighbors, family, or friends, and who didn’t even know each other’s names, beyond the nicknames they had acquired during their confinement in the United States (El Gocho, Pelo Pintado, El Caraqueño), were just beaten, dusty, absent bodies, the victims whom no one came to help for hours, the people who hoped that the return would be bearable, after everything they had gone through in detention.
