More than 100 people just deported from the United States were being held in a hotel when earthquakes struck Venezuela, setting off a scramble to find survivors and bodies buried in the rubble, according to survivors.
A deportation flight from Miami arrived in Caracas hours before Wednesday's earthquakes. On board were 146 Venezuelans, including 19 women and seven children, according to ICE Flight Monitor, an initiative of Human Rights First, which tracks deportation flights.
Lisbeth Portillo, 58, said she escaped the rubble from the hotel with about 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 that was hardest hit in Wednesday’s 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes.
“We walked about five kilometers, and I cried and cried … there was no communication,” Portillo said in a phone interview from her home in Maracaibo, Venezuela.
They reached a National Guard building, where they had a chance to call relatives.
“I was born again; God gave me a second chance,” said Portillo. “I am traumatized,” she said after a pause, weeping.
The Venezuelan government says more than 1,700 people were killed.
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They survived the earthquake the same day that were deported from the U.S.
Portillo was caught up in the Trump administration's drive for mass deportations. In May, ICE Flight Monitor tracked 288 deportation flights to 38 countries, including Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile and the Ivory Coast.
The U.S. ran 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 pause.
Portillo said the government took them to the Hotel Santuario La Llanada, where they underwent medical exams and got identification documents. They were told they would go home the next day.
Portillo was staying in a second floor room with 16 other women. She stepped onto a balcony to look at the sea and saw that the sky was black; it was very hot. She returned to the room, laid on a bed, and began to feel herself being shaken.
“I started hearing ‘papa, papa papapa,’, and I saw the women next to me start to fall,” she said, describing the sounds from the earthquake. “They were all screaming for help.”
And almost immediately, the second earthquake.
"I fall and end up buried and covered by a beam, but the shaking shifted everything where I was buried and I was able to get out,” said Portillo, who has bruises all over her body.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for information from the AP.
A video from the Venezuelan government posted on social media showed images of the deportees being received by Venezuelan authorities upon their arrival at the Caracas airport on Wednesday.
Jenny Rodriguez, 24, told the Telemundo network that she was on the flight and taken to the hotel.
“I was trapped under the rubble. 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”, she said. “Thanks to God — and to him — I was able to get out of there.”
Liliana Rojas told Telemundo that she has been trying to locate her 33-year-old partner. The detention center where he was held in El Paso, Texas, says only told that he was deported.
“No one is giving an answer about anything,” Rojas said.
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Woman says she feels ‘born again’ after surviving
Portillo, who crossed the U.S. border with Mexico in November 2021 and said had an pending asylum claim, couldn't remember her children's phone number. She called 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,’” she said. “‘I’m alive, I made it out of the rubble, I’m alive,’ I told him.”
Her husband called their children, who picked her up and were able to reunite with their mother the following 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.
