More than 100 people who had just been deported from the United States were staying in a hotel in Venezuela when a pair of powerful earthquakes struck, sending survivors scrambling through rubble and leaving the fate of many others unknown, according to those who made it out alive.
A deportation flight departing from Miami touched down in Caracas on Wednesday — just hours before the earthquakes hit. According to ICE Flight Monitor, a project run by Human Rights First that tracks deportation flights, the plane carried 146 Venezuelan nationals, including 19 women and seven children.
Lisbeth Portillo, 58, said she managed to escape the collapsed hotel along with roughly 20 other deportees. The group wandered the streets searching for assistance, witnessing chaotic scenes of people fleeing the destruction — some without shoes, others without clothing — as they emerged from the wreckage in La Guaira, one of the areas hardest hit 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 phone interview from her home in Maracaibo, Venezuela.
The group eventually reached a National Guard facility, where they were able to contact family members.
“I was born again; God gave me a second chance,” Portillo said, then paused and wept. “I am traumatized.”
The Venezuelan government has reported that more than 1,700 people lost their lives in the disaster.
Portillo was among those caught up in the current U.S. administration’s push for large-scale deportations. In May alone, ICE Flight Monitor recorded 288 deportation flights to 38 countries, including Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Chile, and the Ivory Coast. Twelve of those flights were to Venezuela, running three days per week. Deportation flights to Venezuela had resumed in February 2025 following a 13-month suspension.
Portillo said that upon arrival, authorities transported the deportees to the Hotel Santuario La Llanada, where they underwent medical evaluations and received identification documents. They were told they would be sent home the following day.
She had been sharing a second-floor room with 16 other women. Portillo stepped out onto a balcony to look at the ocean and noticed the sky had turned dark and the air was unusually hot. She went back inside, lay down on a bed, and then felt the shaking begin.
“I started hearing ‘papa, papa papapa,’ and I saw the women next to me start to fall,” she said, describing what the earthquake sounded and looked like. “They were all screaming for help.”
Almost immediately, a second earthquake followed.
“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 sustained bruises across her body.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not provide a response to the Associated Press when asked for information about the situation.
The Venezuelan government shared video footage on social media showing the deportees being welcomed by Venezuelan officials upon landing at the Caracas airport on Wednesday.
Jenny Rodriguez, 24, told the Telemundo network that she had been on the deportation flight and was 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 she has been desperately trying to find her 33-year-old partner. The detention facility in El Paso, Texas, where he had been held only confirmed that he was deported, offering no further details. “No one is giving an answer about anything,” Rojas said.
Portillo, who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in November 2021 and said she had a pending asylum claim, could not recall her children’s phone numbers after the ordeal. Instead, 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 recalled. “‘I’m alive, I made it out of the rubble, I’m alive,’ I told him.”
Her husband then contacted their children, who located her and reunited with her the following night.
“I was born that day; on the 24th, I was born again,” said Portillo, who had lived in South Florida for more than four years.
