A deportation flight from Miami had barely reached Venezuela before disaster turned a government transfer into a desperate search for the missing. On board were 146 Venezuelans, including 19 women and 7 children, according to ICE Flight Monitor, which tracks deportation flights. After landing, the group was taken to a hotel in La Guaira, one of the coastal areas that were later hit hard by Venezuela’s back-to-back 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes. Now, more than 100 of those deportees are reported missing, according to survivors cited by The Associated Press.
For families in the United States and Venezuela, the story has become a nightmare inside a national tragedy. These were not travelers checking into a hotel for vacation. They were people removed from the United States, processed after arrival, and told they would soon return home. Instead, many were inside a building when the walls, floors, and beams began to collapse around them.
The La Guaira Hotel Became a Scene of Panic and Dust
Survivor Lisbeth Portillo, 58, said she escaped the rubble with about 20 other deportees after the hotel was destroyed. They walked roughly five kilometers through chaotic streets, looking for help and any working line of communication. Portillo later told AP she eventually reached a National Guard building, where survivors were able to call relatives.
Her account captures the terror of a disaster that gave people almost no time to understand what was happening. She had been in a second-floor room with other women when the shaking began. Within moments, the first violent movement was followed by another. The room became a trap. Concrete, beams, furniture, and bodies shifted in the dark. Portillo said she was buried and bruised, but the movement of the debris somehow created enough space for her to escape.
A Humanitarian Disaster Collides With U.S. Deportation Policy
The missing deportees were caught at the intersection of two powerful forces: mass deportation enforcement and one of Venezuela’s deadliest natural disasters in modern memory. AP reported that the United States ran 12 deportation flights to Venezuela in May, operating about three days a week, after flights to the country resumed in February 2025 following a 13-month pause. ICE Flight Monitor also tracked 288 deportation flights to 38 countries in May.
That wider enforcement backdrop matters because the people in the La Guaira hotel were not simply displaced by an earthquake. They had just been moved across borders by government systems, placed in temporary custody-style processing, and housed in a location that became deadly within hours. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to AP’s request for information, leaving families searching for answers through detention centers, relatives, survivors, and scattered reports.
Families Are Searching Without Clear Answers
Among the families waiting for news is Liliana Rojas, who told Telemundo she has been trying to locate her 33-year-old partner. According to AP’s account of her interview, the detention center in El Paso, Texas, only told her he had been deported. That answer does not tell a family whether a loved one is alive, injured, trapped, hospitalized, unidentified, or dead.
That uncertainty is now one of the cruelest parts of the tragedy. A deportation record may show that a person left the United States. A flight manifest may show that a person reached Venezuela. But after the hotel collapse, families need something far more urgent: names of survivors, hospital lists, body identifications, rescue updates, and official confirmation.
The Earthquakes Hit a Country Already Under Strain
The twin quakes struck Venezuela on June 24, with shaking felt across central and western parts of the country. Al Jazeera, citing the USGS, reported that the first quake measured 7.2 at a depth of about 22 kilometers, followed less than a minute later by a stronger 7.5 quake at about 10 kilometers deep. The shaking affected Caracas, La Guaira, Carabobo, Miranda, Trujillo, and even areas beyond Venezuela’s borders.
The official death toll has continued to rise. Reuters reported that Venezuelan officials confirmed at least 1,719 deaths, 5,034 injuries, and 15,866 people left homeless five days after the quakes. Citizen-led efforts to register missing people had gathered nearly 50,000 names, showing how difficult the full accounting remains.
Why La Guaira Was So Vulnerable
La Guaira’s geography made the disaster even more dangerous. Reuters reported that engineers pointed to soil instability, weak code enforcement, corrosion, and poor construction oversight as factors that may have worsened the collapse of buildings in the region. The coastal state sits between steep mountains and the sea, with loose sand, gravel, and debris that can intensify shaking during earthquakes.
Experts told Reuters that many buildings may have been especially vulnerable because construction rules were not consistently enforced. That does not mean every collapsed structure failed for the same reason. It does mean the quake exposed a deeper national problem: when fragile buildings meet violent seismic force, survival often depends on decisions made years before the ground starts moving.
A Survivor’s Call: “I’m Alive”
Portillo’s escape ended with a phone call that many families are still praying to receive. After reaching help, she called her husband in the United States and told him she had survived. Her family later reunited with her in Venezuela. She had lived in South Florida for more than four years and said she had a pending asylum claim before being deported.
Her survival is extraordinary, but it also sharpens the pain surrounding those still missing. For every person who crawled out, waved for help, or reached a phone, many others remain unaccounted for. In a disaster zone filled with collapsed concrete, broken roads, overwhelmed hospitals, and communication failures, absence itself becomes terrifying.
The Questions Now Facing U.S. and Venezuelan Authorities
The immediate priority is rescue, identification, and family notification. But the unanswered questions are growing. Who was inside the hotel when the quakes hit? How many deportees were moved elsewhere before the collapse? Which hospitals received survivors? Were children among those missing? Were U.S. officials given confirmation of the passengers’ status after arrival? Did Venezuelan authorities maintain a full list of where each deportee was taken?
These questions are not political theater. They are the basic questions families ask when a loved one disappears inside a disaster. A government flight placed people into a post-deportation process. A government-arranged location collapsed. Now, two governments face pressure to account for every name on that flight.
A Disaster Measured in Names, Not Just Numbers
The numbers are staggering: 146 deportees on the flight, more than 100 reported missing, over 1,700 dead nationwide, more than 5,000 injured, and tens of thousands of names collected in missing-person efforts. But behind every figure is a person who expected to reach home, call family, find shelter, or start over after deportation.
That is what makes the La Guaira hotel collapse so devastating. It is not only an earthquake story. It is a story about people forced to move, placed in temporary shelter, and swallowed by a national catastrophe before their families could even understand where they were.
For the survivors, June 24 has become the day they were spared. For the missing, it is the date families now search around, call around, and grieve around. And for authorities, it is the date that demands a full public accounting: every passenger, every room, every survivor, every hospital, every body, every answer.
