Over 100 deported Venezuelans missing after earthquake destroys hotel where ICE sent them
At least 100 Venezuelans deported from the United States are missing under rubble in Venezuela after a deadly pair of earthquakes struck the country just hours after their flight landed.
The Associated Press reports that a deportation flight from Miami carrying 146 Venezuelans, including seven children and nineteen women, touched down in Venezuela hours before a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck on June 24, followed soon after by a second 7.5 magnitude quake. The deportees were taken to the Hotel Santuario La Llanada in La Guaira, which collapsed in the disaster.
The nationwide death toll has now surpassed 1,700. Rescuers are still pulling survivors from the wreckage five days later, including a 21 year old man freed this week. More than 100 of the deported passengers from that single flight remain unaccounted for.
Survivor Lisbeth Portillo escaped the rubble along with roughly 20 others. She told the AP she saw people fleeing barefoot and half dressed through the streets in the chaos that followed. Portillo said she had been sharing a second floor hotel room with sixteen other women when the building came down around her.
“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,” Portillo said, describing the moment the second earthquake hit.
She said she walked roughly five kilometers afterward with no way to reach anyone. “I was born again. God gave me a second chance. I am traumatized,” she told the AP.
ICE has not responded to a request for comment on the deportees who remain missing. Records from the ICE Flight Monitor show 288 deportation flights to 38 countries since May 2026, including a dozen flights to Venezuela in May alone, part of a sharp resumption of removals to the country after a previous pause.
The disaster has raised pointed questions about whether any review of conditions in Venezuela took place before sending hundreds of people into a country now reeling from one of its deadliest natural disasters in decades, and whether the administration has any plan to account for the people it sent there.