Venezuelan Families Are Demanding Answers After Their Deported Relatives Died Trapped in a Government Building During the June Earthquake

Families of Venezuelan migrants who were deported from the United States and died in the June 24th earthquakes are demanding a formal apology from the Venezuelan government and have announced plans to file international complaints over the deaths of their loved ones. A group of 146 migrants, including 120 men, 19 women and five children, had been deported from the United States just hours before the catastrophic earthquakes struck and were being held in an old building in La Guaira, the coastal state neighboring Caracas that was among the hardest hit by the disaster. The building collapsed during the seismic events, and the families say their relatives were given no opportunity to escape.

The earthquakes of June 24th, which registered at magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5, have left close to 6,500 people dead across Venezuela. The deportees who died had been stripped of their cell phones and personal belongings upon arrival and placed in a building monitored by intelligence agents, with no evacuation plan in place according to the families who have since spoken publicly about the conditions their relatives were held in.

What the Families Are Saying

The mothers and relatives who gathered to speak to the press on Monday did so with photographs of their sons and daughters and with a clear set of demands directed at the Venezuelan government. One mother, whose son Daniel Alejandro Núñez Ramírez would have turned 29 years old on August 26th, described him as having no criminal record in either the United States or Venezuela, and questioned why he was being held in what she described as an improper detention in the first place.

She acknowledged that the earthquake itself was an unforeseeable event but focused her grief and her anger on the conditions in which the deportees were held when it struck, the absence of their personal belongings, the lack of an evacuation plan and the decision by authorities to prevent them from leaving the building when the ground began to shake. She called for moral compensation, a formal apology, a full explanation of what happened and announced that the families would be filing complaints both within Venezuela and through international bodies. She also demanded changes to the protocols governing how deportees are received and held upon arrival.

Another mother described locating her son’s body five days after the earthquakes in an improvised morgue at the port, after spending those days searching hospitals in La Guaira and Caracas. She said the government failed in its duty of care toward the people in its custody and called on the authorities to take responsibility for that failure.

The Information Gap the Government Has Not Filled

One of the most pressing complaints from the families is that neither the Venezuelan government nor the Vuelta a la Patria mission, the official repatriation program, has provided them with a complete list of the people who were on flight 164, the deportation flight that brought the group to Venezuela hours before the disaster. The families say they do not know the total number of survivors, the total number of deaths or a full accounting of who was on the plane.

The government confirmed through an Instagram post that 146 migrants arrived on the flight, but the families say that information is insufficient given the scale of what happened and the weeks that have passed since the earthquakes. The search process for their loved ones was left entirely to the families themselves, who spent days moving between hospitals and makeshift morgues without official guidance or support in identifying or locating the people who had been in government custody at the time of the disaster.

The Broader Question of Accountability

The situation in La Guaira raises questions that go past the specific circumstances of one deportation flight. The decision to house newly arrived deportees, who had been stripped of their belongings and their means of communication, in an old building monitored by intelligence agents, with no evacuation protocol, placed a vulnerable group of people in a situation where they had no ability to protect themselves when the earthquakes struck. The families are asking who made that decision, why that building was chosen and why no plan existed for the scenario that ultimately occurred.

The international complaints the families have announced signal their intention to hold the Venezuelan government accountable through channels that go beyond domestic institutions, which many of them clearly do not trust to produce a meaningful response on their own. The deaths of over a hundred people who had been deported hours earlier, stripped of their phones and locked in a building from which they were prevented from fleeing, is the kind of accountability failure that demands a complete and public explanation.