LA GUAIRA, Venezuela — Juan Carlos Villegas called his family in Venezuela before every immigration appointment in the United States.

With the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign underway, he feared that any hearing could be the one that ended with him in detention.

“He always called us,” his sister, María José Villegas, told MS NOW. “We were always on alert in case something happened to him.”

The call his family had dreaded finally came in late May: Immigration agents detained the 37-year-old in Blue Island, Illinois, while he was working as a construction worker in the Chicago area.

Juan Carlos Villegas was deported last week on a plane with 145 other Venezuelans, including 19 women and seven children.

Longtime Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro resisted accepting U.S. deportees until shortly before the U.S. military removed him in a commando operation in January. Under Maduro’s second-in-command and successor, Delcy Rodríguez, the pace of those flights has picked up.

A video posted by Mervin Maldonado, head of Gran Misión Vuelta a la Patria (“Mission Return to the Homeland”), the Venezuelan government program that receives returning migrants, shows Villegas’ group arriving on June 24.

“WELCOME,” Maldonado wrote. “Today we received Flight No. 164 of the Gran Misión Vuelta a la Patria with 146 Venezuelans arriving from the United States.”

Around 4 p.m., Villegas borrowed a phone and called his mother.

“He asked my mom to remind him of her address in Maracay,” a 90-minute drive west of Caracas, his sister said. “He said Venezuelan officials will take him there.”

Before hanging up, Juan Carlos left one last promise: “Mom, I’ll be home tomorrow at 1 p.m.”

About two hours later, the ground began to shake.

Twin earthquakes, measuring 7.1 and 7.5, struck northern Venezuela, including La Guaira state, where the flight carrying Villegas and the others had landed. The disaster has claimed more than 2,000 lives so far, including at least 29 of those who were on that flight, according to relatives who spoke to MS NOW.

The government’s response has exposed the devastating legacy of years of economic collapse, which had already crippled Venezuela’s hospitals, power grid, emergency services and ability to import even the most basic supplies due to U.S. sanctions.

Countless survivors have condemned the response of the interim government led by Rodriguez — a government backed up by the U.S.

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By dawn on the morning after the quakes, Villegas was on her way.

Passengers in her brother’s group were being housed at the Santuario La Llanada Hotel, a government-run building perched on a steep hillside. Since the Trump administration and the Venezuelan government reached a deportation agreement, the hotel had served as an arrival point for deported migrants.

Photos and videos posted on social media showed the hotel reduced to rubble, its terracotta roof pancaked onto the ground. Dozens of deportees from the same flight remain missing and are feared dead — many, if not all, of them in the Santuario La Llanada collapse.

An MS NOW crew reporting from the site this week was ordered to leave and prohibited from using cameras. Reporting has been allowed essentially everywhere else in the quake zone.

With roads and highways damaged by the quakes, Villegas boarded a boat from the coastal town of Choroní to La Guaira, hoping to find her brother alive.

“Several of us from Choroní went to look for him, just regular people from our town,” Villegas told MS NOW. “We didn’t bring anything. No tools, no ropes. We were going to dig him out with our bare hands if we had to.”

When she finally reached the hotel, authorities refused to let her through.

Instead, she said, they gave her contradictory information.

“They told me he was being treated at a local hospital. Then they told me he was dead, that they had pulled him from the rubble,” she said. “We searched hospitals and morgues, but we couldn’t find him.”

Her experience mirrors those of many families interviewed by MS NOW, all of whom said locating their loved ones became the greatest challenge after the disaster.

“Who’s in charge?” one mother asked while searching the rubble for her 20-year-old son.

“No one has come to help us. We’re completely alone. Where is the United States? Where are Delcy and Jorge?” she asked MS NOW, referring to Rodríguez’s brother, Jorge Rodríguez, president of Venezuela’s National Assembly.

Gran Misión Vuelta a la Patria gave MS NOW a one-sentence response to questions about those aboard Flight No. 164: “We have already contacted most of [the families] directly.”

The U.S. said Wednesday that it is providing $300 million in aid and has brought in more than 300 disaster recovery specialists to assist.

“There’s decades of poor investment in the people of Venezuela that made this even more challenging for the current government,” Gen. Francis Donovan, head of U.S. Southern Command — the group that ran the operation to remove Maduro — said when MS NOW asked about criticism of the Rodríguez government.

Several families of those aboard Juan Carlos Villegas’ plane said their loved ones were among those confirmed dead. After MS NOW shared their names with the Department of Homeland Security and requested comment and the full passenger manifest, a DHS spokesperson replied: “This flight safely reached Venezuela and all illegal aliens on board were returned home. When an individual is no longer in ICE custody, ICE is no longer responsible for them.”

Hours after the quakes hit, Immigration and Customs Enforcement began transferring people held at the Dilley Detention Center in Texas in preparation for another flight to Venezuela, according to Rep. Julian Castro, D-Texas, who has made the treatment of detainees at the facility a priority.

“It is unthinkable to send children and families, who have committed no crimes, into a country plunged into chaos by natural disaster,” Castro said, adding that ICE apparently sent that group back to Texas. 

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Across social media, videos have shown relatives digging through rubble with their bare hands and screaming for help as they search. A volunteer rescuer told MS NOW that the few government crews that have arrived have virtually no equipment.

“They had nothing,” he said. “We had to lend them drills, flashlights, shovels because they came empty-handed.”

Even more than manpower and equipment, the thing relatives want most for authorities to provide is information.

Arturo Morales, desperate to find his 25-year-old son, Arturo Alejandro Morales, said he messaged a hotline number provided by the Vuelta a la Patria program on social media. 

“I texted them Friday afternoon. They replied the next day saying they didn’t know where my son was,” he told MS NOW. “It looked like an automated message.”

Morales said his family was able to locate his son’s body, still at the hotel, under rubble. 

“I have already found my son. I have already buried him. I’m mourning him, yet the government still hasn’t given me any information,” he said.

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On Thursday, the rescue of a man pulled from a destroyed shopping center sparked hope that some of the thousands who are missing might also make it.

For most, however, reality has long since set in.

“We finally found him on Saturday, after three days of searching, at an old cargo port where they were taking the bodies,” Villegas said. “He was inside a white body bag, lying on the ground. He was dead, decomposing under the sun. I recognized him by his tattoos, by his hands, because the number they gave me — a wristband number they are assigning to the victims — didn’t match. But it was my brother. It was him.”

Not every family was able to identify their relatives so quickly.

“There were families arguing, saying, ‘This is my brother.’ ‘No, this is my brother.’ They were deported without identification documents or cellphones, and after being treated like criminals in the United States, they arrive here and are treated like criminals again,” Villegas said while waiting outside a Caracas morgue for her brother’s ashes.

Today, Juan Carlos Villegas’ ashes rest inside a small wooden box in his mother’s home.

An American flag sits over the box.

Beside it, an inscription recounting the journey that took him from Venezuela to the U.S.

“He crossed the Darién Gap, he rode the train, and he achieved the American dream. … When he arrived back in his homeland, he sighed, thinking the ordeal of being detained by immigration authorities was finally over. Instead, he was met with this tragedy,” Villegas said.

Anderson Daniel Salcedo also was on Juan Carlos Villegas’ plane. Salcedo, 22, had entered the U.S. in 2023 through CBP One, the Biden administration’s appointment system that allowed migrants to present themselves legally at ports of entry to begin the asylum process.

“That was a legal entry,” said Salcedo’s partner, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. “He had a work permit and a Social Security number. They deported him because they want to get rid of hard-working people.”

After the quakes, his mom got a call saying her son had been found alive, his grandmother, Marlene Lozano, told MS NOW from Nueva Bolivia, in Mérida state.

But doctors told the family that after nearly 40 hours trapped beneath the rubble, Salcedo would need both of his legs amputated.

“He is on a ventilator. We don’t know how he will react when he wakes up and realizes he no longer has his legs,” his grandmother said.

“My grandson only wanted a better life in the United States. He was building a house for his mother here in Mérida,” she said. “All that was left was the roof and the floor.”

Salcedo had been living in Atlanta when he was arrested on April 10 for driving without a license before being transferred to immigration authorities.

“Even though he requested voluntary departure, the process took a very long time. They kept changing his departure date every week,” his partner said.

When the process to remove him got underway, “I finally felt some relief,” she said. “I thought, ‘At least now he’ll be reunited with his family in Venezuela.’ Then, they put him on that ill-fated flight.”

Now she is raising their 9-month-old, American-born baby alone.

She believes what happened cannot be separated into two tragedies.

“First, he was a victim of Donald Trump’s policies,” she said. “Then, in Venezuela, he became a victim of the twin earthquakes and of those incompetent people who failed to get them out in time.”

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Guerrero reported from New York. Julia Jester contributed to this report.

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