ICE Indirectly Killed 100+ Venezuelans by Deporting Them Straight Into the Earthquake Zone
A deportation flight from Miami carried 146 Venezuelans, including 19 women and 7 children. Hours later, the hotel holding deportees collapsed.
A deportation flight from Miami carried 146 people to Venezuela, including 19 women and 7 children, before the hotel where deportees were placed collapsed after powerful earthquakes struck. Only about 20 deportees have been reported as survivors so far. More than 100 are assumed dead.
Anderson Daniel Salcedo gives this story a human face. Reuters identified him as a young Venezuelan construction worker who had spent months in U.S. immigration detention before being placed on the deportation flight. After the hotel collapsed, he survived with catastrophic injuries and later underwent a double leg amputation. He was not a removal statistic. He was a son, a worker, and a human being whose body now carries the consequences of the deportation machine.
The victims were Venezuelans with families, bodies, names, histories, and futures. They included women and children. ICE’s deportation machine treated them as disposable by pushing them outside U.S. public view and leaving their families to search after the collapse.
The flight from Miami arrived in Venezuela hours before the earthquakes. Reporting tied to deportation-flight monitoring identified the deportees on board and said they were transported after arrival to a hotel in La Guaira, one of the areas hit hardest by the earthquakes.
Lisbeth Portillo, 58, survived the collapse, but she did not walk away untouched. She said she had been in a second-floor room with 16 other women when the quake hit, then fell, was buried under a beam, and escaped only after the shaking shifted the rubble around her. She later walked nearly five kilometers with about 20 other deportees looking for help, crying through a communications blackout before reaching a National Guard building and calling relatives. “I was born again; God gave me a second chance,” she said. “I am traumatized.”
Deportation language is designed to hide cruelty. “Removal” makes state violence sound administrative. “Return” makes forced movement sound clean. But there was nothing clean about putting people on a deportation flight, sending them into danger, and leaving families with rubble, injury, disappearance, and silence after the people were gone.
This is deportation as indirect killing. ICE made the state decision that put those people on the plane, turned them into deportees, and moved them into the chain of events that ended with a collapsed hotel, missing bodies, presumed death, amputations, and families begging for answers.
Nineteen women and seven children were among the people forced onto that flight. Their presence exposes the brutality behind the numbers. ICE did not move an abstract category across a border. It moved women, children, families, workers, survivors, and vulnerable people into a disaster chain that made them disappear from public view.
Families searched for loved ones after the Hotel Santuario La Llanada collapsed in La Guaira. Reuters reported that relatives of deported Venezuelans searched for answers, including families connected to Anderson Daniel Salcedo and Oswadeliz Nunez, while receiving little official information. Those names keep the record human.
The families deserve more than silence. They deserve names, body identification records, survivor lists, flight records, custody-transfer records, and a full accounting of who approved the deportation, who knew where deportees were being held, what happened after the collapse, and why the agency that deported their loved ones was not immediately forced to answer.
ICE accountability cannot stop at the fact that a flight landed. The public needs the full record of how 146 Venezuelans, including 19 women and 7 children, were deported into a chain of danger that ended in collapse, injury, disappearance, presumed death, and family devastation. The agency that put them on that plane must answer for what happened after.
ICE’s deportation machine sent 146 people into danger and then abandoned the victims and families after the hotel collapsed. Only about 20 deportees have been reported as survivors so far. More than 100 are assumed dead. The earthquake was the disaster. Deportation was the state violence that delivered human beings into its path.
ICE violence does not end when a deportation flight leaves U.S. soil.
It follows people into danger, disappearance, collapsed systems, hospital beds, missing-person searches, and families forced to demand answers after the government has moved on.
Americans Against ICE documents these harms because deportation is not paperwork. It is a state violence pipeline that can end in death, silence, and abandonment.
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