Immigration flights from the United States triggered the terrified international search of disappeared loved ones

Ali David Navas Vizcaya had been in detention of the United States since the beginning of 2024, when he arrived from Mexico to a border crossing in the United States, where he had an appointment to speak with immigration officers. He called her Friday night and said she thought she was being deported to Venezuela or Mexico. His name is no longer in the ice system.

Almost 8 million Venezuelans have left their homeland since 2013, when their economy dependent on oil collapsed. The majority initially went to other Latin American countries, but more addressed the US.

“We continue the law”

On February 3, Caraballo went to an ICE office in the Dallas office for another mandatory registration with the agents who handle their asylum application. He had been regularly coming to the office for months.

What member of the gang, asked his wife, would enter a federal office for the application of the law during a repression of the Trump administration that has left immigrants throughout the country terrified that they would be deported?

“We followed the law as they told us. We never lost any” meetings with the authorities, said Sánchez, who remains in the United States trying to ensure the release of her husband. Sanchez said that her husband, with whom she married in 2024 in Texas, has not had failures with the law in the United States, also showed the Press Associated a document of the Venezuelan government that shows that she has a clean criminal history there.

Sánchez believes that he was erroneously accused of belonging to Train de Aragua due to a clock -shaped tattoo that marks his daughter’s birthday of a previous relationship.

“He has many tattoos, but that is not a reason to discriminate against it,” he said.

Sánchez said that she and her husband left Venezuela in 2023 with just $ 200 and spent the next three months sleeping in the squares, eating garbage cans and trusting the goodwill of migrants while traveling north.

She thought the sacrifice would be worth it. Her husband had been working as a barber since the age of 13 and in the United States she had the hope of being able to find a new beginning, escaping from the salaries of poverty and the toxic policy of the Ironfistered government of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

Venezuela responds

The Venezuelan government has criticized transfers, calling them “kidnappings” and urging people to protest on Tuesday in the capital, Caracas, to demand that those arrested in El Salvador be sent to their homeland.

Jorge Rodríguez, Maduro’s main negotiator with the United States, urged Venezuelans to live in the United States to return home.

The American dream, he said, had become “a saving nightmare.”

Sanchez agrees. She wants to leave the United States once she finds her husband.

“We fled from Venezuela in the better future. We never imagine that things would be worse.”

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Associated Press Regina García Cano journalists in Caracas, Venezuela and Tim Sullivan in Minneapolis contributed to this report.