Weeks after trekking through the Central American jungle, José López and his wife Lizmerly Agüero felt like they’d made it as they stepped off the subway and gazed at the lights of Times Square.
“I was very happy, I thanked God and I felt like I was in a dream,” said López, 31.
The Venezuelan couple and their 4-year-old daughter are among the nearly 130,000 Venezuelans who immigrated to the United States in the 11 months from April 2021 to last February, both from Venezuela and from other countries such as Peru and Colombia, according to figures in the 12 months as of March 2021, only 4,470 Venezuelans had been arrested at the US border, according to Border Patrol records.
The Lopez family went from a dark and soggy rainforest, where migrants put their lives in the hands of smugglers, to the freezing cold of New York and to the lights of the 42. The most difficult leg of the trip last October was the 4,000 miles to Walk and bus from South America to the United States border.
More than six million Venezuelans have fled President Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela since 2014, with about four million of them settling elsewhere in Latin America. Many of them, like López and his family, are being uprooted again.
They have been largely welcomed in the US as many tell border officials they are fleeing Venezuela’s socialist regime, a government backed by Russia and China that the US is seeking to overthrow. Without special immigration status, they are released to the United States and await a decision on their asylum applications.
“Venezuelans are not migrating, they are fleeing,” said Brian Fincheltub, a representative of the Venezuelan opposition movement in the United States who works for migrants from his homeland. “Venezuelans have walked thousands of kilometers with bags and without food. Apparently they are trying to escape.”
Migration is being fueled by the economic hit in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, coupled with unemployment, xenophobia and growing political instability in several countries in the region, several Venezuelan migrants and immigration advocates have said. Especially in the second half of 2021 and earlier this year, the number of Venezuelans skyrocketed, at times becoming the second largest group of migrants detained at the US border after Mexicans.
“For people living on the edge in an extremely vulnerable situation, Covid was the worst thing that could have happened to them, they were already vulnerable,” said Marianne Menjivar, who works on Venezuelan migration for the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian aid group . “It’s just a tragic situation in the sense that it’s just scraps of paper being blown away by the wind.”
Mayra Pérez, 36, and her husband, Luis Agüero, 32, said they fled Venezuela to Colombia because of oppression and deprivation. But they had to resort to selling sweets on the streets of Medellin.
A migrant and a girl walk through the grounds of a shelter in the Darien region, near the border with Colombia, in San Vicente, Panama, Friday February 11, 2022. Photo: AP“People treat most Venezuelans very badly in Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, they don’t want us there,” Pérez said. In October, they traveled to the United States with their 6-year-old daughter Arianna in tow. You are in New York now.
“I thought there was xenophobia here. But there isn’t,” Pérez said. “Here they have great respect for your rights.”
The arrival of Venezuelans is part of what the Joe Biden administration hopes will be an unprecedented increase in illegal migrant crossings at the US-Mexico border as weather improves and political instability and economic hardship hit the country in parts of Latin America meet.
The White House’s plan to repeal a pandemic-era policy that allows border guards to turn asylum seekers away is also expected to contribute significantly to the surge in immigrants arriving at the gates from the United States.
The abolition of Title 42, as the policy is known, has prompted some states to sue the Biden administration, while Republican Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas bused immigrants released in his state to the nation’s capital Has. A statement from his office on Wednesday said migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia and Nicaragua had been left behind between Union Station and the Capitol in Washington.
A Venezuelan made the trip to the US after leaving Argentina, where she had lived for a year without legal residence, selling empanadas at a train station and working at a fruit stand. María Angélica Reverol eventually flew to Mexico and crossed the US on foot in October. He is now in Chicago, where he said he is trying to get a work permit and legal residency.
“I wanted a country with a good future and I didn’t find it in Argentina where I didn’t have job security,” Reverol said. “I could hardly take care of myself. Everything had a limit.”
Like many of the tens of thousands of Venezuelans who have arrived at the US border in recent months, he has covered a lot of ground by flying to Mexico first. Then he paid smugglers to bring them to Texas. But first there was a tense night at a safe house run by smugglers.
“I didn’t know where I was, I felt alone even though I was trying to keep calm even though I wasn’t,” Reverol said. “I didn’t know what they could do to me.”
Since then, Mexico, like Central American countries, has required visas for Venezuelans who fly, a policy aimed at stemming the flow of migrants.
A migrant woman stays at the San Vicente Migrant Reception Station (ESM) in Meteti, Darién province, Panama, near the border with Colombia, on February 11, 2021. Photo.AFPBut Venezuelans are increasingly choosing to make the journey on foot and by bus, paying smugglers to take them through various countries to the US border. That has led to a drop in the number of migrants arriving at the US border, Border Patrol data shows. At the same time, Panamanian data shows that the number of migrants arriving in that country on foot from Colombia is increasing: 1,153 have set out in January, compared to just three in January 2021.
Niurka Meléndez, a Venezuelan who heads the Venezuelans and Immigrants Aid advocacy group in New York, said her compatriots are so desperate to flee South America that they are willing to travel through some of the world’s most dangerous countries.
“We’re a target for traffickers selling American Dream tour packages for as little as $2,500,” he said. “If I say I’m going there, an organized crime group will move me because they see me as a check that needs to be cashed.”
López and his wife Agüero walked a well-trodden path early in their journey, fearing that the gunmen roaming the dangerous Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama would attack them, intent on robbing them or sexually abusing them. They weren’t hurt, but came out exhausted.
“The hardest thing is seeing your daughter in the jungle, covered in mud and wet,” Aguero said. “At night, the water enters your tent. And the next day you have to dress wet, get up at 5 a.m. and move on.”
While the Darien Gap was risky, migrants said Mexico scared them more. This leg of the journey involved sleeping on the cold floors of basketball courts and dodging corrupt cops, gang members, or smugglers known as coyotes.
“There was a lot to fear that the gangs or the coyotes or the Mexican police would catch up to us,” said Luis Herrera, who traveled with his wife and three children late last year. At one point, the police stole $4,800 from them, he said.
But entering the United States is worthwhile, the migrant and immigration experts said, because the chance of being turned back is slim. Analysts tracking Venezuelan migration point out that many of the Venezuelans are motivated to come to the US in search of job opportunities, and not out of any credible fear of persecution, having lived in a third country.
“If you’re Venezuelan and you make it to the US-Mexico border, the likelihood of repatriation is slim,” said Andrew Selee, president of the nonpartisan Institute for Migration Policy in Washington. “There’s something of an incentive right now for people who are willing to take the journey to try their luck in ways that may not have been there before.”
Pérez and her husband Agüero described their joy after crossing the border into Texas in December, despite spending half a day in a detention center.
They said they were released at government expense and put up in a hotel.
“The food was good, they gave us juice, cereal, we felt very comfortable. We had TV, a woman, everything,” Agüero said. “It was a five star hotel.”
Soon released, they flew to Michigan and then to New York, where they now have their daughter in school and have been trying to settle down. The family is in the process of being granted political asylum based on Agüero’s political activities in Venezuela against the regime, which he says led to his persecution.