Border rules split up Venezuelan families
Miguel Peñaranda, his wife and two stepchildren believed the long odyssey that began seven years ago when they left Venezuela had ended when they reached the United States on Oct. 6. But it turned out that some of their worst troubles had only begun.
After turning themselves in to the U.S. Border Patrol in El Paso, the Peñarandas were placed in separate cells — for men and women — for what they assumed would be a day or two of processing their initial request for asylum.
Peñaranda, 44, and his 18-year-old stepson were released three days later in Brownsville — but there was no sign of his wife or 20-year-old stepdaughter.
An agonizing week went by before Peñaranda received a call from his wife, Heyllyn Yepez. “My love, I am so relieved to hear your voice,” he recalled telling her. She was sobbing on the phone. “We are in Mexico!” she said. “We were deported and sent to Acapulco.”
The family was one of many who have been disrupted by the Biden administration's abrupt closure of the border last month to the large numbers of Venezuelan migrants who had been making their way to the United States this year.
The decision to expel Venezuelans under a pandemic-era policy that allows swift expulsions, previously applied mainly to Mexicans and Central Americans, has had the unintended effect of trapping many Venezuelan families on opposite sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
A Venezuelan man in Utah had earned enough money to send for his wife and three young children, only to see them held back in Mexico when the expansion of the expulsion policy was announced. A Venezuelan woman who arrived in New York in September with her husband and two sons said her mother and sisters were stranded in Costa Rica and unable to join her if the border remained closed.
“They can't go back home, because they'd have to go through the jungle. And they can't come here,” said the woman, Loiseth Colmenares, 30. “Most of the families are like that — we had family members on the way, and now we can't bring them.”
“We're losing hope of reuniting with our families,” she added.
Three Republican governors highlighted what their party has called the “Biden border crisis” by transporting thousands of migrants from the border to cities such as New York, Washington and Chicago, where unprepared city officials and nonprofits had to scramble to find shelter and other services. But the Biden administration created a new cycle of confusion and anxiety when it suddenly barred most Venezuelans from entering — including many who were joining other family members already in the United States.
“It's not the intentional family separation that happened under Trump, but it is still having a devastating impact on families,” said Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense, a nonprofit devoted to the protection of unaccompanied migrant children.
“It is a consequence of immigration policies that are not well thought out,” she said.
The inadvertent family separations are only part of the chaos that has accompanied the arrival of far more Venezuelans than U.S. border facilities were equipped to handle.
The Biden administration has struggled over the past year with the largest influx of unauthorized migration since the mid-2000s. Nearly 200,000 Venezuelans were among the estimated 2.4 million migrant encounters at the border in fiscal year 2022, arriving amid economic, political and climate crises that have compelled people from around the globe to journey to the United States.
In the weeks preceding the new expulsion policy, the pressure on U.S. border facilities had become extreme, creating a tumultuous situation whose dimensions are only now becoming apparent, as migrants allowed into the United States recount their travails.
In some cases, it appears that Border Patrol agents had been sending Venezuelan migrants to seemingly random cities around the country, including Denver, Salt Lake City and Sacramento, California, where many had no family members or friends to receive them. Aid workers in those cities said some migrants arrived clutching immigration paperwork listing arbitrary local addresses where they had been told that they would find assistance — even though local shelters were not set up to receive them.
Autumn Gonzalez, a volunteer lawyer and board member at NorCal Resist, a nonprofit immigrant network, said eight bewildered migrants showed up in Sacramento in September with an address that they had been told at the border was the location of a shelter. It turned out to be an office building. “It's gambling with people's lives,” she said.
Luis Miranda, a spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department, said Border Patrol agents were asking migrants where they intended to go once they were released from custody. Those who did not know were allowed to provide an address of a nongovernmental organization, he said.
Miranda said that there had been no deliberate separation of families, but that there might have been instances where adult family members could not legally be processed or detained together and became separated.
“In cases where that has happened and we become aware of the issue, we take proactive steps to bring such family members back together,” he said in a statement.
Staff members from Kids in Need of Defense said some Venezuelans now stranded in Mexico were so desperate that they were trying to send their children alone to safety in the United States, knowing that minors would not be expelled — a situation that creates additional separations.
“We have counseled them on the risks associated with taking this action,” said Megan McKenna, the group's senior director of public engagement.
Peñaranda said his family was still considering what to do next. Returning to Venezuela is not an option, and he is not certain that Mexican authorities would allow all of them to remain in Mexico.
“I would have preferred to be sent to China, anywhere, than to be separated,” he said. “I understand this was not the right way to enter the country. But this is not the way to treat people.”