‘I am here, I am free’: how one Venezuelan refugee triumphed against the odds
The rough floor of the immigration detention center was Alejandro’s sharpening stone. For hours each day, he scraped trash against concrete at the River correctional facility in rural Louisiana so he could make rings for his loved ones. He wore plastic Coke bottles down to an “O” shape, using the cylinder to give the rings their form. He knew the bottle would leave the rings too big for the fingers he was making them for: his sister, niece and best friend. But he had nothing else.
Each ring would take eight, 10, 12 hours to make. That was fine – he had time. Who knew how long he would be held, packed into a 10-by-15-meter cell with more than 100 other asylum seekers?
For Alejandro – who uses a pseudonym in this story for fear of retaliation – the detention center was “the blackest part of the darkness”. He had undergone intensive military training in Venezuela, had endured death threats when he wanted to leave the armed forces there and had crossed the US-Mexico border to surrender himself to the asylum process. But nothing had prepared him for the psychological and physical torture of a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice)detention center.
After being transferred between Ice detention centers and maximum-security prisons in three states, he arrived at the privatized Louisiana detention center surrounded by nothing but fields. The guards there did not let the prisoners sleep, banging on their metal bunks, stacked three high, throughout the night.
“The system works to wear you down to that point without hope,” Alejandro told the Guardian as he sat next to his sister,Oneida Briceno Arcila, in a shared office of the immigration assistance business she’s opened in Florida to help others like her and her brother.
An asylum seeker herself who had escaped to Miami years earlier, Oneida has a non-traditional background in legal training – but her brother’s case offered her a trial by fire.
“Without her assistance, I never could have gotten out,” Alejandro said. “Few people had the help I did.”
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Alejandro’s story of forced migration is far from exceptional. Today, Venezuelans face the largest external displacement crisis in the Americas, and the second-largest refugee crisis in the world.
The fate of forcibly displaced Venezuelans is at the center of current US political battles over asylum. Migrants have become the pawns of coercive schemes instigated by rightwing US governors who have chartered buses and flights across state lines so they can dump migrants in more left-leaning communities to score political points with their anti-immigrant bases. Some of these cynical stunts have been so intentionally deceptive and cruel that experts have likened them to human trafficking.
Meanwhile, in October, the Biden administration abruptly expanded a pandemic-era immigration policy to expel Venezuelans to Mexico, where migrants and asylum seekers often become the targets of rape, kidnapping and other serious crimes.
To counter the bad optics of this sudden hardline turn, the Biden White House has simultaneously created a program for Venezuelans to come to the US legally through a process called parole. But the new initiative has limited slots and includes requirements that will disqualify all but the wealthiest, best connected applicants who can provide for their own commercial air travel to the US, afford valid passports and find someone stateside who’s willing to financially support them, among other stringent requirements.
In short, the administration has created a legal pathway that Venezuela’s most vulnerable probably cannot even qualify for, while effectively choking off many Venezuelans’ legal right to ask for asylum at the USMexico border.
This restrictive approach comes as the situation in Venezuela remains dire. More than 7 million Venezuelans have been displaced from their country since 2001. But the mass migration of less privileged sectors of society under severe humanitarian distress started in 2014, during what Venezuelans simply refer to as “the crisis”.
By 2014, oil prices had dramatically declined, leading to the retraction of government-funded social services. By that time, the death of Hugo Chávez had led to a change in government leadership, which saw the increasing influence of hardline actors in the ruling party.
In the shadow of coup attempts (in 2002 and 2020), US-backed economicsanctions and freezing of assets, discontent with the government and popular anti-crime sentiments, the Venezuelan state ramped up militarized domestic policing and political control in an atmosphere of paranoia.
Then, in early 2015, Barack Obama declared Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to national security, citing government corruption and human rights abuses, marking a new phase of US policy toward the country. Under the Trump administration, US sanctions on Venezuela drastically increased. Venezuela became one of the most sanctioned countries in the world, and its ability to export oil or to trade was largely blocked.
Amid harsh sanctions, militarized policing, and government corruption, the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela dramatically worsened. This year, an estimated 42% of Venezuelan children in Caracas neighborhoods were experiencing malnutrition, while political violence and hunger made Venezuela unlivable for millions.
When Venezuelan asylum seekers search for refuge, they often espouse US patriotism and idealize the freedom that the US can potentially provide. Yet their welcome has been far from warm, with many facing imprisonment within mainstream prison populations across the US, detention in privatized centers outside of official oversight, and the recent media spectacle of being shuttled around the country for the political benefit of conservatives.
Still, forcibly displaced Venezuelans continue to cross borders in order to find freedom, or simply survive.
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Oneida and her husband arrived in Miami with two kids and two bags.
In Venezuela, their family had owned a small cellphone retail business. But when Oneida’s husband refused to sell his products at a fixed government rate, they started receiving threats. One time, on the way home, her husband was threatened at gunpoint.
With Oneida pregnant, the family tried to move to another city and escape their persecutors. But the threats continued. They had few other viable choices – they decided they had to leave Venezuela, with only their 10year-old and six-month-old in tow.
“Literally, we left our whole family,” Oneida said. “We left everything.”
In 2015, Oneida, her husband and their two children were able to come to the US legally with tourist visas – a pathway that has become far less possible for Venezuelans today, as the US embassy in Caracas has been shuttered and all consular services suspended since 2019.
The family got to Miami that October and applied for asylum. “Really, we didn’t have an option to go back,” Oneida said.
Even though they tried to do everything by the book, it still took more than two years for them to receive authorization to work in the US. While they waited, they did what they could to get by, selling their possessions back in Venezuela to pay the rent.
“We did, well, what all immigrants do,” Oneida remembered.
Their future here, however, remains tenuous because of the legal limbo they’ve endured for over seven years.
Oneida’s oldest son just aced a statewide test and has started receiving letters about his college prospects. But because he only has temporary protected status (TPS) – a short-term designation for people unable to return to their home countries because of conflict, natural disasters, or other disruptions, which offers no pathway to a green card or citizenship – his mom isn’t sure he’ll be able to attend university.
Oneida also has TPS, while her sixyear-old daughter – who was born in the US – is an American citizen. For years now, Oneida, her husband and their two oldest kids have been waiting in US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ extensive affirmative asylum backlog for a chance at a more stable future for their whole family, hoping for an interview to prove to an asylum officer that they qualify for refuge.
If they were granted asylum, their family would finally have a pathway to a green card – and eventually to citizenship.
“Asylum establishes a human right. That we have a right to life, family,” Oneida said. “As long as we don’t have asylum, we can’t do anything. Really, we feel abandoned.”
Yet even after encountering so much adversity, Oneida still feels her family belongs here. She dreams of becoming a US citizen, like her daughter.
“Always when I go out, when I drive and I see the beautiful blue sky and see the American flag … I always tell God, when I am an American citizen, I will have a flag in my house,” she said. “To me, this seems so respectful, so proud to be American.”
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Alejandro’s travels north started in the middle of the night in Caracas.
It was 2019, and fellow military officers had threatened him with death after he was branded as a political discontent. He left his apartment with only a backpack, forced to leave Venezuela over land by night to avoid being recognized as a member of the military.
After walking across a bridge into neighboring Colombia, he used most of his 10 years’ worth of savings from his military pay to buy a plane ticket to Mexico City. In Venezuela, average monthly incomes are currently less than $100, and Alejandro’s salary was the equivalent of $21 per month.
Even so, Alejandro was lucky to have the option of flying. The August 2021 cancellation by Mexico of most flights from Venezuela and the drastic tightening of entry restrictions means that Venezuelans often must instead cross the deadly Darien Gap in southern Panama and continue on land across all of Central America and Mexico.
Even though Alejandro says he had to save a drowning elderly man and child while swimming across the Rio Grande River on the US-Mexico border, his crossing to the US was far less horrific than what other Venezuelans have experienced.
Once he stepped on to US soil, he promptly surrendered to the border patrol in order to enter the asylum process. Officials transferred Alejandro to the troubled Val Verde correctional facility, a privately run prison with a history of prisoner abuse and detainee deaths in Del Rio, Texas. He stayed there for a month before being transferred to the south Texas Ice facility outside San Antonio. From there, he went to a prison in Memphis, Tennessee.
“You don’t need to know a psychologist to know that the person who designed the system [of transporting detainees from one facility to another] had a macabre mind,” Alejandro said. “They handcuff your hands, feet and waist. Then they give you a sandwich and a water you can’t drink because you are handcuffed. You are handcuffed here in front of one bottle of water and a sandwich you can’t eat.”
From Memphis, Alejandro was transferred yet again to a correctional facility in Mississippi, a privately run maximum-security prison.
“Most [asylum seekers] think they will continue their process living in a refugee center with their family,” Alejandro says. “However, if you have the same process [as I did], you will have to be in a two-by-two meter cell confined as long as the officer decides. The detention for immigrants is the same as if you have killed someone.”
From Mississippi, Alejandro was transferred to his last privately run prison – the River correctional facility in rural Louisiana, an Ice detention center. He remembers it as the darkest part of this nightmare.
The yard was the sole outdoor area where the more than a hundred asylum seekers in Alejandro’s 10-by-15 meter cell were allowed an hour of recess. Ale