Case Explained: “Being a migrant is not a crime”: A Venezuelan mother’s fight to keep her family together after deportation to México. – Legal Perspective

This story is part of Deportation Tracker, a project of the Border Center for Journalists and Bloggers, in partnership with Arizona Luminaria and La Silla Rota  with the support of Global Exchange.

Chapter One

Yesenia is barefoot, three days into a deadly trek through the jungle in Panama. Her kids traveling with her are stomach-sick. So is she. They are all soaked, covered in thorn scratches and out of food. They walk past dead bodies. They watch a desperate man throw himself off a cliff. With well more than a thousand miles to migrate north, they don’t know what tomorrow, or the next hour will bring.

Her children keep her going — placing one bare, mud-sinking foot in front of the other through rainforests and swamps.

“If it was just me, I wouldn’t have been able to do it,” Yesenia says in Spanish, remembering. “They’re my motivation. Always. That’s what they still are for me.” Her youngest, the only girl, is 4. Her oldest son is 12.

It’s 2022. Yesenia and her four children are heading to the United States to reunite with Mariano, her husband who recently fled to Tucson. Like Mariano before her, she is following in the tracks of tens of thousands of migrants from Central and South America, the Caribbean, and all over the world, as they passed through the notoriously dangerous Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama.

More than two years later, Yesenia is driving on the south side of Tucson with two of her children — her now 6-year-old girl and 9-year-old boy — in the backseat. She’s almost home. Mariano and her two other boys, 7 and 14, are waiting. She sees police lights in her rearview mirror, and the memory of the Panamanian jungle flashes through her mind.

Along with the memory comes the fear that drove her from her native Venezuela — and the uncertainty of unanchored years bouncing between South American countries with Mariano and her kids, searching for safety, stability, a permanent home. A home they thought they’d found in a Southern Arizona city proud of its historic role in launching the sanctuary movement for migrants, and with a loving church congregation that embraced them as family.

Yesenia knows what the traffic stop could bring: the arrival of Border Patrol, detention, deportation, and even separation from her children. 

What she fears — and something worse — will come to pass. 

Yesenia’s story reflects the inhumanity migrants face in their search for safety. The vulnerability she endured in the jungle, she says, perversely prepared her — steeled her for a swift deportation to southern México. To endure brutality from immigration officials on both sides of the border. The separation from her husband and two sons in Arizona. And a new fight to protect her two other children in México.

Alone in a country she does not know, without legal immigration status, Yesenia’s family remain targets for exploitation. 

Deporting foreign migrants to México poses serious risks, said Savi Arvey, director of refugee protection for Human Rights First. “Many are left without legal status, access to basic needs, and face extortion, kidnapping, assault by organized crime groups, or abuse by Mexican immigration authorities,” she said. 

For women like Yesenia, “these dangers are even more severe due to barriers in accessing essential medical services, food, and safe shelter while trying to protect her children in unstable conditions,” Arvey added.

“These challenges are even further compounded by the trauma of being separated from family members,” she said. “It’s an all-around devastating situation — created by both the U.S. and Mexican governments — that no one should be forced to endure.”

While migrants fleeing violence or poverty have long faced such injustice, civil and human rights experts warn that a coordinated U.S. anti-immigrant crackdown is using local law enforcement to pursue people like Yesenia — a Venezuelan mother detained during a routine traffic stop. 

President Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations, aided by the cooperation of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration, is fueling a grim reality for migrants, experts say: the U.S. and Mexican governments are working with increasing vigor to erode constitutional due process and asylum rights, and forcibly displacing people seeking refuge and legal status  — primarily Brown and Black immigrants.

Both countries, Yesenia says, have turned their backs on offering refuge to those who need it most.

“Where they hold you when you’re detained in the United States, you see everything. They treat you badly there — horribly, horribly,” she says.

“You’re even more surprised because it’s the United States, the land of opportunities, the supposed country where everything shines, where everyone wants to go because it’s wonderful — and it’s not like that.” In México, the situation is no better. They have no heart for migrants, she says. “I never feel safe.”

She said migration “is a necessity,” but in both countries “they treat you as if you were worth nothing.”

“Being a migrant is not a crime,” she adds.

Fleeing Venezuela

The scars lining Yesenia’s body are a constant reminder why she won’t go back to Venezuela. Those wounds were inflicted by her ex-husband.

More than a decade later, she still remembers those days — the spinal fear she felt for her own life and the desperation to save her 1-year-old child. One night, she says her husband stabbed a screwdriver into her armpit and lodged a hatchet into her foot. 

“I have all my scars from him. I have one here,” she says, tracing her finger across her cheek, along her upper left arm, and ending at the starburst of one scar near her armpit.

“He almost killed me,” she says.

Yesenia was too scared, during and after her recovery, to leave. And then chaos flared again. 

She says her husband lit their house on fire one night when she was sleeping. She escaped the flames. Her husband’s family had taken their son. 

After she fought to get her son back, she fled to a different state in Venezuela. Her husband found her. She fled again, and again he found her. Yesenia says he is an officer in the National Guard, and she thinks he used intelligence agency databases to keep tracking her down. 

“Up til this very day, I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. I don’t know where he is,” Yesenia says of her ex-husband. “I can go back. But there will always be the fear that he’ll find me, that he’ll kill me, that he’ll kill my son, or that he’ll take him away from me.”

“There are people who don’t know that one always emigrates for a reason,” she says.

Carolina Jiménez Sandoval is president of the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and human rights advocacy organization. She has spent decades studying and advocating for human rights in her home country of Venezuela and throughout Latin America. 

“Sadly, I believe Yesenia’s story reflects the experience of many Venezuelans,” she said. 

In 2023, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women reviewed Venezuela’s compliance with its obligations under international frameworks on women’s rights. Although some progress was made, the report highlighted a long list of concerns, including “the persistence of femicides, disappearances and psychological and sexual violence against women and girls and the lack of a gender-sensitive protocol for the investigation of gender-based killings (femicides).”

“To put it simply, most Venezuelan women have nowhere to go if they are abused by their partners, especially if their partners are connected to the government,” Jiménez Sandoval said.

It was during one of the periods of hiding out from her husband that Yesenia found Mariano on Facebook, and they began a budding online friendship.

Like many Venezuelans forced out of their country because of political persecution, violence or economic crisis, including food, fuel and medicine shortages, in recent years, Yesenia first went to Colombia. That’s where Mariano had fled to escape threats and persecution from military officials.

Since 2014, nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country — representing about a quarter of the entire population.

In 2017, the couple met in person for the first time in Colombia. Yesenia was eight months pregnant with her third child, Yender. The night Yesenia showed up on his doorstep, Mariano went from being a single man in his early 20s to a partner and stepfather of three. 

Yesenia says of Mariano that she “won the lottery.” Mariano can’t hide his smile when his wife speaks of him.

After about a year in Colombia, the family moved to Ecuador, then to Peru, briefly to Chile, and then back to Colombia — in search of stability and safety. They ultimately decided to migrate to the United States because they heard there was work there and the country had a reputation for offering opportunities and asylum to those in need. They’d grown their family with two more children and wanted to give all their kids a permanent home where they could live without fear.

They decided Mariano would go first, get settled, and then send for his family. 

The jungle

It’s 2022, and the family doesn’t have enough money to pay for a flight to get closer to the United States or to hire a smuggler to guide them through the dangers of Central America and México. 

Yesenia knows what to expect — or thinks she does. She has their four kids with her. Her oldest child helps lug their water bottles, a bag of extra clothes and food. Though they can’t afford guides of their own, they are reluctantly allowed to follow a group led by guides.

A couple of days in — already soaked through, hungry, exhausted — the family witnesses a father and a toddler slip off a cliff to their deaths. Yesenia can’t remember if that was before or after Joan saw the body of a baby half-buried in the mud. “That was a trauma for that child, for the oldest one,” she says — voice steady, in her matter-of-fact way that hints at how she works to keep the tragedies at a distance.

They drink unfiltered water, go hungry, and all get very sick. She recounts the horrors with the same measured demeanor she uses to tell the rest of her story, occasionally pausing to pull a detail from memory, to flick a quick smile of assurance at a child on her lap.

The hatchet wound on her left foot that once forced her to flee domestic violence and her own country, both drives her forward and slows her down as she crosses the Darién Gap. The swelling forces Yesenia to wear sandals.

A few days later, the sucking mud swallows one of her sandals and forces her to walk barefoot. She says it was like surrendering to the jungle, not trying to fight it.

She estimates they came across about 30 dead bodies. She says she saw vultures eating one of them. 

“Even my daughter, the little one, saw it,” she says, pausing at the memory.

The Darién is one of the most dangerous migration routes in the world. Every year, thousands of people venture through its muddy trails, turbulent rivers and mountains that form a natural barrier between South and Central America. In 2024 alone, an estimated 174 migrants died trying to cross this jungle, according to the United Nations.

“I was crying and I was telling my children that, ‘I can’t go on. I can’t go on,” she says. “My children were the ones … who encouraged me. They said, ‘We’re here for you. We’re going to get to our dad. We can do it.’”

Remembering her children pushing her forward brings a pained smile to Yesenia’s face. She shifts on the couch, holding her stomach and wincing slightly. And then, the story of the jungle continues: they sleep where they can, they eat what they can find. They cross a river by raft. They walk for hours, always pressing north.

They beg for money in the streets to make it across Central America, through Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. Yesenia doesn’t sleep so she can keep an eye on her kids. 

“Staying alert to everything,” she says, “because even the one you think wants to help you, they want to rob you.”

Mariano says the migrant trails change people. You have to think of yourself and your kids and look away from the horrors, he says, otherwise the guides might lash out or leave you behind. “If you speak up, things will get worse for you. If you get involved, things will get worse for you. You have to say, “Mind your own business.” It’s like learning to turn a blind eye,” he says in Spanish.

“One becomes inhuman,” Yesenia says. 

México: “You hear the screams”

Yesenia and the kids make it across the Suchiate River between Guatemala and México on a large inner tube. In the first Mexican city, Tapachula, just north of the Guatemalan border, a fellow Venezuelan woman lures them into a safe house. They don’t know they’re walking into their own kidnapping. 

Yesenia estimates they spent six nights in the downtown Tapachula house, with about 60 other migrants. “There were about nine adults, not counting the children,” she says of the room where they were held captive.  

Armed guards watch them, force them to stay in the cramped room and to ask permission to use the bathroom. Women without children, she says, are taken out and raped. As Yesenia remembers, two of her children stand in the courtyard, within earshot. She shoots them a look. It’s unclear if they’re listening. She continues without lowering her voice, but flashing a resigned smile: these kids have lived through so much.

“Yes, you hear the screams,” she says. “You hear when they yell at them, when they beat them.” 

Mariano, already settled and working in Tucson, finally scrapes together the money and wires $900 for Yesenia and their kids’ release. Free, they focus on one thing —  continuing north to reunite their family. They travel on small buses, sleeping where they can, often in the streets.

México is a dangerous place for migrants, says Gretchen Kuhner, director of the Institute for Women in Migration, which focuses on supporting and protecting female migrants in México.

“It is not safe. Let me be clear. It is not safe,” she said in Spanish. “The fear is so great. There’s no consequence for not protecting the migrants.”

Yesenia and her children beg for food, spare change, ride the rails on the back of a freight train, and walk. They are kidnapped again, this time briefly and further north in México, until they fork over more money to men she calls bandits. 

Still following in Mariano’s footsteps, they finally make their way to Piedras Negras, a Mexican city just south of the Texas border, where they take a raft across the river and into the U.S. There they find Border Patrol agents and turn themselves in to seek refuge the legal way. Yesenia tells the agents that she is seeking asylum.

Not quite safe

The following weeks — Yesenia and her children’s first in the U.S. — are a whirlwind of detention, bureaucratic transfers and questioning. She wonders: will they ever make it to Mariano?

“Tension, anguish,” she says of their introduction to America.

“They (Border Patrol) don’t tell you anything about what’s going to happen — if they’re going to send you back or let you enter the county. Obviously, there’s fatigue and stress,” she says.

They are in Texas, a border state that in 2022 began busing people seeking asylum to Democratic-led cities, primarily New York, Chicago and Denver, as political retaliation for opposing Republican anti-immigration measures. 

U.S. Border agents give Yesenia a choice: they can transfer her and her children to any of those three cities free of charge. Unsure which is closest to Tucson where Mariano is waiting for her, she chooses Chicago. She has no idea she is just two states away from reuniting with Mariano, separated by a few hundred miles, and now is being sent 1,730 miles in the opposite direction.

Yesenia and her kids are placed in a Chicago shelter. She tries to register with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, as she’s instructed. But there’s a problem. The government doubts Yesenia’s daughter is really hers because she doesn’t have a birth certificate. The only meeting she can get at a Colombian consulate for help is in New York City, so officials put her and her kids on a flight. Once there, they detain Yesenia and take her daughter away, she says. 

She asks for a DNA test to prove parentage. The wait is unbearable. 

“At that moment, the only thing I was thinking was that the only thing that might possibly allow me to get my daughter back was the DNA test. I felt a lot of fear and mistrust, since I didn’t know anything about the laws in that country,” Yesenia says.

After two nights forcibly separated by the U.S. government from her youngest child, the test comes back positive, and they are reunited. Offered a flight back to Chicago, Yesenia asks to be returned to Texas instead, now knowing it’s closer to Mariano. He drives from Arizona to pick her and the children up. Finally, they are together again and settle as a family in Tucson.

“It is unreal,” she says.

She made it through Panama, Central America, Mexico with her children. Survived the kidnapping, crossed the Rio Grande, faced a broken immigration system in Texas, Chicago, New York. Endured separation from her daughter. Then, finally, here is Mariano, in the flesh. “I don’t know how to describe it,” she says.

Yesenia is due in a Houston court for the first hearing of her asylum case. She writes to ICE officials, asking for a change of venue. She says she receives a letter confirming the change. But when she checks her case online, it still shows her court date in Houston.

Without a lawyer to advise her, she checks the online registry every morning, hoping that the change in venue will appear. It never does. Not sure how to get to Houston, and nervous she will be detained and deported without her children, she doesn’t know what to do. 

Remembering how immigration officials forcibly separated her from her daughter, she decides to stay in Tucson. 

“I was scared,” she says.

When she checks again later, she sees a final order of deportation, and realizes she will have to come to terms with being indefinitely undocumented in the U.S. Mostly, she worries about her children. What if they are picked up by police or immigration agents? What if she or Mariano are arrested and deported, and her family separated — again? 

Her three eldest kids are attending Safford K-8, not far from where the family is living in Armory Park, in downtown Tucson. 

Mariano works long hours, sometimes through the night. Yesenia takes care of the house and kids, supplementing Mariano’s income by making arepas and empanadas. She sells them in parking lots throughout Tucson. Neighborhood passersby soon become regulars, returning for a frequent bestseller — Yesenia’s chicken arepa with mayonnaise and cilantro. 

They join a Seventh-day Adventist Church. Finding community with other recently arrived migrants, even other Venezuelans, as well as the Spanish-speaking elders who lead the congregation and welcome the family to their community. They begin to feel at home. Remembering, Yesenia often slips a  “Gracias a Diós” into her sentences, largely crediting the church with helping her through some of her family’s hardest moments in Tucson, as well as during and after her deportation.

“Honestly, I’m very grateful to the church and to everyone, because they truly treat you like family. They are the best people, guided by God, I’ve been able to meet,” she says.

Return to the nightmare

It’s three days before Valentine’s Day in 2025, and Yesenia’s standing outside a QuickTrip gas station on Tucson’s south side, selling arepas and empanadas. She’s only been in the parking lot a few minutes when a woman she approaches to offer arepas starts hurling insults at her. 

Knowing little English, Yesenia only understands a few of the woman’s words: “fuck you” and something about “police.” She and her two kids walk away from the woman, deciding to wait a few minutes before trying to make another sale. 

Her 9-year-old son Yexander sees a state trooper’s SUV pull into the gas station, and Yesenia hurries to leave.

She pulls onto West Valencia Road, heading east. Nervous, Yesenia calls Mariano and asks him what she should do. He tells her to just drive safely and slowly and everything will be all right. 

Yesenia is barely more than a block from her apartment, when the patrol vehicle following her flashes its lights. The beams trigger memories of Venezuela, the jungle, crossing the border —- the hatchet in her foot, the dead bodies on Panama trails, the kidnappings in México.

She turns onto a side street and pulls over. 

Yesenia offers the ID she got at a Chicago migrant shelter. The trooper accuses her of having a fake ID, she says, threatening her with years in jail. He tells her that they will tow her car. “I was just thinking about my kids, that’s it,” she says. “Trying to keep calm, just stay calm and maybe it would be OK.”

The traffic ticket for driving 25 mph in a 40 mph zone stated she was driving at a speed that would “impede traffic,” according to a copy the family shared with Arizona Luminaria and La Silla Rota. The citation included additional violations for no insurance, a suspended license plate and not wearing seatbelts. Yesenia disputes that her children weren’t wearing their seatbelts.

After a while, one of the elders from the family’s church arrives, followed soon by Yesenia’s husband. Mariano asks the trooper if he can collect some of his belongings, including his tools and stereo, before their car is towed. 

He’s loading them into the church elder’s vehicle when he sees a flash of green and white reflected in the window: the unmistakable markings of a U.S. Border Patrol truck.

I told him to run, Yesenia remembers, worrying about her two other kids who are home alone. 

“I didn’t run because of nervousness,” Yesenia says. “Because of my children. But I also would have run. Everyone is going to run. Any immigrant who doesn’t yet have their papers in order, if they see Border Patrol, is going to run. It’s just common sense.”

The trooper who pulled Yesenia over “was unable to validate the identification of the driver and  requested the assistance of an interpreter and Border Patrol,” according to a Feb. 21 statement from Bart Graves, an Arizona Department of Public Safety spokesperson, or DPS.

Yesenia, Mariano, and the church elder present all say that one of the troopers in the patrol vehicle during the initial stop spoke perfect Spanish, and communicated with the family seamlessly for at least 30 minutes before Border Patrol arrived.

On Feb. 20, the news organizations requested an arrest report and any documentation related to Yesenia and her children. Border Patrol has not responded to questions about their detention or any of the allegations made by Yesenia and Mariano.

Yesenia remembers the moment they put her in the Border Patrol vehicle.

“They handcuffed me in front of my children,” she says. Her kids are crying, “almost hysterical. But I was more worried about my other two kids right then.”

Yesenia begs for her 7- and 14-year-old sons at home without her. She pleads with Border Patrol agents to stop by her home a block away so she can tell her kids what’s happening.

“I needed to see them,” she says. They tell her: “No.” 

Agents load Yesenia and her other two children into a Border Patrol truck.

Joanna Williams is the executive director of Kino Border Initiative, a migrant aid and advocacy organization based in Nogales. She said they’re alarmed that a traffic stop by state troopers ended in Yesenia’s transfer to immigration authorities. 

“If DPS is involved in these kinds of arrests then there will be more families within Arizona that are impacted, more families separated, and more long-term residents of our communities who are torn away from their homes,” Williams added in an interview shortly after the family’s detainment.

“Interrogation and unjust accusations”

Yesenia asks to make a phone call.  She says that she can’t go back to Venezuela and that she is in danger in México. 

“That’s not our problem,” she says a Border Patrol agent tells her. “That’s your problem.”

When she asks where they will send her, she says the same agent told her: “Far from us.”

At the Tucson Sector Border Patrol station, agents question Yesenia and her children. “They asked my 6-year-old daughter if her dad was a gang member, if he had a gun,” she says. Officers also repeatedly ask Yesenia if she is a member of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua. Her daughter is sobbing.

“The whole night was filled with interrogation and unjust accusations,” she says.

Yesenia’s questioning came as the Trump administration alleged that some migrants in the U.S are members of the Venezuelan gang, invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in March to fast-track deportations. The law was last used during World War II to intern tens of thousands of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans, including U.S. citizens.

Recently deported Venezuelans have filed lawsuits claiming they were wrongfully sent to prisons in El Salvador, where they were tortured. The administration’s use of the law was reviewed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. In September, the court issued a preliminary injunction, halting deportations based on the law. 

Yesenia says agents threaten to send her to Guantánamo, and that her kids can be put up for adoption. Her boy can’t stop trembling. “He was screaming in tears,” she says. “And saying please don’t separate us from his brothers.”

“I was just crying for, for my siblings because I didn’t want them to deport us,” Yexander says in a quiet voice. He says he was worried about his little sister, too. 

Yesenia asks agents repeatedly to let her phone her family so she can check on her children, let them know where she is.

“They didn’t allow me any calls,” she says.

At home, her family and church friends are searching for her, praying for her. Her community holds a rally. More than 70 people — friends and strangers — call for justice.

Mariano doesn’t know what to tell the boys about their mother, brother and sister.

At about 5 a.m. the next morning, after a sleepless night, agents load Yesenia and the kids onto a bus and drive them south to Nogales. There, border agents usher her and the children across the border and into México. 

The first thing Yesenia asks Mexican officials is to make a phone call. She says an immigration officer tells her that American government officials have ordered them not to allow any of the deported migrants to make calls. She doesn’t know where the bus is heading or how long the ride will be.

Officials from México’s National Migration Institute did not respond to repeated requests for comment about Yesenia’s treatment in the country or about how many non-Mexicans have been deported to the country from the United States.

On the forced relocation south, Yesenia starts bleeding. At first she thinks it’s her typical menstrual cycle, though it seems heavier than normal, and the cramps are worse. She has no tampons or pads. When she asks an officer for help on the bus, she says they tell her there’s nothing they can do.

“I had absolutely nothing,” she says.

In the bathroom, she washes her underwear and pants, then hangs them from the window to dry in the sun and breeze. 

She uses a wad of napkins, from the sandwiches given to her kids, to staunch the flow of blood, still heavy. Sharp pangs hit low in her belly.

She asks where officers are taking them. “They never responded to me. Or they say they’d get back to me in a second and then never did. They gave me nothing, just nothing.”

Yesenia’s resilience begins to falter.

“The pains were already more intense,” she says, remembering. Shifting in her seat, her chin quivering, she exhales sharply.

Reporter Erik López of La Silla Rota contributed to this story

Editor’s Note: Arizona Luminaria and La Silla Rota repeatedly tried to reach out to Yesenia and Mariano after last communicating with them in late summer, 2025, but have not heard from them since.

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