A Venezuelan mother to the US government: ‘I need the next deportees to be treated as people’

After five days of searching, she had at least one confirmation: the body was at Bolipuertos’ Specialized Container Terminal in La Guaira Port, an improvised morgue where bodies were piled up and decomposing, as if they belonged to nobody. The forensic doctor said to her, kindly: “Come in, ma’am, come in.” He put on a face mask and the woman asked about her son, Daniel Alejandro Núñez Ramírez, 28, one of the deportees on Flight 164 that arrived the morning of June 24 in Venezuela from the United States. The doctor told her that, indeed, his body number was 1018.

“My body, 1018!” the mother repeats — Oswadeliz Núñez Ramírez, a 58-year-old woman who finds it hard to accept that her son is a number.

She went to where the body was and opened the sack that covered it. The last time she had seen him face to face was eight years earlier, when Daniel was still studying civil engineering at the Universidad Nacional Abierta. One day he told her he was leaving the country. “He said: Mom, I’m going to leave for work.” He first went to Peru, and in 2022 he arrived in the United States, where he settled in Jacksonville, Florida.

He had left at age 20, barely more than a teenager, and now she had him in front of her again at age 28, transformed into a man. “And when I saw him again, I saw him dead,” the mother says. Her son’s face was unrecognizable because of the impact of the collapse of the Hotel Santuario La Llanada, where Daniel had been taken by the Bolivarian Intelligence Service, the feared Sebin, along with more than 100 people who had arrived on Flight 164 as deportees from the United States to Caracas. The death certificate states that Daniel died of multiple traumatic injuries. “My son didn’t suffer, at least I have that consolation,” Oswadeliz believes. “He died immediately.”

When the mother was finally able to see him, more than 100 hours after the devastating earthquakes in Venezuela, his head “no longer had blood, it had worms.” But she continued inspecting the lifeless body and saw the tattoos on his arms, “which were intact,” his stomach, his legs and his buttocks. She recognized him. He was not only a victim of a tremor; he was, certainly, her son.

On Wednesday, June 24, Oswadeliz, a lawyer by trade, was at her home in El Tigre, in Anzoátegui state, far from Caracas or La Guaira. She did not yet know then that Daniel had been deported. Earlier in the year, during a conversation, her son had told her he intended to return to the country at some point. He was one of nearly 600,000 Venezuelans whom the administration of Donald Trump stripped of legal protection.

“He had told me he was going to come back in July or August of this year, because ICE’s persecution was horrible, he couldn’t even work properly, he had to live practically in hiding and he didn’t want to keep living like that,” Oswadeliz says.

On Mother’s Day, May 10, a call from Jacksonville alerted Oswadeliz. “They told me Daniel had been detained. That was my Mother’s Day present.” ICE officers grabbed him as he was heading to his construction job. The mother does not remember names, but her son was held in four detention centers in the country, like nearly 6,000 Venezuelans who today remain in the custody of U.S. immigration authorities.

“ICE immediately pressured him to sign his voluntary deportation,” the mother says. “He was scared about the costs, which would have been too high to keep fighting his asylum case.” At the time the mother sought help and tried to support her son with attorney fees. Now, remembering it, she breaks down in tears and even blames herself: “I say to myself, my God, why didn’t I sell the little I have here in Venezuela so he could have continued with his asylum case? He would be alive today.”

At 5.25 pm on Wednesday, June 24, hours after landing at Simón Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetía, Daniel was allowed a four-minute call. He was going to be transferred to the hotel where they would be given screenings, exams and vaccinations. The next day, Sebin officers would send each person to their home. He was supposed to arrive in El Tigre, but that never happened. At 6.04 pm on Wednesday the ground began to shake. The Hotel Santuario La Llanada could not withstand the earthquake’s force; its red-tiled roof collapsed, ending so many lives.

Oswadeliz learned from a friend not only that her son had been deported, but that he had been housed in that hotel. “ICE does not notify family members; it does not warn when it hands them over to the Venezuelan government, knowing how this government is. They handed over our families and the government did whatever it pleased,” she says.

The mother hired a shared taxi and, after more than eight hours of travel, arrived in Caracas. A Sebin officer assured her that her son was alive and that he himself had rescued him. Oswadeliz searched every possible hospital, but Daniel was not in any one of them. Agony was eating her from the inside. On Monday morning the mother was able to enter the area around the hotel, where, she says, there was only an excavator and a few volunteers.

“They told me there was no life there. I said: ‘All right, but if my son is dead, where is my son’s body?’ I caused a scene; I told them if they wanted to shoot me, shoot me. They prepared their weapons, they brandished them. But if I don’t make that scene, nothing happens. Four bodies were produced there, one was mine. There are more people buried there; if you don’t go look for your dead, they won’t give him to you. The government wants to cover up that there are more dead there,” she says.

“I want to fight to change the law”

“I wanted to receive him alive,” Oswadeliz says, carrying in her hands a wooden urn inscribed with the following information: Daniel Alejandro Nuñez Ramírez. Date of death: June 24, 2026. Date of cremation: June 30, 2026.

This Tuesday she had to move her son’s decomposed body to the private funeral home Previsabel XXI in Caracas, where she paid $680 to cremate the body. In the free cremation services the government offered, they told her that “if she wanted the remains quickly, they would give her anybody’s ashes.”

The mother keeps doing the math, looking for probabilities in the facts: if the U.S. government had not detained him, she says, her son would not have been deported; if he had not been deported, she thinks, he would not have ended up in the hands of Venezuelan authorities; if he had not been with Venezuelan authorities, she says, he would not have been housed in the hotel; and if he had not been in the hotel, the building would not have fallen on his body and caused his death.

“Sebin processed them as if they had criminal records in Venezuela when they did not. If my son had no criminal record, why was he being held?” the mother asks, who learned that of the 146 —initially reported as 147— people who arrived on the charter flight operated by GlobalX from El Paso, Texas, those who did have criminal records were taken to face justice. They survived the earthquake.

So far, the Venezuelan government has not provided an official list of the number of deportees who died in the incident, although early reports spoke of 12 and now 32 are being mentioned. The U.S. government, for its part, insisted that the flight “arrived in Venezuela without incident and all undocumented immigrants on board were returned to their countries of origin,” the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told several media outlets. It later added: “When a person is no longer in ICE custody, ICE is no longer responsible for them.”

The mother has returned home with her urn, still incredulous that her boy has been reduced to the dimensions of a coffin and is not the “strong, robust” man of 1.85 meters and about 110 kilos he had become.

Oswadeliz has shouted enough, has cried enough, yet no one seems to hear her. She has thought, for example, of trying to reach Marco Rubio. “I want him to tell me why the United States handed my son over to this government and did not tell me that my son was no longer in their hands. If they had handed him to me that same Wednesday afternoon, I would have come straight home with him,” she says. “I want Marco Rubio to give us moral compensation, to apologize to us, to say he’s sorry. I want to fight to change the law. If you don’t have a criminal record when you are deported, your family must go pick you up, they have to bring you home. My son is already dead, nothing will bring him back, but at least a precedent must be set so those who come next are not mistreated. I need the next deportees to be treated as people.”

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