Jhoan Bastidas was deported from the United States and spent 16 days at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, watched by cameras and eating small meals that left him hungry.
“I was locked up all day in a little room — I counted the feet: 7 wide and 13 long — without being able to do anything, without a book, looking at the walls,” Bastidas, 25, said in his father’s middle-class home in the western city of Maracaibo, Venezuela.
Three weeks after he was returned to Venezuela under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, Bastidas is just starting to make sense of it all — how he is back in the once-prosperous hometown that he left as a teenager; how tattoos on his chest earned him a reputation as a criminal; and how he became one of the few migrants to set foot on the naval base best known for housing terrorism suspects.
Piecing lives together
Bastidas and roughly 350 other Venezuelans who migrated to the U.S. are trying to piece their lives together after they were deported to their troubled country over the past few weeks. About 180 of them spent up to 16 days at the base in Guantanamo before being flown to Honduras by U.S. authorities and, from there, to Venezuela by the government of President Nicolás Maduro.
It is part of the White House’s efforts to deport a record number of immigrants in the U.S. illegally. Trump’s government has alleged Venezuelans sent to the naval base are members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which originated in the South American country, but it has offered little evidence to back that up.
“It was all very hard; all those experiences were very hard,” Bastidas said. “You have to be strong in the face of all those problems, you know, but I saw so much hate.”
More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have left their homeland since 2013, when its oil-dependent economy came undone and Maduro became president. Most settled in Latin America and the Caribbean, but after the COVID-19 pandemic, they increasingly set their sights on the U.S.
Venezuela has refused to take back its own citizens from the U.S. for years, with brief, limited exceptions such as the recent flights.
Over the weekend, the U.S. government transferred hundreds of immigrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador after Trump invoked an 18th century wartime law to speed up deportations of alleged Tren de Aragua members. The Trump administration, however, has not provided any evidence to back up the gang-membership claim.
The immigrants were transferred even as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows the president broader leeway on policy and executive action to expedite mass deportations.
Leaving Venezuela
Bastidas, his mother and siblings left Maracaibo in 2018, one of the harshest years of the country’s protracted crisis. As they tested their luck in Peru and then settled in Colombia, people living in Venezuela lost jobs, formed long lines outside near-empty grocery stores and went hungry.
Their hometown saw businesses shutter and entire families sell their belongings and move away. The hourslong power outages that became everyday occurrences starting in 2019 pushed even more people to abandon Maracaibo.
