Uprooted again: Venezuela migrants cross US border in droves

DEL RIO, Texas (AP):

Marianela Rojas huddles in prayer with her fellow migrants, a tearful respite after trudging across a slow-flowing stretch of the Rio Grande and nearly collapsing on to someone’s backyard lawn, where, seconds before, she stepped on American soil for the first time.

“I won’t say it again,” interrupts a US Border Patrol agent, giving orders in Spanish for Rojas and a dozen others to get into an idling detention van. “Only passports and money in your hands. Everything else – earrings, chains, rings, watches – in your backpacks. Hats and shoelaces, too.”

It’s a frequent scene across the US-Mexico border at a time of swelling migration. But these aren’t farmers and low-wage workers from Mexico or Central America, who make up the bulk of those crossing. They’re bankers, doctors and engineers from Venezuela, and they’re arriving in record numbers as they flee turmoil in the country with the world’s largest oil reserves and pandemic-induced pain across South America.

Two days after Rojas crossed, she left detention and rushed to catch a bus out of the Texas town of Del Rio. Between phone calls to loved ones who didn’t know where she was, the 54-year-old recounted fleeing hardship in Venezuela a few years ago, leaving a paid-off home and once-solid career as an elementary schoolteacher for a fresh start in Ecuador.

But when the little work she found cleaning houses dried up, she decided to uproot again – this time without her children.

“It’s over, it’s all over,” she said into the phone recently, crying as her toddler grandson appeared shirtless on screen. “Everything was perfect. I didn’t stop moving for one second.”

Last month, 7,484 Venezuelans were encountered by Border Patrol agents along the US-Mexico border – more than all 14 years for which records exist.

The surprise increase has drawn comparisons to the mid-century influx of Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro’s communist rule. It’s also a harbinger of a new type of migration that has caught the Biden administration off guard: pandemic refugees.