Venezuelans in US anxiously watch home crisis, brace for new migration surge

Rafaías Villán has made the decision.

He hasn’t told his father yet, so any conversations about this topic have to happen outside his father’s rundown apartment in Maiquetía, about 30 minutes away from Caracas.

Villán is leaving Venezuela.

“I’m telling you, two days after the elections, I was ready to run away,” he says in Spanish.

He made the decision after Venezuela’s electoral authority announced last month, without providing any evidence, that authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro had been reelected for a third term.

The 38-year-old programmer is scrambling to find flights to leave with his wife and two kids. But he hasn't had much luck.

He hopes to soon join the tens of thousands of Venezuelans who have already fled to the U.S. to places like Doral, Fla., and Katy, Texas just outside Houston.

In the U.S., Venezuelans who have migrated are paying close attention to the events in their home country.

Luisana Tolosa works at a Venezuelan restaurant in Katy, also known as Katy-zuela due to the high number of Venezuelan migrants who now call it home.

The telecommunications engineer and college professor left her home country a year ago with her mother and three kids.

“Up until the last day, with my booked flight, I kept saying, ‘My God, I don’t want to leave, I belong here,’” Tolosa tells NPR during a work break. “I know everything was bad, but I was in denial.”

She says before the July 28 election her mind was set in going back.

“I said, ‘I’ll stay one more year, and I’ll go back,’” Tolosa said. “Venezuela needs everybody who is willing to rebuild the country to go back.”

Mass migration in the horizon

The opposition is contesting the election as fraudulent. They've provided copies of the tallies that show leader Edmundo González Urrutia got the overwhelming support of the voters.

Maduro’s victory declaration has been followed by yet another sweeping crackdown on dissent. His security forces have arrested more than 2,000, including lawyers, journalists, campaign staffers and ordinary Venezuelans.

Human rights groups report more than 20 people have been killed.

Danae Jimenez knows all too well about this.

She left Venezuela 10 years ago after being persecuted because of her work with one of the opposition’s political parties.

“One of the persons that was in my team … he was killed. He was killed after I left the country,” Jimenez says. “So, I realized that I did the right thing and I saved not just my life, (but) my nine-month-old baby girl.”

Jimenez hasn’t seen her mother and father in a decade. One of her siblings migrated to Argentina, also fleeing persecution.

“Deep inside, I just want to see my mother again, I just want to see my city again,” Jimenez says crying. “I just want to see my daughters with my mom, at least once.”

In the meantime, she says she’ll keep organizing from the U.S. with other Venezuelans. She says she doesn’t want their cause to die.

“What is happening right now is going to affect the border crisis, and it’s going to affect the economy,” Jimenez said. “It’s going to affect everything around the (US) government, the elections.”

Maduro has been in power for 11 years, after succeeding his mentor, the late Hugo Chávez.

Since 2014, about 8 million Venezuelans have left the country, according to the United Nations.

“The country doesn’t offer any possibility of work,” Magaly Sanchez-R, a researcher who studies Venezuelan migration, says. “Salaries are extremely low … Services are completely collapsed, education is a disaster.”

As a result, more than 6.5 million Venezuelans have gone to countries in Latin America and the Caribbean,according to the Interagency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants of Venezuela.

Colombia has taken in about three million Venezuelan migrants in recent years, while Peru has received about 1.5 million.

According to data published by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, since 2021 Border Patrol agents have had about 838,000 with Venezuelans at and between ports of entries.

Sanchez-R says millions more will likely leave if Maduro clings to power.

“This situation in Venezuela (is) an unprecedented situation of enormous repercussions not only in the region, but in terms of the planet,” Sanchez-R says.

And that impact could be felt soon.

According to surveys conducted before the July 28th elections by Venezuelan polling firms, between 25% to 40% of Venezuelans said they were planning on leaving the country. In one survey, four out of five said their decision would be accelerated if Maduro were to win.

Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says a wave of migration from Venezuela could bring neighboring countries human talent. But it comes with great costs, too, for providing health care, education and other services for migrants.

That should be something the U.S. should consider as it thinks on how to address the roots of migration of Venezuelans, Abrams said.

“The United States, under this administration, has tried to stop them from coming,” Abrams said. “It’s a huge problem and the solution to the problem is not found at the Rio Grande, it’s found by having more pressure on the Maduro regime … the solution is found in Venezuela.”

Forced to leave

Political persecution is one of the many reasons Percy Tordecilla says she’s leaving Venezuela.

“Now, here people can't even speak freely,” she says. “If things do not change … with pain in my heart, because I really love this country, I’ll really have to go.”

The 51-year-old was born in Colombia, but has lived in Venezuela for 40 years. She makes a living by selling groceries from her garage in Guarenas, about 24 miles east of Caracas.

She lives by herself since her two kids have left, and can’t return to Venezuela. Her daughter claimed asylum in the U.S. after almost drowning while crossing the Rio Grande.

Her daughter has been asking her incessantly to come to the U.S. Her son is moving to Mexico.

When Maduro was named the winner, Tordecilla says her daughter called her screaming and crying, “she said, ‘Mom we lost, I won’t be able to go home for six more years!’”

There’s nothing Tordecilla can do to ease her. And there’s nothing she can do. She has to go to her daughter.

“When I die I want to be buried in Venezuela because I love this country,” Tordecilla says. “But I’ll have to go because I’m no longer happy in this country.”