A Venezuelan family followed the rules to enter the U.S. After being arrested and detained for a month, they're leaving.
Life sucks for so many!!
A Venezuelan family followed the rules to enter the U.S. After being arrested and detained for a month, they’re leaving.
Like thousands of other migrants, the family entered under the Biden administration’s rules in 2024. With Trump in office, they were locked up in Texas before deciding to abandon asylum.
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/04/16/texas-immigration-detention-dilley-undocumented-self-deportation/?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
by Uriel J. García April 16, 2026, 5:00 a.m. Central
EL PASO — In the summer of 2025, José, his wife Carolina and their teenage daughter arrived for their first scheduled hearing at an immigration court in downtown El Paso. The family believed they were going to argue their case for political asylum proceedings after fleeing Venezuela.
Just over a year earlier, the family had followed the rules the Biden administration had established to enter the U.S.: They made an appointment through the CBP One cellphone application, met with a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent to request asylum, and received “parole” — permission to live and work in the country while their case was pending.
But at the court hearing in June, the judge dismissed the family’s case without hearing any testimony, following a Trump administration order that immigration judges dismiss cases en masse so officers could arrest immigrants before they walked out of courtrooms — a policy the U.S. Department of Justice later said was made in error.
As soon as they walked out of the El Paso courtroom, U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement agents arrested them and took them to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, a privately-run facility operated by CoreCivic where the family said their 14-year-old daughter quickly fell into depression and was vomiting for days.
In April 2025, the Trump administration terminated the legal status of the more than 900,000 people who entered the country using the CBP One app — most had received permission to live and work in the U.S. for up to two years while their cases were pending. And it sent notifications to immigrants who had entered using the app that they needed to return to their home countries or they would be arrested............................
A Venezuelan family followed the rules to enter the U.S. After being arrested and detained for a month, they’re leaving.
— (@oceancalm.bsky.social) 2026-04-19T08:59:22.239Z
www.texastribune.org/2026/04/16/t...
The South Texas José, 40, and his wife Carolina, 31, from Venezuela, in Las Cruces, New Mexico on April 12, 2026. José and his family are choosing to self deport back to Venezuela after being detained by ICE and held at a family detention center in Dilley for a month. Paul Ratje for the Texas TribuneFamily Residential Center in Dilley on Jan. 20. 2026. Brenda Bazán for The Texas Tribune