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.
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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.
Last year, El Paso ranked second in the nation for such courthouse arrests, after New York City, according to an analysis by Joséph Gunther, a mathematician who analyzes federal immigration data.
José and his family spent a month in the detention center, which has faced persistent accusations by advocacy groups of “inhumane conditions, routine mistreatment, and due process violations.” When they were released and allowed to return to Las Cruces, N.M., where they had lived for eight months, they had to check in with ICE every three months and received a new court date for June 2027.
Instead, the family bought one-way plane tickets back to Venezuela.
“What I don’t understand is how can someone do everything right and still get treated like this?” said José, who asked that he and his wife be identified only by their first names because they fear being targeted by the Venezuelan government. “I feel like it doesn’t make sense because we entered legally but yet we ended up locked up.”
Last month, U.S. District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs in Massachusetts said in a 25-page ruling that the Trump administration illegally revoked the legal status of those who used the cellphone application. Burroughs ordered the Trump administration to reverse its actions, saying her order applied to immigrants who used the app between May 2023 and January 2025.
But for José and his family, the treatment they’ve received since last year has convinced them that they’re better off dropping their dreams of making a life in America.
“Honestly, my time here made me disillusioned,” Carolina said. “As soon as we got out [of detention], I told my husband, we’re leaving this country, I don’t care where we end up, but we’re not staying here.”
Fleeing Venezuela
In Venezuela, José worked as a mechanic and fixed used vehicles to resell at a profit.
One afternoon in 2022, José and his two younger brothers went to the capital city of Caracas to pick up three motorcycles that José planned to repair and resell. They noticed a man in a blue pickup truck watching them, he said.
At a military checkpoint a few miles down the highway, José said a soldier fired a round in the air, yelling at José’s brothers to pull over. Instead, José said, his brothers turned around and fled. A few other soldiers stepped out of the building and began shooting toward his brothers as they rode off, he said.
José threw himself on the ground. One round went through his motorcycle’s speedometer, he said.
“I thought I was shot, and because I was wet from the rain, I thought I was bleeding from my stomach,” he said.
José said his brothers escaped, but the soldiers grabbed him and ordered him to call his brothers to return to the checkpoint.
Before long, he said, his wife, sister-and-law, and some friends arrived at the checkpoint, demanding to know where José was.
“When the sergeant saw they came for me, his attitude immediately changed, he began treating me nicely,” José said. He was released and allowed to go home. He said his brothers were afraid to report the incident, but José decided to file a complaint with local prosecutors.
A few weeks later, he and his wife saw the same blue pickup truck driving past his home, José said.
“We started discussing if maybe we should leave the country,” he said.
From 2015 to the end of 2022, more than 7 million Venezuelans fled the country during an economic and political crisis that resulted in many not having access to basic needs such as food and medicine, a crisis blamed on an authoritarian government accused of corruption and persecuting dissidents.
In 2022, they fled to Brazil, where they lived for nearly two years, until the country elected a new president who reopened diplomatic relations with Venezuela.
“We were afraid that this meant that this would open up a way for someone from Venezuela to come after us,” José said.
They traveled to Colombia, where they joined other Venezuelans who were also fleeing to the United States.
After a four-day hike through the Darien Gap, a 66-mile roadless stretch of jungle, mountains and rivers between Colombia and Panama, they arrived in Mexico in late 2023. It took three months to book an appointment through the CBP One app in McAllen. In February 2024, they were allowed to enter the country, according to José’s immigration documents.
They first moved to Kansas, where José and his wife spent six months working at a meat processing plant. José would cut cow carcasses into quarters as they passed on a conveyor belt, he said. Then he injured his shoulder and needed surgery.
The workplace injury resulted in a $25,000 settlement with his employer, money they used to resettle in Las Cruces, N.M., where his sister-in-law had moved with her family. He bought a car and began delivering Walmart groceries. Carolina would sometimes deliver groceries but mostly stayed home to help her pregnant sister, while their daughter enrolled in middle school.
For the next eight months, the parents worked while their daughter went to school, as they waited for their court date in June.
“I’m here to deport you”
Following their arrest at the El Paso courthouse, as agents transported them to Dilley, the family said they peppered agents with questions about why their case was dismissed and why they were being detained if they didn’t enter the country illegally.
“I can’t tell you anything else, other than I’m here to deport you,” José recalled an agent telling him.
At the detention center, roughly 75 miles southwest of San Antonio, they were given blue jumpsuits and immediately separated, with Carolina and their daughter sleeping in a wing for mothers and children while José went to the men’s wing.
They said they had to sleep with the lights on because the facility didn’t turn them off at night. Breakfast was served at 7 a.m. each morning: boiled eggs and oatmeal.
In the evenings, after the 5 p.m. dinner, José was allowed to take his daughter to an outdoor recreational area where they played volleyball with other detainees.
One evening after dinner, their daughter threw up. Her parents took her to the facility’s medical center, where they gave her some pills for nausea, but for the next three days, she kept throwing up when she tried to eat, José said.
“Every day she kept asking me, when are we going to get out? And would complain that she wasn’t sleeping in her own bed,” José said.
“I was scared I was going to spend months there, like other people,” their daughter said.
Carolina grew frustrated with each passing day. She couldn’t hug or touch her husband, she said. She tried to comfort her daughter, but it was hard to keep the teenager’s spirits up when she felt so overwhelmed.
“I’d try to distract her, I’d comb her hair or just be with her, but there were times where I couldn’t even stand myself, so I’d stay in my room by myself,” Carolina said.
During their second week in the detention center, José called a lawyer who represented detained immigrants. The lawyer told José that according to a 1997 settlement between advocacy groups and the federal government, children could not be held in a detention center for more than 20 days.
That gave them some hope. Their daughter began to count down the days, jokingly telling her parents that if it wasn’t for her, her parents would stay in the detention center longer.
Later that week an asylum officer interviewed the family by phone for seven hours — it was the first time the daughter learned the reason they had fled Venezuela. She begins to sob as she hears the details, her father said.
“We tried to keep those things from her because we didn’t want to scare or traumatize her,” José said.
The asylum officer found their story credible, allowing them to stay in the U.S. to continue with court proceedings. On July 5, they were released and dropped at a bus station in Laredo, where they caught a bus back to Las Cruces.
They could continue their lives in the U.S. But they didn’t want to.
“It’s hard living in fear”
On a recent Friday morning, after packing their luggage and organizing their immigration paperwork, José went to deliver one last grocery order. Around 10 a.m. Carolina heard a vehicle pull into the apartment complex’s parking lot. At first she thought it was her husband returning in a hurry, she said.
It was six masked ICE agents.They arrested the brother of a neighbor who also had recently immigrated from Venezuela.
Carolina immediately called her husband. She told him to stay put.
“I’m nervous,” she said, as she recorded the arrest from inside her bedroom. She called other neighbors to warn them to stay inside. “I never want anyone to go through the same experience we went through inside the detention center.”
After the ICE agents left, José returned home.
“It’s because of stuff like this we’re returning home,” he said. “It’s hard living in fear.”
They flew to Miami earlier this week, then caught a flight on Wednesday to Venezuela on Wednesday.
“I’m really nervous,” José said in a text message as they prepared to meet with Venezuelan immigration officials.
Two hours later he texted: “They let us go, thank God. We’re happy but really tired.”
