EDITOR’S NOTE: CNN is using first names only in this story at the family’s request to protect their privacy.
New York
—
Her 3-year-old in tow, Franyelis stepped out of the repurposed budget hotel, its blue awning faded where the “Days Inn” logo once was.
Heading out of the shelter to pick up the family’s oldest son from school, toddler Emmanuel – Emma, for short – ran circles around his mom, seven months pregnant with her third child.
“Es un varón,” she said in Spanish, smiling shyly. It’s a boy.
Emma was oblivious to the cars, the don’t-walk signs, even the cold on this windy, 34-degree afternoon. Nor did the toddler seem to sense his mom’s anxiety.
Franyelis, 28, had never expected to get pregnant again when she got to the United States.
None of it was supposed to happen like this.
The American dream had belonged to her partner, her sons’ dad. He was the one who’d spurred their move two years ago from Venezuela, bolstered by a new, smoother path to requesting asylum under the Biden administration.
“Let’s go there. We’ll be fine,” he’d told her, echoing the hopes his sister and other stateside relatives had stoked: “Come! You can get a better future for the boys here.”
A supportive, hardworking partner, Franyelis had gone along. But since then, President Donald Trump had changed not only the immigration rules of her new country but the political landscape of her native one, snagging Franyelis in a strange subplot of the US immigration enforcement crackdown.
As her due date neared, Franyelis kept coming back to the same thought: “I want to leave.”
She shook her head. Tears swelled. “I need to leave.”
But she wasn’t sure that was possible. At least not in time.
* * *
Born and raised in Zulia state, along Venezuela’s border with Colombia, Franyelis had met Yonquenide when she was 17. It was he who, when their first two children were old enough, decided it was time to dream bigger for their family.
“What I didn’t have, I wanted to give to them, do you understand me?” he tells CNN. “For them to speak English, to make a new life. I dreamed they would study. In my childhood, I never… What they gave me was given to me with a lot of effort by my parents. I wanted it to be easier for me with my children.”
Extreme poverty, runaway inflation and political turmoil also gripped Venezuela, with nearly 8 million residents fleeing from 2014 to 2025, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The United States extended Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelans to live and work legally in the US while their home country faced instability “due to the enduring humanitarian, security, political, and environmental conditions.”
When Franyelis and Yonquenide’s eldest, Yoneifer, was 7 and Emma just 2, they set out on what turned into a three-month journey to the US-Mexico border. Like most Venezuelans, they had no passports – which can be ultraexpensive to get or renew – so the adults took their national ID cards, along with the boys’ birth certificates. To cover the roughly $20,000 trip – much of it paid to smugglers – Yonquenide had sold a home he owned in Colombia, then worked along the way, he says.
Arriving in August 2024, they planned to do everything the right way, the legal way. With a cousin’s help, they applied for entry via the CBP One app, a Biden-era tool that let undocumented immigrants schedule appointments for asylum claims at legal ports of entry. They claimed they’d been extorted by drug runners, Franyelis recalls.
“We came in on the bridge, not crossing the river or anything like that,” she says, referring to the Rio Grande that migrants often wade through or swim – an endeavor that killed one of her cousins in 2023 – to sneak into the United States.
After a month in Texas, Franyelis and Yonquenide bought flights for themselves and their sons to New York City, where his sister hosted them for a few weeks before their first immigration court appointment that November, the same month US voters re-elected Donald Trump. They confirmed at the virtual hearing before Immigration Judge Jonathan Reingold they were seeking asylum, both say.
The couple rented space in a shared home, and after their temporary work papers came through, Yonquenide worked to cover their rent and other costs.
“I am a person who is not the type to stay in the house sleeping,” he says. “I like to work. And you know, you learn as you go. Even if you are new to a job, at one point, you figure it out.” He made deliveries and used his work van to moonlight as a mover. He sold candy in the street. He earned about $900 a week.
“Having another child wasn’t in the cards,” Yonquenide says. But by mid-2025, he and Franyelis were expecting their third.
“It is always a blessing,” he knew.
And the surprise pregnancy fit their surprising new life. Joy and wonder fill photos the couple took around that time: touristy shots at the Brooklyn Bridge and Times Square, candids by a lake in summer, just a few months before the kids would see their first snow.
Unseen were political winds that had begun to shift in this country they now called home.
* * *
Just as Trump began his oath last January, the CBP One app was effectively shut down and appointments made through it canceled as part of what would become a nationwide immigration enforcement crackdown. Franyelis and Yonquenide did not get orders to self-deport, they say.
Then, in early September, the United States initiated a bombing campaign against what it claimed were Venezuelan drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. That same month came the announcement of the revocation of the Temporary Protected Status that had protected hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans from deportation.
Days later, Franyelis and Yonquenide had a routine appointment with Reingold at the courthouse at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan. By then, reports were multiplying of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detaining asylum seekers as they left hearings like this one; federal officials didn’t reveal how immigrants’ names land on agents’ lists.
Yonquenide suggested they avoid the risk and go underground, joining the roughly 8 million foreigners living in the United States illegally. But Franyelis insisted. “I wanted to live a comfortable life here,” she recalls, “and that meant doing the right thing, legally, for our children.”
“Let’s go,” she said. “God will protect us.”
So, mom and dad, with their two sons, reported that morning to Reingold’s courtroom. They left around 9:40 a.m. with a letter confirming their next court date: July 2029.
Emma was asleep in Yonquenide’s arms when it happened, right there in the hallway, just like they’d heard.
ICE agents swarmed.
“They were waiting for him,” Franyelis recalls.
“They showed us no mercy,” her partner says.
The agents forced Emma out of his father’s arms. Father Eduardo Fabian Arias, a Lutheran priest who supports Spanish-speaking families in the courthouse, stepped in to help them make sense of what was happening.
“My husband started crying, begging for them not to separate him from his children,” Franyelis remembers, still not sure why she and the boys were spared.
The agents led Yonquenide down the hall into an emergency stairwell leading to the ICE holding cell. He became one of at least 14,822 Venezuelans arrested by ICE between January and mid-October 2025, according to an analysis by the Deportation Data Project, an academic effort that analyzes federal data; they were the fourth-most-targeted nationality of Trump’s immigration enforcement push, and a large percentage of the latest wave of migrants to arrive under his predecessor.
Emma looked around, confused at the adults fussing around him and too young, perhaps, to grasp the severity of the scene.
“When he saw his father cry, he started to giggle,” his mom recalls.
But Yoneifer, then 8, caught all of it. He cried unconsolably.
After a 10-day transit through ICE facilities, Yonquenide landed in North Louisiana’s Jackson Parish Correctional Center and was able to call Franyelis, who by then had connected with a lawyer via Fabian Arias’ Manhattan parish, St. Peter’s Church.
They began to help Yonquenide build a case for his next court hearing in December.
* * *
Once in detention, asylum seekers’ cases restart on a separate track called detained court, where justice is notoriously more expeditious and harsher, with much lower asylum approval rates.
After a Sunday Mass in Spanish last October at St. Peter’s, Franyelis joined hundreds of immigrants and their families at the church’s free legal clinic. Held below the presbytery, it connected them with immigration attorneys, with the church sometimes using donations to cover legal fees for the most serious cases.
“It’s hard, but I have to keep going. I can’t get sad. When I am, I try not to show them,” Franyelis said, nodding toward her children as they played with her phone in a corner of the room.
Soon after Franyelis met with the lawyer, Yonquenide again called her from detention – a routine call, like from a parent away on a business trip but for the recorded voice stating the name of the detention center and the detainee and a prompt to press #1 to accept the call.
Yonquenide asked Yoneifer if he was behaving and what he had eaten that day.
“Nothing, we haven’t eaten today,” the boy replied.
“You had empanadas,” Franyelis corrected him.
“Your mom is tough,” Yonquenide joked on the line. “She doesn’t give you anything to eat.”
From the other end of the table, Emma called to his dad that he loved him very much.
“I love you, too,” Yonquenide replied, “hasta el cielo.” All the way to the sky.
The call was brief, much like – at least in Franyelis’ mind – this whole episode: just an interruption, a sad glitch in their new American life. Yonquenide would be released soon, she figured, and since her and the boys’ next court hearing wasn’t until 2029, they would have plenty of time to keep building their dream.
“We just have to wait until they release him,” she thought, “because we cannot go back to Venezuela.”
* * *
Yonquenide’s court hearing was moved up by a month, and the judge ruled on the spot: an immediate deportation order. If Yonquenide wanted to appeal, he’d have to wait another eight months in detention.
“I don’t wish it upon anyone,” he tells CNN of being detained. “It’s very ugly in there. The food is not good, and among the Latinos, people get hit and stuff like that.”
“No,” Yonquenide decided. “Eight months locked up? No… I prefer to go to my country.”
The next day, he signed his deportation papers.
Three weeks later, Franyelis’s phone rang around 1 a.m.
“My love, they’re going to transfer me,” Yonquenide told her. Then, the line went dead.
From Louisiana, he flew to El Paso, Texas, then to Phoenix. From there, the same White House that for months had insisted Venezuela was a dangerous country run by drug cartels dispatched him on yet another of last year’s 76 deportation flights back to South America.
For two days, Franyelis had no news of Yonquenide. Then, finally, he called from Caracas.
“Honey, we descended from the cloud, and in the blink of an eye, I was back in Venezuela,” said her partner, now among at least 10,072 Venezuelans deported from January to mid-October 2025, according to the Deportation Data Project.
Back in New York, Franyelis was starting to think differently now that Yonquenide was a continent away: “I can’t stay. I don’t feel well here.”
As much as she had embraced their move to the US, she had never been its driving force. And now that her partner – the father of her two little boys and their little brother on the way – was gone, the thought repeated in her mind, often bringing her to tears.
Did she like it here? “Not anymore,” she said, “not since he was deported.”
* * *
When his deportation flight landed, “they removed the chains from our hands and feet,” Yonquenide recalls. “I thank God that I am no longer locked up.”
Similar arrivals were broadcast on TV and social media with exaggerated civility by Venezuela’s intelligence service, the SEBIN, to welcome US deportees home – and malign the United States – as part of the government’s “Great Mission Return to the Homeland.”
Children and their mothers got toys as they exited a plane, one video showed. Men wearing gray jumpsuits from ICE detention smiled and thanked then-President Nicolás Maduro, showed another.
Detainees with no criminal record got door-to-door rides to their desired destinations. Yonquenide was dropped off at his brothers’ home in Maracaibo, some 430 miles by road east of the capital, but he slept at Franyelis’ mother’s house: “He gets scared being alone at night,” she says, smiling.
Yonquenide, of course, went back to work – but made just $70 to $80 per week in construction. “You don’t earn a good living here,” he admits to CNN by phone. And he missed his children: “They are my inspiration for moving forward.”
“Being alone isn’t very good. You become more negative,” Yonquenide tells CNN. “But, you know, I settled back in my country… Us Venezuelans, we are not bad people.”
But just as Yonquenide was finding stability again in his homeland, Venezuela was on the verge of its most volatile, course-altering weeks in at least three decades.
* * *
Through the months Yonquenide and Franyelis had navigated the US immigration system, the US boat-bombing campaign had intensified, along with Trump’s rhetoric against Venezuela’s government.
Then, on January 3, US forces executed a dramatic, nighttime capture of Maduro and his wife in their home before transferring them to the United States, where he pleaded not guilty to charges of narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and other alleged crimes.
The arrests upended Venezuela, making the country’s tense climate more dangerous. Fearing a US ground offensive, the nation’s troops closed the borders and set up more checkpoints across the capital. Officials split over how to interact with the United States. The SEBIN was empowered to stop anyone and staunch political dissent for what the government called national security concerns.
Yonquenide wouldn’t discuss any of it, not even the monthly hyperinflation of some 20% to 30% that made his small income almost worthless. “I’m going to tell you something: I can’t talk much about it because here they record the calls and all that,” he said. Though CNN had no indication Venezuelan authorities were listening, reports of authorities searching civilians’ phones for government criticism increased amid the state of emergency.
Franyelis knew the political situation in Venezuela was bad. She knew of the hours-long supermarket lines and electricity blackouts. But she had just spent Christmas and New Year’s Day alone with her children at the shelter they moved into after Yonquenide’s income vanished.
And she wanted to be back with her partner as soon as possible, especially as her April due date neared. Surely, it would be simple for her to leave the country that had deported her partner and deposed the leader of the nation to which she wanted to return.
Turns out: It was not.
* * *
In December, Franyelis began seeking motions for voluntary departure from the United States for herself and the boys. Her attorney filed the requests, he confirmed to CNN, with the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, the formal name of the US immigration court system.
If she and the boys left without a judge’s approval, the court would issue their removal orders in absentia when they failed to show up to her next asylum hearing. Leaving the country without authorization could trigger a lengthy ban on re-entering the United States – a possibility she wanted to avoid.
Through the request, Franyelis renounced her claim to seek asylum in the United States and asked Reingold to let her self-deport. The move surprised even her lawyer, given they weren’t due back in immigration court until 2029 and could work and receive social services until then.
“Most people want to stay,” says Saverio Lo Monaco, who has seen only three or four clients wish to self-deport among the roughly 250 asylum claims he’s litigated. “Most people would say, ‘Beautiful, I have another three years to go, there will be another (presidential) administration by then.’ Most people would wait.
“But she came to me and told me, ‘They removed my husband, so I don’t want to keep fighting because I want to be with him,’” the attorney said.
The Trump administration last year began offering free flights and $1,000 to undocumented immigrants to voluntarily leave the US, a sum the Homeland Security secretary in January raised to $2,600, claiming “tens of thousands” of immigrants had self-deported via the program.
Immigrants who wanted to go needed a valid passport to travel by air – the only option Franyelis could see now, in her third trimester and with little kids. But she had never had one. And after the United States and Venezuela severed diplomatic ties in 2019, there had been no way for her to get one in the States.
Venezuelans in need of consular support in the US typically had to travel to a third country, like Canada or Mexico, with another acceptable form of documentation to get it; that’s even what the International Organization for Migration advised.
Franyelis had none. The Homeland Security Department did not respond to CNN’s questions about options for Venezuelans with no passport who wish to self-deport.
“Legally, it’s an impasse,” Lo Monaco says. “The best-case scenario is that they approve her request (to self-deport.) Then, she would have to leave the country.
“But I don’t know exactly how.”
* * *
Franyelis turned the problem over and over in her mind as she came and went from the New York shelter, almost always with Emma. On a Friday afternoon in January, the two headed out to Yoneifer’s public school a few blocks away, where they stood at the gates in a herd of hooded parkas speaking softly in English and Spanish.
The toddler danced around, incapable of containing his energy. Franyelis’ coat just barely fit over her midsection, stretching at the waist. “It’s not that big, really,” she said, stroking her belly. “Better that way.”
When a school attendant unlocked the iron gates, parents and siblings walked onto the blue playground turf, scanning children grouped mostly by class. Franyelis walked slowly, smiling shyly at the teachers she recognized. Emma spotted his brother first, then sprinted at him, arms outstretched, into a waist-high bear hug that Yoneifer – now a mature 9 – returned awkwardly, half-smiling.
Together, the trio walked back toward the street, Franyelis calling out to Emma as he zigzagged among adults and older children. She wished he would stay near her, where she could see him. She was too pregnant to run after him.
In school, Yoneifer was learning English fast, understanding basic expressions and responding in Spanish, his mom says. He didn’t want to go back to Venezuela, but he missed its warm beaches.
“The water is cold here,” he said.
Yoneifer wished all four of them could be reunited. He missed his father, the outgoing one. “I’m more of a homebody,” Franyelis says. “He is the one who would take them out to play soccer in the park or on a soccer field.”
With the temperature below freezing, she couldn’t take them to the park, but it wasn’t far to the public library, with books in Spanish and a row of computers with games in English or Spanish. It was easy to keep Emma entertained with books, coloring and toys, but Yoneifer was more despondent, often on his mom’s phone or playing computer games.
Unable to work a traditional job and with a toddler to care for, money also was a constant concern for Franyelis, making her return to Venezuela all the more urgent. A photographer who saw Yonquenide get detained had set up a GoFundMe account for her, and the $2,100 or so it had collected bought Emma a haircut and both boys new off-brand sneakers, plus clothes and other necessities, their mom says.
Franyelis also started babysitting three times a week, earning $50 per shift watching the children of a friend who worked nights, along with her own kids, at their place. For now, she could keep her boys safe, Franyelis knew. But the clock was ticking to her April due date.
“I can’t give birth here,” in the United States, she said. “Who would take care of my two oldest when I’m in the hospital?”
* * *
With immigration cases backlogged by the millions, Franyelis knew she might not get a response soon to her request for voluntary departure. For many immigrants, having an American baby – with a constitutional right to citizenship – was a dream come true. But her dream’s focus had shifted.
“That’s what bothers me,” she said, touching her belly. “When I will feel the pain, I will have to bring them somewhere to be watched over, and with the pain, it is going to be very complicated.”
Yonquenide understood why his partner wanted to leave. “I would like her to stay there and give my children a future, but she wants to be next to me,” he says from Venezuela. “I think she needs help with the pregnancy and with the children.
“She is only one person, and she’s not going to be able to handle all this.”
There was at least one other option for immigrants without travel documents: traveling by land to Panama, then by boat to Colombia to avoid the dangerous Darien Gap. From last January to September, more than 18,000 migrants, most from Venezuela, had taken the route back, UNHCR reported.
“I would do it if it was just me,” Franyelis says, nodding toward her sons. “Like this, 7 months pregnant, I would do it.
“But I can’t, not with them.”
“It takes a long time, and she doesn’t have enough money to get here by land,” Yonquenide says. “Only with help or with a voluntary deportation flight can she get out of there.”
“The problem is new,” says her lawyer, Lo Monaco. “She is the first Venezuelan I encounter that wants to return. Does the government have a system for that? The only system that they have is to forcibly detain people and remove them that way.”
So, as her due date approached, Franyelis remained in geopolitical limbo: living with her young sons in the United States while longing to be back in Venezuela, where her growing family could be together.
This story was edited by Michelle Krupa.
