A migrant family’s 7,100 mile odyssey from Venezuela to San Jose

They walked and hitchhiked, rode buses and boats and sneaked onto a freight train. They passed through nine countries in nine months — a perilous, exhausting journey that began in January when they fled their home in Venezuela and spanned more than 7,100 miles before reaching San Jose last month, a city where they knew no one but were told they might find help.

They slept on cardboard mats on streets or in tents at transit stations and worked odd jobs for quick cash. They fended off robbers who stopped their Mexican train with rocks and bottles and slogged through a Colombian jungle passing bodies of fallen migrants who’d perished along the way.

As if the odyssey weren’t grueling enough for Keila and her husband, Keiner, both 31, the couple made the unthinkable journey to the United States with their three young daughters — Sophia, 10, Thailyn, 6, and Sinay, 5.

On Sept. 30, when they and seven others arrived to everyone’s surprise in San Jose, the government officials and nonprofit agencies that came to their aid believed the group was the Bay Area’s first busload of Latin American migrants sent by Republican governors to “sanctuary states” like California as a political protest over immigration policy. But, it turns out, their story is different.

That bus trip to San Jose was provided by private supporters working to help migrants resettle in the United States. But as with so many families before them, Keila and Keiner have ended up in the United States with an uncertain future that — like America’s ongoing immigration debate itself — is far beyond their control.

Keila recounted her family’s ordeal in an exclusive interview with the Bay Area News Group at a San Jose motel where her family is staying while local officials and community groups try to help them find work and housing and apply for asylum. They asked that their faces not be shown, last names published or location revealed, fearing deportation. Though much of her account could not be independently verified, she shared cell phone images taken along the way depicting their journey.

The family is among a new wave of Central and South Americans showing up in recent months at the southern border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has reported a nearly fivefold increase in unlawful crossing encounters along the Mexican border, from 458,000 in 2020 to more than 2.2 million so far in 2023, spurred in part by the end of migration restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most terrifying for Keila, she said, was her fear that they’d fall prey to gangsters or victim to the unpredictable tropical weather as they slogged some 60 miles through a wilderness on their way into Panama.

“For me, the most difficult thing was the jungle,” Keila said in Spanish to a bilingual photojournalist, “because I was afraid that they were going to kill us, rape us, or a river would overflow (and drown us).”

As difficult as their journey was, Keila said she and her husband felt the family could no longer stay in Venezuela under the oppressive socialist regime of President Nicolas Maduro, whose political philosophy she described as “you’re either with me, or you die.”

The United Nations Human Rights Office reported last month that “gross human rights violations continue to occur in Venezuela” to silence government critics, ranging from threats, surveillance and harassment to extrajudicial executions. More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled the country, and more than 1.1 million, including 371,000 in the United States, have pending asylum requests, an interagency response network said.

Keila and her husband had “protested for our rights,” she said, but “we were threatened that if we protested for our rights in our country, the police would arrive and beat us, they would put us in prison, they would beat us or kill us. We decided to make a decision to leave because of all the abuse they were doing to us there, threats, death threats sometimes.”

From their home in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, they set their sights on the United States, fearing if they tried to resettle in other countries along the way they would have difficulty finding work and be victimized by corrupt government officials or drug cartels. But they had little money or other goods to cover the costs of such a trip.

To escape Venezuela, they had to avoid detection by authorities and ended up hitchhiking in cars and trucks on their way to neighboring Colombia, ducking low in the seats so they wouldn’t be seen. There, they would meet up with others making the same journey.

“Sometimes we had to ask for food because we didn’t have anything to eat or money,” Keila said. “We worked cleaning the windows of cars, to be able to continue moving forward.”

They made their way to the Colombian city of Medellin, and on to the most difficult part of the trip — the roadless, swampy, mountainous jungle wilderness of the Darien Gap into Panama.

They crossed a bay in a canoe to a staging area where paid guides known as coyotes or mochileros — “backpackers” — led groups of migrants through the dense tropical rainforest. Those who pay the most get to walk closest to the guides to lessen the chances of losing their way, while others followed, hoping not to fall behind and get lost.

The family offered a mobile phone, hair iron and some cash from selling their motorcycle to pay the guides, and joined a group of some 500 migrants making their way through the jungle. But they had little in the way of supplies besides a few iodine pills to treat water, so they sought out waterfalls to drink from, and added packets of powdered sweetener for calories.

They passed the bodies of travelers who’d died on the journey, and tents and packs abandoned by migrants forced to lighten their load. After their first day, they ran out of food and spent a full day hiking without anything to eat. Keila said their girls were tired and starting to wear down.

But they came upon an abandoned pack with some tortillas, tuna and mayonnaise. “Thank God, we got a bag and we ate,” Keila said.

The family made the roughly 60-mile trek through the jungle in three days, sleeping in tents or on the ground. They took a canoe from the edge of the jungle to the Panamanian capital, then spent the next several weeks making their way through Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala before reaching Tapachula in southwestern Mexico. To enter each country, they had to pay off officials.

Mexican immigration authorities put them in detention for two weeks in Tuxtla Gutierrez, a city some 1,700 miles from the U.S. border, and then bused them to Mexico City.

They walked to a dump site north of the city where they were able to climb aboard a freight train — dubbed La Bestia, or “The Beast,” because so many migrants are injured or killed falling from the cars.

The family rode an open-topped gondola car filled with coal, with the girls lying on a tent under a makeshift sunshade. Still, danger lurked ahead. Gang members from a cartel stopped their train and tried to rob the migrants aboard.

“We had to grab rocks and bottles to be able to defend ourselves,” Keila said.

They rode the train all the way to Ciudad Juarez, which lies across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas.

At the border, they crawled under barbed wire and reached the Rio Grande, where they were able to wade across its knee-deep, muddy water. Then they walked to a border gate and turned themselves in to border officials.

“I cried and I thanked God because all those terrible things that we had gone through had already been over,” Keila said. “I was a little more calm, but what I didn’t know was what was waiting for us when we entered the immigration office. We were detained, we didn’t know what the process was like.”

After several days at a detention center, the family was released, Keila said. They were asked to sign some papers, but she said they didn’t understand what they meant.