After a stint in Guantanamo Bay, a Venezuelan deported from the US adjusts to his homeland

MARACAIBO, Venezuela (AP) — Jhoan Bastidas was deported from the United States and spent 16 days at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, watched by cameras and eating small meals that left him hungry.

“I was locked up all day in a little room — I counted the feet: 7 wide and 13 long — without being able to do anything, without a book, looking at the walls,” Bastidas, 25, said in his father’s middle-class home in the western city of Maracaibo, Venezuela.

Three weeks after he was returned to Venezuela under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, Bastidas is just starting to make sense of it all — how he is back in the once-prosperous hometown that he left as a teenager; how tattoos on his chest earned him a reputation as a criminal; and how he became one of the few migrants to set foot on the naval base best known for housing terrorism suspects.

Piecing lives together

Bastidas and roughly 350 other Venezuelans who migrated to the U.S. are trying to piece their lives together after they were deported to their troubled country over the past few weeks. About 180 of them spent up to 16 days at the base in Guantanamo before being flown to Honduras by U.S. authorities and, from there, to Venezuela by the government of President Nicolás Maduro.

It is part of the White House’s efforts to deport a record number of immigrants in the U.S. illegally. Trump’s government has alleged Venezuelans sent to the naval base are members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which originated in the South American country, but it has offered little evidence to back that up.

“It was all very hard; all those experiences were very hard,” Bastidas said. “You have to be strong in the face of all those problems, you know, but I saw so much hate.”

More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have left their homeland since 2013, when its oil-dependent economy came undone and Maduro became president. Most settled in Latin America and the Caribbean, but after the COVID-19 pandemic, they increasingly set their sights on the U.S.

Venezuela has refused to take back its own citizens from the U.S. for years, with brief, limited exceptions such as the recent flights.

Over the weekend, the U.S. government transferred hundreds of immigrants to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador after Trump invoked an 18th century wartime law to speed up deportations of alleged Tren de Aragua members. The Trump administration, however, has not provided any evidence to back up the gang-membership claim.

The immigrants were transferred even as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows the president broader leeway on policy and executive action to expedite mass deportations.

Leaving Venezuela

Bastidas, his mother and siblings left Maracaibo in 2018, one of the harshest years of the country’s protracted crisis. As they tested their luck in Peru and then settled in Colombia, people living in Venezuela lost jobs, formed long lines outside near-empty grocery stores and went hungry.

Their hometown saw businesses shutter and entire families sell their belongings and move away. The hourslong power outages that became everyday occurrences starting in 2019 pushed even more people to abandon Maracaibo.

He set off for Texas in November 2023, bankrolled by a brother whose promise of a car and a food delivery job in Utah convinced him to migrate.

Bastidas turned himself in to U.S. authorities after reaching the border with Mexico and was taken to a detention facility in El Paso, Texas. He remained there until early February, when one morning he was handcuffed, driven to an airport and put in an airplane without being told where it was headed.

After the aircraft landed, fellow passengers thought they were in Venezuela, but when he reached the door and only saw “gringos,” Bastidas said, he concluded they were wrong. When he saw “Guantanamo” written on the floor, it did not mean anything to him. He had never heard that word before.

Guantanamo

When inside the cell, Bastidas said, he could never tell the time of day because its only window was a small glass panel at the top of the door looking into the building. He said he only saw sunlight every three days for an hour, which was the recreation time he was allowed to spend in what he described as a “cage.”

Bastidas said his hands and feet were shackled whenever he left his cell, including when he went to shower every three days.  At one point, he and other detainees were given small Bibles, and they began praying together, reading Scripture loudly and placing their ears against the door to hear each other.

“We used to say that the one who was going to get us out was God because we didn’t see any other solutions. We didn’t have anyone to lean on,” Bastidas added.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump has said he planned  to send “the worst" to the base in Cuba, including members of the Tren de Aragua. Bastidas said he is not part of the gang and believes the U.S. authorities used his tattoos to wrongly catalog him as a member of the criminal organization.

When asked which tattoos he thinks authorities misjudged, his father pulled down the neck of Bastidas’ white T-shirt and pointed to two black, eight-pointed stars, each inked on one side of the chest, below the collarbones.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit attempting to block further transfers to Guantanamo alleging cruelty by the guards and suicide attempts by at least three people held there.

Bastidas and other Venezuelans returned to Venezuela from Guantanamo on Feb. 20. Armed state intelligence service agents dropped them off at their homes.

Bastidas spent the next two weeks resting. He then began working at a hot dog stand.

Back home

Abandoned storefronts and homes are everywhere in Maracaibo, which once was a magnet for immigrants looking for good-paying jobs in and around nearby oil fields. But corruption, mismanagement and eventual U.S. economic sanctions saw production — and population — decline steadily.

Few people might know Bastidas by name in his sweltering hometown, but practically everyone in Maracaibo knows someone who has migrated. So, news of the Venezuelans’ transfer to Guantanamo was shared seemingly endlessly on social media and WhatsApp, setting off debates over their living conditions and alleged gang affiliations as well as the complex crisis that drove them to migrate in the first place.

Bastidas is leaning into faith to ignore the noise and move forward.

“I see it as a kind of test that the Lord put me through,” he said. “He has another purpose for me. It wasn’t for me to be (in the U.S.), and he kept me there (in detention) for some reason.”

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Salomon reported from Miami.