AZ Luminaria series tells the harrowing story of a Venezuelan couple deported to Mexico

Much of the news about Venezuela over the last few weeks has focused on the United States’ capture of former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. But Venezuela has been in the headlines for much of the second Trump administration, largely due to the president’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.

The 1798 law is being used to justify fast-tracked deportations of Venezuelans, with the administration claiming that the US faces a clear and present danger from Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang.

This comes as the population of Venezuelans has grown by 119% since 2019, with some 1.2 million living in the U.S. as of 2024. Venezuelans are the fastest-growing group of Hispanic people in America, and many of them came here seeking asylum from the Maduro regime.

A recent three-part series in Luminaria takes a detailed look at the story of two such people — a Tucson couple named Yesenia and Mariano. John Washington wrote the series, and he joined The Show to talk about it.

Full conversation

SAM DINGMAN: Just to say up front, this piece is so extensive and we're barely going to be able to touch on all of it, but I did want to ask you: Why did you select the story of Yesenia and Mariano in particular to tell in this piece?

WASHINGTON: Well, my connection with them begins almost a year ago on Valentine's Day 2025, when I got a call from a family member who told me that they had gone missing, that Yesenia and two of her children had gone missing after an arrest on the southside of Tucson. And they were concerned that potentially they were in Border Patrol or ICE custody and asked if I could try to find them. As a reporter, I started making some calls and found out that the next morning they had been already deported to Mexico.

DINGMAN: Yeah.

WASHINGTON: So I was able to start tracking the family. I was able to keep in touch with them, and I sort of followed their journey — which is very long, as you say, very harrowing — over the next seven months. And I just stuck with it and was able to meet them again in Mexico and just try to understand what the actual impact of a swift deportation like this really means for a family.

DINGMAN: Yes. Well, as you just alluded to, they had arrived in Tucson after journeying some 5,000 miles in their attempt to reach the U.S., and one of the things that you cover extensively is what was involved in that journey. And that's one of the things that really stuck out to me about your reporting is the astonishing level of detail.

To give listeners just one example, Yesenia initially flees her home in Venezuela because Her ex-husband is physically abusive. He has, among other things, attacked her foot with a hatchet.

WASHINGTON: That's right.

DINGMAN: That means that she can't walk long distances in shoes, which becomes an issue when she has to trek hundreds of miles through the jungle. So she wears sandals, which then gets sucked into the mud, which means she has to make a lot of the trip barefoot. There are so many examples like this, and that is hardly the most harrowing.

What was important to you about that level of granularity in telling this story?

Bear Guerra

WASHINGTON: You know, there was another moment that really stuck out to me, and this is an answer to your question. This is after she was deported with two of her four children, and the family decided that they couldn't remain apart, so they wanted to reunite together in Mexico City.

Yesenia was in the very southern Mexico with two of her children. Mariano, her husband, was in Tucson. They both made the journey towards the middle to Mexico City. That entailed being arrested, that entailed traveling by bus. Yesenia was undergoing a very serious physical malady at that moment, which turned out to be a miscarriage. She didn't know that until later. She was on the back of a train, on the top of a cargo train stopped in the middle of the night in the jungle, two of her children sleeping at her feet.

And in order to protect them, she grabbed rocks to try to fend off potential bandits that were coming. And the fortitude that she was able to muster in that incredibly harrowing, dangerous, exhausting few weeks of being oppressed and being detained, being deported — I think that's something that we don't always see.

What happens after such a deportation? It's not like their story just ends because they're out of this country, because they're on the other side of the border, but they survive. They figure out ways to survive if they can. And this is something that I think is important to understand is what this actually looks like beyond just the number.

DINGMAN: As we've been discussing, this story is largely about Yesenia and Mariano as people, but it is also a story about the immigration system, obviously, both here in the U.S. and in Mexico. And one of the major systemic storylines here is how the Mexican government is handling people who are deported there by the U.S. Tell us how that impacted Yesenia.

WASHINGTON: Right. So not just Mexico, but Mexico has definitely been a partner in the United States in the immigration enforcement regime, being willing to accept Venezuelans, for example. There's other nationals that they accept as well that are deported from the United States. So obviously those people aren't originally from Mexico, but Mexico is willing to receive them.

They could decide not to. And Trump has threatened tariffs if they were to make that decision. But it's not just being a willing partner in receiving the migrant. But then what we see is, in practice, the migrants are often persecuted or robbed or jailed in Mexico as well. And all of that and more is what happened to Yesenia.

DINGMAN: Well, as I said, John, there is obviously so much to cover in this story. And I know that we have just barely scratched the surface. So I want to encourage listeners to go check out John's reporting in Arizona Luminaria. John Washington is the reporter who told it. John, thank you so much.

WASHINGTON: Thanks for having me, Sam.