A group Venezuelans barred from the U.S. have flown home from Mexico and Panama in the first special flights for migrants since the U.S. enacted tougher border controls this month.
About 100 Venezuelans who were expelled from the U.S. or turned away at its southern border flew from Mexico City to Caracas on state airline Conviasa on Tuesday. A second flight with 300 passengers is scheduled for Wednesday, Venezuela’s Ambassador to Mexico, Francisco Arias, said in a phone interview.
The passengers pay half price on these flights, which are subsidized by Conviasa.
More than 7 million Venezuelans have fled the nation’s economic crisis in recent years, according to data collected by the U.N. The Venezuelan government has often sought to help its citizens return home from Chile, Peru, Argentina and elsewhere.
Some free flights from Mexico to Venezuela are planned beginning next week, Arias said. About 800 Venezuelans also left Panama Tuesday in three separate flights to Caracas, Venezuela’s Migration Service director Samira Gozaine said. Another was scheduled for Wednesday.
The flights will allow some of the thousands of Venezuelans stranded in Mexico and Central America to return home after the U.S. implemented measures to deter a surge in migration. U.S. authorities reported a record 189,520 encounters with Venezuelans at the southern border in the fiscal year that ended in September. Such encounters have plummeted since the new policy, an expansion of a pandemic-era program known as Title 42, took effect on Oct 12.
Venezuela’s embassy in Mexico City has registered 1,200 people in recent days who want to make the trip, Arias said.
“Most of them want to return because they wanted to go to the U.S., not Mexico,” he said. “They thought that the doors to the U.S. would be open.”
President Nicolas Maduro’s government restarted humanitarian flights from other Latin American countries last week, according to the Foreign Ministry, with 251 people returning from Peru on Oct. 20. U.S.-bound Venezuelan migrants caught in Costa Rica and Guatemala are also demanding humanitarian flights and travel permits of their own from local consulates.
