Economic collapse and political repression drove up to a third of Venezuela’s population to flee over the past decade. Some are now returning home and reembracing loved ones on Venezuelan soil.

This is not the way it was supposed to happen.

Venezuela’s top opposition leader has long vowed to reunite families by restoring democracy. That goal remains elusive. Although the dire economic conditions that fueled the exodus have eased, the country is still a political pariah and military tensions with the US are rising fast.

Some Venezuelans are making the costly trek home anyway. For many, diaspora life has proved disappointing, even hostile in the US, where the Trump administration is revoking legal protections, rounding up immigrants and accelerating deportations. South American destinations like Chile and Ecuador aren’t as welcoming as they once were either.

Venezuelan migrants, their accents softened by years living in places like Chicago, Buenos Aires or Madrid, yearn to see aging parents they left behind. Frustrated by poor job prospects and wary of simmering xenophobia, some are trying to make a fresh go of life back home, often keeping their suitcases open just in case.

Their arduous journeys illustrate the shifting dynamics of Venezuelan migration.

It’s often family bonds that beckon. “I learned the hard way to start from the bottom up, but it was a very lonely life,” said Eduardo Rincón, 24, who returned to Caracas with his father and brother in July after two years in Miami. The three had obtained US parole status in 2023 and were working their way up. After a string of gigs, Rincón was earning up to $4,000 a month managing the front desk of a hotel in Brickell, enough to save and help support his mother back home.

Then the Department of Homeland Security informed the trio that their parole status was revoked and warned of imminent deportation. “We didn’t qualify for asylum and decided to stick together and return,” Rincón said.

He now earns $600 a month handling communications for a plastics company in Caracas, barely enough to buy a monthly basket of food for a family of five, according to private-sector estimates.

Rincón has set a one-year deadline to leave Venezuela again if things don’t improve. “It seems we’re doomed to choose between a better life economically, but without family and friends, and a poorer life, but surrounded by loved ones.”

The reverse flow is still modest. In a recent report, the governments of Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia said more than 14,000 US-bound migrants, mostly Venezuelans, had turned around since Trump’s crackdown began in January. In Colombia, usually the last stop for returning Venezuelans, immigration authorities tallied around 12,000 heading back between January and June 2025. Nearly all of these were Venezuelan.

Seven out of 10 Venezuelans arriving in Panama said they wanted to return home, according to a study by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. The International Organization for Migration made a similar finding in Central America. In another snapshot of the reverse flow, entries into Venezuela from Colombia accounted for 83% of all observed movements at the border, according to a July IOM study.

Family reunification is among the main drivers of the north-to-south migration that UNHCR and other organizations started observing in late 2024. Other motivations include pursuing work in a chosen field, discrimination and trouble legalizing status.

Another is a perception, however tenuous, that Venezuela’s economy is recovering and living conditions have improved.

While strongman Nicolas Maduro has managed to check hyperinflation, the gap between Venezuela’s official currency exchange rate and the black market rate has widened to at least 65%, according to private-sector estimates.

Economic data is scarce. The central bank last issued inflation figures a year ago, and the government has locked up economists who dared to publish estimates that challenged the official narrative of a country that has overcome US sanctions. What’s clear is that Venezuela pumps only around a third of the oil than it did in the 1990s, eroding the country’s main source of revenue.

And although there are fewer blackouts, water cuts and fuel shortages than before, repression persists. Maduro’s leading foe, Maria Corina Machado, carries the torch for the opposition, from underground.

Coyotes and Travel Agents

Trump’s anti-immigrant policies have sent many Venezuelans packing. So far this year, more than 13,300 have been expelled on twice-weekly deportation flights, according to Venezuelan authorities. Thousands of others have crossed over from Colombia after enduring precarious journeys on flimsy boats from Panama, desperate to avoid the perilous Darien Gap between Panama and Colombia where migrants are vulnerable to extortion and violence.

Smugglers who once ferried migrants to the US are now profiting by bringing them the other way. One “coyote,” as the smugglers are known, charges $2,500 to cross from El Paso, Texas to Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, followed by back-to-back flights to Mexico City and Medellín. For another $100, the migrants return overland to Venezuela.

The coyote, who requested anonymity, claims to know Mexican and Colombian officials who look the other way when he transports people without tourist visas or valid passports, a challenge for many Venezuelans abroad.

Demand has spawned numerous intermediaries for pricey airline tickets. “Small independent travel agencies have sprouted up in Venezuela in recent months to keep up with demand,” said Rodolfo Ruiz, an aviation lawyer in Caracas.

At Helshy Campos’s travel agency in Maturín in eastern Venezuela, personnel has doubled since July 2024.

“Our phones exploded with requests since Trump cancelled TPS,” Campos said, referring to the protected status that Venezuelans previously enjoyed. Her service includes escorting elderly Venezuelans traveling alone.

“Some just can’t adapt and tell their children they’d prefer live their last years and die in Venezuela,” she said, adding that almost half of her clients are at least 60 years old. Others are sick and lack access to health care in the US. She’s also helped families who say they are tired of waiting for asylum as possibilities to work in the US dwindle.

“They’d rather live with less money working remote jobs but among their loved ones with no xenophobia,” Campos said.

Saul Añez and his family made their 20-day trip from Chicago to Maracay outside Caracas in May, after DHS urged him to self-deport if he wanted to return legally in the future. In April he drove straight for 48 hours to Laredo, Texas and continued by bus and boat through Central America and Colombia back to Venezuela.

“It wasn’t a good life after enduring the stress of possibly being detained, deported and blocked from going back,” Añez said.

Back in his hometown, Añez worked at a notary for a few weeks. But after sharing travel tips on social media, he left again, this time for Costa Rica to set up a travel service for returning migrants.

Tomás Páez, coordinator of the Observatory of the Venezuelan Diaspora in Madrid, cautions against drawing conclusions from incipient changes in migration patterns. The US in particular, which he said accounts for only 10% of the diaspora since 2015, garners disproportionate attention.

“There have always been people who go back for family reasons,” Páez said. “The numbers are still relatively small.”

The average rate of return of migrants around the world is 30%, so the number of Venezuelans who have returned, whether by choice or not, remains negligible, Páez notes. But he adds that “the data always lags the reality.”

Some Venezuelans are leaving other countries like Chile, where immigration is a top issue in the country’s presidential election.

Beatriz Villasmil’s fingers were once stained purple from picking blueberries in Chile. Today, they’re dusted with flour in Caracas where she makes empanadas that she’s selling from home. Things have been rough so far.

Villasmil, 37, fled Venezuela with her infant in 2017 and journeyed 4,500 miles to Chile, searching for a better life. Her father’s sudden death and a wish to reunite with her sick mother and brother brought her back in 2023. She arrived home broke, tried to open a brow salon, then a restaurant, but both failed.

She remains upbeat. “Yes you can, in Venezuela, you can,” she said in a phone interview. “You can start your own business, you can sell things like cakes, and get the money you need without having to abandon your family and miss moments with them.”

Manuel, 36, is less sanguine. He returned in July after leaving in 2022 for Uruguay and then settling in Argentina as a sound technician. After his grandmother died in May, he had hoped to stay with his family for at least a year, but couldn’t find work and returned to Buenos Aires in September, sooner than expected, he said in a phone interview.

"I was eating up my savings while waiting for gigs that never came, and worst of all, relying on my family in Caracas."

No Place Like Home

Anthony Maurizio, 28, hasn’t visited his mother and brother in Caracas since he left for Chile in 2017 with just $200 in his pocket. “It really hit me this year how much I miss them,” he said in an accent now flecked with Chilean slang. Working as a server at an upscale winery south of Santiago, Maurizio recalls how his mother sold her gold jewelry to pay for his plane ticket out.

He plans to return next year, but only for a month or two before moving on again, maybe to Italy or Iceland. First he needs to renew his expired Venezuelan passport at a consulate in Bolivia or Brazil, which are among the few countries that still host consular services.

For others, there’s no place like home. Juan, a 54-year-old lawyer who settled in Peru in 2017, returned in 2023 after landing only low-wage gigs picking fruit and working at a funeral home.

“I was fed up, bills piled up and I wasn’t even saving,” he said over the phone from Caracas.

He is barely making ends meet at home either. “The situation is horrible, Venezuela’s economic situation is the worst and the government is the worst that could happen to us for 26 years,” Juan said, referring to Venezuela’s socialist era. “But this is the best decision I’ve ever taken in my entire life. I don’t regret it at all.”

“Better to have a hard time economically at home than abroad, without your people.”

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