Yesenia wipes her eye while recounting the difficulty of walking with her four children through the jungle of Panama. April 16, 2025. (John Washington/Arizona Luminaria) This story is part of Deportation Tracker, a project of the Border Center for Journalists and Bloggers, in partnership with Arizona Luminaria and La Silla Rota with the support of Global Exchange.Chapter OneYesenia is barefoot, three days into a deadly trek through the jungle in Panama. Her kids traveling with her are stomach-sick. So is she. They are all soaked, covered in thorn scratches and out of food. They walk past dead bodies. They watch a desperate man throw himself off a cliff. With well more than a thousand miles to migrate north, they don’t know what tomorrow, or the next hour will bring.Her children keep her going — placing one bare, mud-sinking foot in front of the other through rainforests and swamps.“If it was just me, I wouldn’t have been able to do it,” Yesenia says in Spanish, remembering. “They’re my motivation. Always. That’s what they still are for me.” Her youngest, the only girl, is 4. Her oldest son is 12.It’s 2022. Yesenia and her four children are heading to the United States to reunite with Mariano, her husband who recently fled to Tucson. Like Mariano before her, she is following in the tracks of tens of thousands of migrants from Central and South America, the Caribbean, and all over the world, as they passed through the notoriously dangerous Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama.More than two years later, Yesenia is driving on the south side of Tucson with two of her children — her now 6-year-old girl and 9-year-old boy — in the backseat. She's almost home. Mariano and her two other boys, 7 and 14, are waiting. She sees police lights in her rearview mirror, and the memory of the Panamanian jungle flashes through her mind.Along with the memory comes the fear that drove her from her native Venezuela — and the uncertainty of unanchored years bouncing between South American countries with Mariano and her kids, searching for safety, stability, a permanent home. A home they thought they’d found in a Southern Arizona city proud of its historic role in launching the sanctuary movement for migrants, and with a loving church congregation that embraced them as family.Yesenia knows what the traffic stop could bring: the arrival of Border Patrol, detention, deportation, and even separation from her children. What she fears — and something worse — will come to pass. Yesenia’s story reflects the inhumanity migrants face in their search for safety. The vulnerability she endured in the jungle, she says, perversely prepared her — steeled her for a swift deportation to southern México. To endure brutality from immigration officials on both sides of the border. The separation from her husband and two sons in Arizona. And a new fight to protect her two other children in México.Alone in a country she does not know, without legal immigration status, Yesenia’s family remain targets for exploitation. Deporting foreign migrants to México poses serious risks, said Savi Arvey, director of refugee protection for Human Rights First. “Many are left without legal status, access to basic needs, and face extortion, kidnapping, assault by organized crime groups, or abuse by Mexican immigration authorities,” she said. For women like Yesenia, “these dangers are even more severe due to barriers in accessing essential medical services, food, and safe shelter while trying to protect her children in unstable conditions,” Arvey added.“These challenges are even further compounded by the trauma of being separated from family members," she said. "It’s an all-around devastating situation — created by both the U.S. and Mexican governments — that no one should be forced to endure.”While migrants fleeing violence or poverty have long faced such injustice, civil and human rights experts warn that a coordinated U.S. anti-immigrant crackdown is using local law enforcement to pursue people like Yesenia — a Venezuelan mother detained during a routine traffic stop. President Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations, aided by the cooperation of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration, is fueling a grim reality for migrants, experts say: the U.S. and Mexican governments are working with increasing vigor to erode constitutional due process and asylum rights, and forcibly displacing people seeking refuge and legal status — primarily Brown and Black immigrants.Both countries, Yesenia says, have turned their backs on offering refuge to those who need it most.“Where they hold you when you’re detained in the United States, you see everything. They treat you badly there — horribly, horribly,” she says.“You’re even more surprised because it’s the United States, the land of opportunities, the supposed country where everything shines, where everyone wants to go because it’s wonderful — and it’s not like that.” In México, the situation is no better. They have no heart for migrants, she says. “I never feel safe.”She says migration “is a necessity,” but in both countries “they treat you as if you were worth nothing.”“Being a migrant is not a crime," she adds.The sun rises in Caracas, Venezuela, Saturday, Jan. 10, 2026, a week after U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)Fleeing VenezuelaThe scars lining Yesenia’s body are a constant reminder why she won’t go back to Venezuela. Those wounds were inflicted by her ex-husband.More than a decade later, she still remembers those days — the spinal fear she felt for her own life and the desperation to save her 1-year-old child. One night, she says her husband stabbed a screwdriver into her armpit and lodged a hatchet into her foot. “I have all my scars from him. I have one here,” she says, tracing her finger across her cheek, along her upper left arm, and ending at the starburst of one scar near her armpit.“He almost killed me,” she says.Yesenia was too scared, during and after her recovery, to leave. And then chaos flared again. She says her husband lit their house on fire one night when she was sleeping. She escaped the flames. Her husband’s family had taken their son. After she fought to get her son back, she fled to a different state in Venezuela. Her husband found her. She fled again, and again he found her. Yesenia says he is an officer in the National Guard, and she thinks he used intelligence agency databases to keep tracking her down. “Up til this very day, I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. I don’t know where he is,” Yesenia says of her ex-husband. “I can go back. But there will always be the fear that he’ll find me, that he’ll kill me, that he’ll kill my son, or that he’ll take him away from me.”"There are people who don't know that one always emigrates for a reason," she says.Carolina Jiménez Sandoval is president of the Washington Office on Latin America, a research and human rights advocacy organization. She has spent decades studying and advocating for human rights in her home country of Venezuela and throughout Latin America. “Sadly, I believe Yesenia’s story reflects the experience of many Venezuelans,” she said. In 2023, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women reviewed Venezuela’s compliance with its obligations under international frameworks on women’s rights. Although some progress was made, the report highlighted a long list of concerns, including “the persistence of femicides, disappearances and psychological and sexual violence against women and girls and the lack of a gender-sensitive protocol for the investigation of gender-based killings (femicides).”“To put it simply, most Venezuelan women have nowhere to go if they are abused by their partners, especially if their partners are connected to the government,” Jiménez Sandoval said.It was during one of the periods of hiding out from her husband that Yesenia found Mariano on Facebook, and they began a budding online friendship.Like many Venezuelans forced out of their country because of political persecution, violence or economic crisis, including food, fuel and medicine shortages, in recent years, Yesenia first went to Colombia. That’s where Mariano had fled to escape threats and persecution from military officials.Since 2014, nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country — representing about a quarter of the entire population.In 2017, the couple met in person for the first time in Colombia. Yesenia was eight months pregnant with her third child, Yender. The night Yesenia showed up on his doorstep, Mariano went from being a single man in his early 20s to a partner and stepfather of three. Yesenia says of Mariano that she “won the lottery.” Mariano can’t hide his smile when his wife speaks of him.After about a year in Colombia, the family moved to Ecuador, then to Peru, briefly to Chile, and then back to Colombia — in search of stability and safety. They ultimately decided to migrate to the United States because they heard there was work there and the country had a reputation for offering opportunities and asylum to those in need. They’d grown their family with two more children and wanted to give all their kids a permanent home where they could live without fear.They decided Mariano would go first, get settled, and then send for his family. Clothing and other personal items litter the trail where migrants trek across the Darien Gap from Colombia to Panama in hopes of eventually reaching the United States, on May 10, 2023. (AP Photo/Ivan Valencia, File)The jungleIt’s 2022, and the family doesn’t have enough money to pay for a flight to get closer to the United States or to hire a smuggler to guide them through the dangers of Central America and México. Yesenia knows what to expect — or thinks she does. She has their four kids with her. Her oldest child helps lug their water bottles, a bag of extra clothes and food. Though they can’t afford guides of their own, they are reluctantly allowed to follow a group led by guides.A couple of days in — already soaked through, hungry, exhausted — the family witnesses a father and a toddler slip off a cliff to their deaths. Yesenia can’t remember if that was before or after Joan saw the body of a baby half-buried in the mud. “That was a trauma for that child, for the oldest one,” she says — voice steady, in her matter-of-fact way that hints at how she works to keep the tragedies at a distance.They drink unfiltered water, go hungry, and all get very sick. She recounts the horrors with the same measured demeanor she uses to tell the rest of her story, occasionally pausing to pull a detail from memory, to flick a quick smile of assurance at a child on her lap.The hatchet wound on her left foot that once forced her to flee domestic violence and her own country, both drives her forward and slows her down as she crosses the Darién Gap. The swelling forces Yesenia to wear sandals.A few days later, the sucking mud swallows one of her sandals and forces her to walk barefoot. She says it was like surrendering to the jungle, not trying to fight it.She estimates they came across about 30 dead bodies. She says she saw vultures eating one of them. “Even my daughter, the little one, saw it,” she says, pausing at the memory.The Darién is one of the most dangerous migration routes in the world. Every year, thousands of people venture through its muddy trails, turbulent rivers and mountains that form a natural barrier between South and Central America. In 2024 alone, an estimated 174 migrants died trying to cross this jungle, according to the United Nations.“I was crying and I was telling my children that, ‘I can’t go on. I can’t go on,” she says. “My children were the ones … who encouraged me. They said, ‘We’re here for you. We’re going to get to our dad. We can do it.’”Remembering her children pushing her forward brings a pained smile to Yesenia’s face. She shifts on the couch, holding her stomach and wincing slightly. And then, the story of the jungle continues: they sleep where they can, they eat what they can find. They cross a river by raft. They walk for hours, always pressing north.They beg for money in the streets to make it across Central America, through Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. Yesenia doesn’t sleep so she can keep an eye on her kids. “Staying alert to everything,” she says, “because even the one you think wants to help you, they want to rob you.”Mariano says the migrant trails change people. You have to think of yourself and your kids and look away from the horrors, he says, otherwise the guides might lash out or leave you behind. “If you speak up, things will get worse for you. If you get involved, things will get worse for you. You have to say, "Mind your own business." It's like learning to turn a blind eye,” he says in Spanish.“One becomes inhuman,” Yesenia says. México: “You hear the screams”Yesenia and the kids make it across the Suchiate River between Guatemala and México on a large inner tube. In the first Mexican city, Tapachula, just north of the Guatemalan border, a fellow Venezuelan woman lures them into a safe house. They don’t know they’re walking into their own kidnapping. Yesenia estimates they spent six nights in the downtown Tapachula house, with about 60 other migrants. “There were about nine adults, not counting the children,” she says of the room where they were held captive. Armed guards watch them, force them to stay in the cramped room and to ask permission to use the bathroom. Women without children, she says, are taken out and raped. As Yesenia remembers, two of her children stand in the courtyard, within earshot. She shoots them a look. It’s unclear if they’re listening. She continues without lowering her voice, but flashing a resigned smile: these kids have lived through so much.“Yes, you hear the screams,” she says. “You hear when they yell at them, when they beat them.” Mariano, already settled and working in Tucson, finally scrapes together the money and wires $900 for Yesenia and their kids’ release. Free, they focus on one thing — continuing north to reunite their family. They travel on small buses, sleeping where they can, often in the streets.México is a dangerous place for migrants, says Gretchen Kuhner, director of the Institute for Women in Migration, which focuses on supporting and protecting female migrants in México.“It is not safe. Let me be clear. It is not safe,” she said in Spanish. “The fear is so great. There’s no consequence for not protecting the migrants.”Yesenia and her children beg for food, spare change, ride the rails on the back of a freight train, and walk. They are kidnapped again, this time briefly and further north in México, until they fork over more money to men she calls bandits. Still following in Mariano’s footsteps, they finally make their way to Piedras Negras, a Mexican city just south of the Texas border, where they take a raft across the river and into