Venezuela migrants cross US border in droves
Marianela Rojas huddles in prayer with fellow migrants after trudging across a slow-flowing stretch of the Rio Grande and nearly collapsing when she stepped on American soil for the first time. "I won't say it again," interrupts a US Border Patrol agent, giving orders in Spanish for Rojas and a group of 14 other Venezuelans to get into a detention van. "Only passports and money in your hands. Everything else - earrings, chains, rings, watch - in your backpacks." It's a frequent scene across the US-Mexico border at a time of swelling migration.
But these aren't farmers and low-wage workers from Mexico or Central America, who make up the bulk of those crossing. Among them are bankers, doctors and engineers from Venezuela. and they're arriving in record numbers as they flee turmoil in the country with the world's largest oil reserves and pandemic-induced pain across South America.
Two days after Rojas crossed, she left detention and got a bus out of the Texas town of Del Rio. The 54-year-old fled hardship in Venezuela a few years ago, leaving a paid-off home and career as an elementary school teacher for a fresh start in Ecuador.But when the housecleaning work she found dried up, she decided to uproot again."It's over, it's all over," she said on the phone to loved ones. "Everything was perfect. I didn't stop moving for one second."
