On a cold day in January, Carmen (not her real name) carried her 10-month-old baby boy down Vernor Highway in Southwest Detroit. In a moment of panic and desperation, she left the apartment she shared with five other people and went outside for air. Though the temperature was just above freezing, she wore flip-flops and a tank top — she had no winter coat or boots for herself or her baby.

Carmen is 22 years old and one of the hundreds of Venezuelan refugees who have arrived in Detroit — just some of the millions who have fled the country’s totalitarian government and economic crisis. The situation there has become so dire with starvation and crime that 7.3 million Venezuelans have been displaced.

“The desperation in Venezuela is everywhere,” Carmen says.

Her journey began in 2017 and took her to Colombia and Ecuador before she crossed the dangerous Darién Gap on her journey north to the U.S. border, with stops in El Paso, Texas and New York City.

BridgeDetroit is not using Carmen’s full name nor naming her partner and children because they are currently going through the immigration process.

Detroit has not seen the same influx of Latin American migrants as New York, where the mayor has declared it as a humanitarian crisis. Still, social service agencies such as the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation are rapidly preparing to deal with the health and well-being of the migrants once they arrive.

Angie Reyes, executive director of DHDC, said her team noticed migrants trickling in late last year before a large influx during the holidays when Carmen arrived. Reyes says DHDC has helped about 200 people.

“We’re trying to connect (migrants) to resources, get them clothing, diapers, and essentials.”

Mary Carmen Muñoz, executive director of Latin Americans for Social and Economic Development (LA-SED), said her organization, which also works with recent immigrants and refugees, has seen a significant increase in Venezuelan newcomers. Many of them are families arriving without clothing for winter.

“The environment challenges them,” Muñoz said. “We provide immediate relief and work with Freedom House (temporary home for asylum seekers from around the world) to help find housing.”

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No safe place

Carmen’s journey to Detroit had many stops.

After leaving her home, Carmen tried her luck in neighboring Colombia, which is host to the largest community of Venezuelan refugees in the world.

She arrived with only a backpack, part of a crowd of other refugees. She dodged the scam artists and con men who prey on frightened newcomers and walked and hitched rides until she arrived in Barbosa, a small city outside Medellín – Colombia’s second-largest city – and tried to settle in.

Carmen got a job as a cook at a small restaurant, where she says she was treated warmly and respectfully. But the pay was so low she could barely scrape enough money together to afford the low-rate hotel she was staying in despite working seven days a week. After three months, she still had no money for food or anything else. She felt she had no choice but to move on.

An aunt who lived in Ecuador invited her to stay until she got on her feet. Displaced for a second time, she walked miles, took buses and hitched rides to Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, where she would start over again and try to make a go of it.

For five years, it worked. Carmen hustled—cooking and selling arepas on the crowded streets during the day and selling ice cream out of a cooler to passing cars in the evening. She earned enough to rent a room and still have money for groceries. There was life in Ecuador. By 2020, Carmen found a partner who made her happy, and in 2021, she gave birth to a daughter. Perhaps she had finally arrived at her destination, she thought.

But all around her, signs of deepening instability began to show. A growing presence of drug lords and international cartels from Mexico and Albania established routes in Ecuador. They brought with them terrifying violence, leaving Carmen with a constant sense of unease. Every year, she saw things in Ecuador getting worse, not better.

Things have continued to deteriorate in Ecuador. More than a year and a half after Carmen left, armed men stormed into the studio of a major Ecuadorian TV station during a live broadcast as the country watched. The attack came after a series of violent episodes that spread across the country, including explosions and the abduction of police officers.

In August of 2022, Carmen decided to uproot her life again; This time, she set her sights on the United States.

“Any other country was going to be more of the same, more of barely surviving,” Carmen said. “I wanted something better.”

Her despair about finding a better life close to home was not baseless. According to the World Bank, Latin America and the Caribbean have the “undesirable distinction” of being one of the world’s most violent regions.

But for people with little or no money, the journey to the U.S. border is torturous. They cross eight countries and endure weeks, sometimes months, of dangerous travel to reach the border of Mexico and the United States. Migrants face treacherous terrain, exposure to disease and violence at the hands of criminal groups.

Over and over, others warned Carmen of the merciless passage, but she was determined to make this move her last. With her ten-month-old in tow and four months pregnant, Carmen would cross the Darién Gap, a dangerous 66-mile stretch of jungle that connects Colombia and Panama and marks the beginning of the treacherous journey north that would take two months.

“The jungle is a business,” Carmen said. “People shake you down for money as soon as you get there. There is no end to it. At every stretch, someone is there to extort you.”

A treacherous journey

Carmen lived in constant fear of being raped, kidnapped, or killed, but she kept walking through a dense rainforest that draped over steep mountains and vast swamps. She walked past mounds of luggage, clothing, and backpacks left behind by migrants who realized they could no longer carry their belongings. Past armed men and past dead bodies.

“I grabbed a sheet that was on the ground to wrap my daughter in because she had a fever,” Carmen said. “But when I pulled the sheet, there was a dead little boy about three or four years old underneath. Seeing him filled me with horror and panic.”

At last, she reached Panama, but she had to keep walking, crossing through rivers and streams. At one crossing, Carmen lost her grip and was swept away by the river’s strong current.

She had been carrying her infant in her arms, but as the water pulled her away from her group of about 50, she felt someone grab hold of the baby. She let go of her child and was carried away by the river.

“I preferred to let my daughter go to save her. If I didn’t let her go, I would have taken her with me, and she would have drowned,” Carmen said.

The river pulled her in and threw her against the rocks. She started swallowing water and could feel herself drowning. Then, strong hands grasped her. She says a man who knew how to swim came back to save her.

Her daughter, now two, is terrified of water. “Sometimes she screams when I bathe her,” Carmen said. “Tell me, what child screams when getting a bath?”

The rest of her journey was just as dramatic. She walked and hitched rides through the rest of Panama, then Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala, carrying her daughter the whole way. Every day, there was a new struggle, but every day she kept walking.

Mexico, a country rife with cartels, corrupt police, and human traffickers eager to profit from the flow of people headed north, lay ahead of her. As she moved on, Carmen was terrified of being killed, kidnapped, or extorted, which are not uncommon fates for people like her in Mexico, where migration protection rackets are a billion-dollar industry.

Elizabeth Orozco Vasquez, CEO of Freedom House Detroit said “these are not unique stories.”

“We have heard everything. They cross the jungle where there are dead bodies. Men usually make the journey faster, but women and children take longer because they have to hide at night for fear of being raped. All the way through to the northern border, people are being exploited,” Orozco Vasquez said. “We had a woman who came through with two children. She was raped in Mexico. She was seven months pregnant by the time she got to Freedom House.”

Orozco Vasquez adds that “no one takes that kind of journey if their homeland was safe. These people really cannot go back, their countries have collapsed, It’s too dangerous.”

Two months after leaving Ecuador, malnourished, dehydrated, and now six months pregnant, Carmen arrived in Ciudad Juarez. Across the Rio Grande was El Paso, Texas. She crossed that last river and allowed herself to be picked up by Border Patrol agents.

When the police took her into custody, she wept for joy. “I was overcome with a sense of peace when I got to the United States,” said Carmen. “I felt safe.”

Hardships continue 

In October 2022, Carmen spent nine days in an immigration detention and processing center, which she describes as a “prison.” Then, a Catholic organization bought her a bus ticket to New York City, where she joined more than 150,000 other new arrivals, a flood of migrants that has strained city services.

Carmen was placed in a Manhattan hotel repurposed for emergency migrant housing and, a few months after arriving, gave birth to a son in a New York City hospital. She was reunited with her partner, who came to the U.S. before her, and felt hopeful about this new life.

But her hopefulness did not last. Soon after her baby was born, her mental health began to deteriorate. “They told me I had postpartum depression,” Carmen said.

For months, Carmen isolated herself in her hotel room. She couldn’t work and struggled to make friends. Sometimes, she would wander down to the lobby of the repurposed hotel, a de facto town square, where migrants and refugees gathered daily. Carmen went there a few times to try and meet people, but fights broke out, which scared her.

“I cried all the time,” she said. “If anyone said anything to me, I would burst into tears.”

As the weeks stretched on, Carmen began cutting herself. She was consumed by depression. After almost a year in that hotel room, she couldn’t take it anymore. In late October of 2023, she took her children back to the NYC Port Authority and boarded a bus, once again leaving an adopted home behind. This time, she was bound for Detroit, where her brother had moved, and he had invited her to join him.

The city of Detroit said it does not have data on the total number of migrants that have arrived here. However, David M. Bowser, chief of housing solutions and supportive services for the city, says there are 144 new arrivals currently occupying beds in emergency facilities.

“The city continues to work closely with our local partners to be aware of and to address the needs of all residents, long-term or new arrivals, of the City of Detroit,” Bowser said.

When she arrived, Carmen found more challenges but also a new home. She recently got a small one-bedroom apartment where she lives with her partner, her two children and her sister.

“I suffered every single day of the journey, I slept in the streets, I was treated so badly, I was so hungry and my daughter’s health suffered. I would never do it again if I knew what it was like,” Carmen said.

Since her panic attack on Vernor Hwy in Southwest Detroit, Carmen has started school, learning how to read, and is settling into her new home.

“For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m one step ahead,” she said.