The New Yorker:

A young democracy activist fled Venezuela, where the government threatened to arrest her for treason. Now in ICE custody, she knows that she may be quickly deported.

By Rachel Monroe

Edgarlys Castañeda Rodríguez, a slight, delicate-featured twenty-seven-year-old from Venezuela, posted makeup tutorials and dance videos to her few thousand followers on Instagram and TikTok, but it was her posts about politics that tended to go viral. In them, she was open about her opposition to President Nicolás Maduro. In one video, Castañeda talked about how politics had driven a wedge between her and her father, a Maduro supporter. In others, she shared information about protests in support of the opposition party Vente Venezuela. People began to send her videos of police violence and accounts of threats they’d received, and she would repost them.

Castañeda’s posts made her mother, Luisa, nervous, but Castañeda was convinced that Vente Venezuela would take power. Instead, last July, Maduro declared victory in an election that is widely understood to be corrupt. Protesters thronged the streets, banging pots and pans. Maduro, accusing them of participating in a coup, began a brutal crackdown, which has included the torture, secret detention, and killing of protesters, opposition-party members, and their relatives, according to Human Rights Watch.

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