Venezuela quakes leave hundreds dead, thousands still missing

Rescuers kept digging through collapsed buildings in La Guaira on Thursday as Venezuela’s earthquake death toll climbed to at least 235, with more than 4,300 people injured and thousands still unaccounted for. Acting President Delcy Rodríguez declared a state of emergency after the back-to-back quakes hit near Caracas within about a minute of each other on Wednesday.

The tremors, measured at magnitude 7.2 and 7.5, struck Venezuela’s strongest quake sequence since 1900. La Guaira was the hardest-hit state, and emergency crews focused on northern areas where buildings had fallen in the worst shaking. The death toll was likely to rise.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s predictive model gave the disaster a 42 percent chance of at least 10,000 fatalities in one estimate. That model is based on historical averages rather than event-specific conditions, and hospitals, roads and rescue teams in the region came under strain.

The missing-person picture remained unstable. A crowd-sourced tracker linked to opposition leaders listed more than 41,000 to 46,000 people as unaccounted for, though that figure could not be independently verified. The United Nations is coordinating a major rescue effort, and U.S. Southern Command is surging military forces in the region to support earthquake relief.

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled 6-3 on June 25 in favor of the Trump administration’s authority to use the long-running metering policy, which lets Border Patrol or immigration officials turn back asylum seekers when crossings are too overburdened to process more claims. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, while Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

The court said migrants standing on the Mexican side of the border have not yet arrived in the United States for purposes of asylum law. The policy was first used under the Obama administration, expanded during Trump’s first term, and rescinded in 2021 under President Joe Biden.