MIAMI — While Washington debates policy responses to Venezuela’s earthquake — including a preliminary, unapproved plan to send U.S. technicians and billions of dollars to help administer reconstruction — Miami-Dade’s Venezuelan community has spent the past three weeks building its own, more immediate answer: a countywide donation drive that has already put 50 tons of aid on the ground in Caracas.
From Warehouse to Airport
The effort began within days of the June 24 earthquakes, when Miami-Dade County Tax Collector Dariel Fernandez partnered with Global Empowerment Mission (GEM), a Doral-based humanitarian organization, to open drop-off locations across the county.
Fernandez, appearing at GEM’s Doral warehouse as the drive launched, told residents that the people of Venezuela were not alone. Within days, donation points had expanded to eleven locations, including Tax Collector offices, the Miami-Dade Supervisor of Elections lobby, Doral Legacy Park, the restaurant El Arepazo, and Food For The Poor’s Coconut Creek facility — accepting non-perishable food, hygiene products, baby items, and clothing.
The drive quickly drew in other South Florida institutions. CBS Miami and Neighbors 4 Neighbors, longtime disaster-response partners, launched a parallel collection campaign funneling both goods and monetary donations to GEM’s Doral distribution center. County officials repeatedly emphasized that financial contributions were the most effective form of help, since they let relief teams purchase region-appropriate supplies and adjust quickly as needs on the ground changed.
Fifty Tons, Delivered
The collected donations, gathered from residents across Miami-Dade, were consolidated at GEM’s South Florida distribution center before being loaded for shipment.
Earlier this month, a LATAM Cargo humanitarian flight carrying roughly 50 tons of food, hygiene products, medical supplies, and other essentials landed at Simón Bolívar International Airport in Caracas. Fernandez credited the shipment entirely to the Miami-Dade community’s response, saying thousands of residents had answered the call to help people they would never meet.
A Community With Deep Ties to the Crisis
The urgency behind the drive reflects Miami’s demographics as much as the scale of the disaster. Miami-Dade is home to one of the largest Venezuelan communities in the United States — U.S. Census estimates put the figure at roughly 124,000 residents in the metro area — many of whom have family members directly affected by the quakes, a pair of 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude events that leveled homes, hospitals, and schools and left the death toll climbing for weeks afterward. Hard-hit areas like La Guaira saw survivors and international rescue teams still digging through rubble days after the initial quakes.
The relief effort has continued even as the county’s Venezuelan community separately pushes Washington on immigration policy, including calls to extend Temporary Protected Status and defer deportations in light of the disaster — a reminder that for many Miami-Dade families, the earthquake in Venezuela is simultaneously a humanitarian emergency abroad and a matter of legal and economic security at home.
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