It starts years before they made it to the U.S.-Mexico border in October 2022 and turned themselves into authorities, in Yuma, Arizona, asking for asylum. Reydi’s story starts in his home country, Venezuela, in 2017. He had been doing political activism on and off for years. He finished his law degree and was teaching classes at the university when the Bolivarian Intelligence Service, which has an extensive record of human rights violations, detained him and some of his colleagues at the university for political reasons.