Border Report: San Diego Priest Helps a Migrant’s Remains Get Home to Venezuela

Around 8 a.m. one March morning in Venezuela, Josmary Uriza received the kind of phone call that no one wants to receive.

It was about 5 a.m. in San Diego, where her husband, Eduardo Jose Vivas Bracho, lived. He had gone to a San Diego hospital in an ambulance. 

His roommate, another man from Venezuela, went to the hospital and video-called Uriza again so that she could see her husband, she said. He was in intensive care in a coma. Doctors told her that her husband had a blood clot. She said he’d already been hospitalized twice since coming to San Diego because of his asthma.

A few days later, the doctors decided to disconnect him from the machines that were keeping his body alive after determining that he wasn’t reacting to any stimuli, Uriza said. He died at 35 years old.

“It was hard,” Uriza said in Spanish. “He was always the pillar of the house.”

Though he died in March, Vivas Bracho has only just begun his journey home to his final resting place. He likely would not have made it home at all without the help of Rev. Hung Nguyen at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church, where Vivas Bracho initially found shelter after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. That’s because San Diego County cremates the remains of people whose families do not come forward to cover burial costs and scatters the ashes at sea.

Nguyen said he promised Uriza that Vivas Bracho would make it home to her and their two daughters, ages 10 and 7.

“I wanted him here so that my daughters have a place to cry or to bring a rose,” Uriza said.

Vivas Bracho left Venezuela more than once over their 12-year marriage, she said, each time trying to find a way to better support his family. In Venezuela, he served in the military and worked as a police officer, she said. After they’d been married about five years, he tried to find better-paying work in Colombia, she said.

“That was hard for us,” she recalled. “We grew apart as a family. I went there, and he came here, but it’s not the same being the four of us versus the three of us.”

He came back to Venezuela for a couple of years before setting out for the United States in 2023. He hoped to be able to build the family a house and buy a car before returning to be with them. He mostly succeeded with the house — only the bedroom that he and Uriza would have slept in remains unfinished, she said. 

Vivas Bracho crossed the border and looked for a Border Patrol agent so that he could request asylum, Uriza said. He spent about six months in detention before being released and making his way to the shelter at our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Barrio Logan. 

There, he made friends with a man from Mexico whose father died while they were living at the shelter, according to Nguyen. The church held a Mass to help the man grieve his father. 

Vivas Bracho found a place to rent with the other man from Venezuela who had passed through the church shelter earlier. The man from Mexico ended up living nearby as well, and they frequently spent time together.

Vivas Bracho found work in construction, Uriza said. He called Uriza daily when he was on his way to work around 6 a.m. Pacific time, she said. 

“His plan was to come back in December of this year, and then in March this happened — at the beginning of the year practically,” Uriza said. 

When the friend from Mexico found out that Vivas Bracho was dead, he contacted Nguyen, the priest said. He told Nguyen that he wanted the church to do the same thing for Vivas Bracho’s family that it had done for him with his father by giving him the space to grieve.

“If it wasn’t for him, Eduardo probably would’ve been cremated by the county and scattered at sea,” Nguyen said.

The church paid for funeral services for Vivas Bracho, allowing Uriza to say goodbye via video-call before he was cremated. Nguyen said it was the first time he’d taken care of the details of funeral arrangements, and it made him feel like Vivas Bracho was his family member even though the two didn’t know each other. Nguyen celebrated a Mass for him as well. 

Since then, Vivas Bracho’s remains have waited in Nguyen’s office while the priest tried to figure out how to get him home. The postal service is the only way to legally ship remains, he said, and he didn’t trust that Vivas Bracho would make it all the way to his wife that way.

Instead, he called on the Jesuit Migration Network for help. The group, which has representatives throughout the hemisphere, has a meeting among its different regions every few years, and the next one was taking place in October in Guatemala. 

Rev. Brad Mills of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church carried the remains with him to the meeting, where he handed them off to someone from Colombia, Nguyen said. In the coming weeks, Vivas Bracho’s remains will travel to Bogotá, where another member of the Jesuit network will take him to the border with Venezuela. A Venezuelan contact will cross the border to get him, and then his wife will be able to at last bring him home.

Nguyen said the network investigated carefully the rules about bringing remains on airplanes and across borders, and Vivas Bracho’s remains are traveling with as much documentation as possible to ensure a smooth trip.

Uriza said that her husband was the kind of person who got along with everyone.

“He always had a smile and was never bitter. His life was joyful,” she said. “He was never in a bad mood, and if he could help, he helped.”

Nguyen said that was evident in the way that the people who knew him stepped up to help after he died — and in the way that he sacrificed himself to try to provide for his family.

He believes that God helped connect him with the family, and so does Uriza.

“I know God does things for and because of something,” she said. “When I talked with the father, I felt grateful, and I thought it was something that God had destined for us for him to be able to get here.”

Thank you for reading. I’m open for tips, suggestions and feedback on Instagram @katemorrisseyjournalist and on X/Twitter and Bluesky @bgirledukate.

In Other News

Released: Immigration and Customs Enforcement released the mother of a U.S. Marine who was arrested at the agency’s offices in downtown San Diego last month, Shelby Bremer reported for NBC7.

Arrested at check-ins: Lillian Perlmutter of Times of San Diego and Shaylee Navarro of Stocktonia reported that ICE is increasingly calling in people for seemingly routine check-ins so that its officers can detain them. 

Deported paletero: A National City father and paletero turned himself in for deportation after a long-fought battle to stay in the United States that began during the first Trump administration, Alexandra Mendoza reported.

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