Daimer Willians Oropeza, 27, dreamed of becoming a radiologist. As a teenager in Venezuela, he studied radiology until a ruptured hernia forced him to abandon his education—his family couldn’t afford the costly medical treatments. To support himself, he took up a new trade as a barber, a skill that would take him across South America and eventually to the United States.
Oropeza’s migration path is difficult to track due to the number of countries he lived in while working as a barber. Social media posts and interviews with his relatives reveal that he worked in Colombia, then Peru, then Chile, before making his way north to Mexico. There, he waited for five months for a CBP One appointment that never materialized.