Maikol Gabriel López Lizano was two years older than Acosta Peña, warm and polite. Originally from La Guaira, on Venezuela’s central coast, he had left the country in 2019, with his mother and four siblings, because, he told me, “there’s no future for us there.” After living in Peru for three years, he decided to travel north. He and Acosta Peña met in another migrant shelter in Chicago. López Lizano spoke with a kind of halting formality, which charmed her. They found steady jobs—he in a mechanic’s garage, she in a factory that molded plastics—and moved in together in January of 2025, after dating for a few months.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter