Imagine being afraid to leave your home and forced to look over your shoulder every second despite never committing a crime.
The reality for a number of Venezuelans living legally in the United States has come to this after President Donald Trump and his administration have revoked their protective status all under the guise of protecting the nation’s borders.
People of all ages who left their country because of political and social unrest have been living safely in the U.S. having children, adopting pets and even working long hours to make ends meet and live the so-called “American dream.”
Despite doing everything correct since they arrived in the U.S., many are now left to wonder if their neighbors are looking at them with a different set of eyes since Trump has taken the reins of the government.
People are working behind the scenes to make sure all immigrants (legal or illegal) know their rights if someone comes to their doors, but that advice only works if the government itself abides by the rules and laws of the land.
The Trump administration has shown it doesn’t do things by the book through executive orders that bypass Congress and ignore the checks and balances provided in the Constitution.
A man who pardoned more than 1,500 Jan. 6 insurrectionists now pretends he wants to make America safer?
In a time when hate and racism has reared its ugly head, it’s no wonder that even law-abiding migrants are left feeling that the world is out to get them.
Noem paints Venezuelans as ‘dirtbags’
Venezuelan families in Virginia and throughout the United States are “afraid” after the Trump administration and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem have given hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are in the U.S. legally deadlines to get out or face deportation or worse, incarceration.
Noem has announced the termination of Temporary Protective Status, or TPS, for the 600,000 Venezuelan individuals estimated to live in the United States under the designation. Depending on when the TPS status was obtained, the designation will be terminated on either April 7, 2025 (for those granted TPS under the 2023 Venezuela designation) or likely Sept. 10, 2025 (for those granted TPS under the 2021 designation).
Noem said in a notice of termination that “permitting the nationals of Venezuela to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to the national interest of the United States.”
Noem asserted that members of the Venezuelan gang known as Tren de Aragua are responsible for sex trafficking, drug smuggling, police shootings and kidnappings. The Department of Homeland Security claims to have identified 600 migrants in the U.S. with connections to the gang – that is one-tenth, o.1, less than one percent, of the estimated 600,000 Venezuelans in the nation, according to an article in The Guardian.
Noem doubled down on the president’s untruthful rhetoric from the campaign trail on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” saying “Venezuela purposely emptied out their prisons, emptied out their mental health facilities and sent them to the United States of America.”
Noem told “Fox and Friends“ that the Trump administration is following a mandate from the people.
“The people of this country want these dirtbags out,” Noem said.
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People with TPS must pass criminal background checks to be eligible for the designation, but of course, that doesn’t fit the narrative of a president who promised mass deportations.
The DHS and the Department of State claims to have reviewed current conditions in Venezuela and insist that improvements have been made in the economy, public health and crime that “allow for these nationals to be safely returned to their home country.”
Alarmingly, there are reports of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, taking more of a deport-now, ask-questions-later approach, rounding up immigrants nationwide, putting them in shackles and deporting them on large military planes allegedly with no due process.
ICE is picking up approximately 1,000 people per day.
Last week, Trump ordered the expansion of a migrant detention site in Guantanamo Bay to hold up to 30,000 people. On Tuesday, the first group of migrants was taken to the detention center.
Venezuelan family legally in the U.S.: ‘For most people, we are criminals’
In small cities throughout the nation, there are pockets of hard-working Venezuelans legally working and contributing in positive ways to their communities.
They are not part of any gang and haven’t committed any crimes.
AFP talked with one family from Venezuela who has been in the U.S. for more than eight years and have a TPS designation. The family runs a successful small business, owns a home, has a 10-year-old child and a Beagle dog. Family members including a brother and mother live nearby.
Just like many U.S. citizens, they dress up for Halloween parties, wear matching PJs on Christmas morning, enjoy adventuring on the weekend in their off-road vehicle, spending time at the beach and the simple joys of having a new puppy in the house. They frequent pumpkin patches, enjoy kayaking, picnics, hiking and gardening.
In a matter of days, they’ve gone from living a near-perfect life to the complete opposite. They went from searching online for a sled to enjoy the snow outside to pulling their blinds and locking their doors.
They have taken the Venezuelan flag off their car. They are no longer going to the gym or allowing their child to participate in extracurricular activities.
“I have tried to be strong, but yesterday I cried a lot,” they told AFP. “We have gone from feeling safe and happy to feeling strange and different from the rest, always afraid, always hiding, only from work to home.”
They are afraid to spend free time outside the four walls of their home and fearful of going to local restaurants.
They are scared, they told us, every time they see a police car, even though they have never committed a crime. Despite this, they feel like people in their community now view them as criminals.
“We are very exhausted from thinking so much,” they told us. “We can’t sleep well. Our whole body hurts. We just want to work to pay our debts and be able to save money so that if they deport us, we can take something with us.
“We will never lose faith and hope that everything will turn out well. There is always a light on the path. There are good people who support us and give us strength and hope.”
Despite their optimism, they know that people who once brought them flowers or chatted with them at a party voted for the man who now wants to send them away.
“No matter how much effort or work we put in, or how good people we are, for most people, we are criminals.”
The state of Venezuela
Like many executive orders signed by the president, the move to revoke the TPS status for Venezuelans will likely be challenged in court. The move by DHS and the Trump administration is on the radar of organizations like the ACLU, which has already filed multiple lawsuits opposing the actions of Trump since he took office on Jan. 20.
Venezuela, despite what the Department of Homeland Security asserts, is still facing shortages of food, medicine and electricity due to political unrest.
In August 2023, more than 72 percent of people were unable to access public health services when needed. Medicine shortages stood at 26.3 percent by August 2023, according to estimates.
Due to illness and the lack of basic services, food and school supplies, more than 26 percent of children are no longer in school.
According to World Vision, more than 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014.
Dictator Nicolás Maduro, who lost his last election but declared victory anyway, has been known to use “hardline” tools of repression such as torture and killings “to stifle dissent,” and those who face deportation fear death or punishment if they return. Nearly 16,000 people have been subjected to politically motivated arrests in the last decade.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has continued to document cases of killings, short-term enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, torture and ill-treatment and sexual and gender-based violence against opponents of the Maduro government.
The Biden administration, through former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, extended the length of time for Venezuelans in the U.S. under TPS as one of the final acts of Biden’s term.
However, Trump, through, you guessed it, an executive order, revoked the extension.
When TPS expires, people will revert to the U.S. immigration status they held prior to the TPS designation unless they have acquired another immigration status allowing them to lawfully remain in the U.S.
For many in this program, their prior underlying immigration status has expired, leaving them unable to lawfully remain in the United States and work, making them subject to immediate removal.
Florida supporters of Trump feel betrayed
Large numbers of people who have left Venezuela have settled in Florida, and many Latinos and Hispanics who supported Trump in his re-election bid now feel betrayed by the president and the Republican Party.
“There’s a lot of people trying to see what to do because returning would be almost suicidal in a way, because some of those people that are here that have spoken about the situation in Venezuela on cameras and everywhere, they set foot in Venezuela and they will be jailed,” activist Beatriz Olavarria told a Miami-based affiliate of NBC News.
Venezuelans who are settled in the United States are hoping that Trump and his administration will have a change of heart.
In Trump’s first term, he granted Venezuelans permission to stay. Current Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in 2022 that it would be a “very real death sentence” for countless Venezuelans to send them home.
“Under the brutality, incompetence, and deliberate mismanagement of the Maduro regime, Venezuela is not safe for ordinary Venezuelans,” he wrote.
Olvarria said Noem and the Trump Administration are singling out Venezuelans unfairly.
“We are not all criminals,” Olvarria said.
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Crystal Graham
