‘Beyond betrayal.’ Venezuelans in Florida are angry at Trump immigration policy

MIAMI — Venezuelan migrants in South Florida say they feel betrayed by a Trump administration decision to end legal protections for hundreds of thousands of people who fled dictatorships and sought refuge in the U.S.

New regulations scheduled to be published this week would end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for more than 300,000 Venezuelans in early April. Protections for a second group of some 250,000 Venezuelans currently extended through September but now also seem likely to be removed.

The move by the Trump administration is a turnabout of a long-standing U.S. policy that has extended TPS to more than a half million Venezuelans. On NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she believed the designation had been abused. “Remember,” she said, “Venezuela purposely emptied out their prisons, emptied out their mental health facilities and sent them to the United States of America.”

Venezuelan-Americans say that’s simply not true

Venezuelans started migrating in large numbers to the U.S. in the 1980’s. The numbers surged in recent decades as people fled the political and economic turmoil of the authoritarian regimes of Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.

Nearly 400,000 people who left Venezuela now live in Florida. Adelys Ferro, the director of the Venezuelan American Caucus, says, “We are human beings who work here, who are small business owners.” Ferro says Venezuelans exiled here “actually believe that the TPS was the right way to get legal in the United States, to have our work permits, to have a social security number, to be able to buy a house.”

Florida’s largest Venezuelan population is in Doral, a Miami suburb. Ferro and other activists held a press event there Monday but didn’t want any TPS recipients to speak out. They were worried they could be targeted for deportation by federal immigration authorities.

In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump won the vote in Miami-Dade County, helped largely by the Hispanic vote, including naturalized Venezuelan-Americans. That’s one reason why Ferro and many others here say they’re shocked and disappointed. “Beyond betrayed,” she said. “They used us. During the campaign, the elected officials from the Republican Party, they actually told us that he was not going to touch the documented people. They said, ‘No, it is with undocumented people.'”

Carlos Pereira, a Venezuelan-American who lives in Doral, says many of his friends and neighbors are frantic about the impending policy change. “They’re frustrated,” he said. “They’re scared, they (take) cover, hide.” For them, he says eliminating TPS “would be a tragedy.”

Noem noted in the draft rule that it’s not in American national interests to permit the Venezuelans to remain in the U.S. That broad determination may be worrying not just to Venezuelans, but also to people from Haiti, Nicaragua and more than a dozen other countries that currently have temporary protected status.

The decision to remove TPS comes as a Trump administration official has been meeting with Maduro, negotiating the release of several American hostages. Pereira wonders why Republican members of Congress, long-time supporters of Democratic rule in Venezuela, aren’t criticizing the decision to negotiate with the authoritarian regime. In the past, he says, “They always speak very hard against the Maduro regime. Now because Papi Trump is negotiating with Maduro, they close their mouth?”

Republican Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart who represents Doral says he’s watching the negotiations closely for any signs of concessions by Trump. He says the President has to be “very careful.” Diaz-Balart says he opposes Trump’s removal of TPS for Venezuelans and hopes people can be granted asylum on a case-by-case basis.