The Trump administration is ending an immigration program that presently protects hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants in the United States from deportation, opening the way for many of them to lose their legal status this spring, according to a government notice acquired by CBS News.
This weekend, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem canceled one of Venezuela’s two Temporary Protected Status designations, which the US administration had earlier ruled was too hazardous for Venezuelans to safely return home.
TPS, established in 1990, has been used by both Republican and Democratic administrations to provide temporary immigration protections to migrants from countries plagued by war, environmental disasters, or other situations that make deporting detainees risky. The policy protects beneficiaries from deportation and qualifies them for work permits, but it does not grant them permanent legal status.
According to government figures, Venezuela’s TPS program is the largest of its kind, shielding nearly 600,000 migrants from deportation.
The Trump administration’s approach will result in an estimated 350,000 Venezuelans covered by a 2023 TPS designation losing their work permits and deportation protections two months after Noem’s decision is formally published. Venezuelans who were granted TPS under an earlier 2021 designation will remain eligible until September, though those protections may be taken off.
Those whose TPS protections expire and who do not have another immigration status would lose their legal right to work in the United States and may be exposed to detention and deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has drastically boosted arrests across the country under President Trump. On Saturday, Mr. Trump said that the Venezuelan government had agreed to accept migrant deportees from the United States, after years of rejecting American deportation planes.
The moves to reduce TPS, first reported by The New York Times, are part of Mr. Trump’s broader assault on illegal immigration and humanitarian programs that allow certain migrants to lawfully enter or stay in the United States. Administration officials have also proposed revoking the legal status of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans who arrived in the United States through a sponsorship mechanism established by the Biden administration.
The Biden administration first awarded TPS to Venezuelan migrants in 2021, citing the country’s deteriorating economic and political difficulties under President Nicolas Maduro’s autocratic regime.
According to the United Nations, about 8 million people have fled Venezuela, making it the greatest diaspora in the Western Hemisphere. While millions of Venezuelans have relocated in other South American countries such as Colombia, hundreds of thousands migrated to the United States’ southern border during former President Joe Biden’s term.
While Noem noted in her ruling that some situations in Venezuela identified by the Biden administration “continue,” she ruled that continuing the TPS program would be “contrary to the national interest.” She mentioned the difficulties some communities in the United States have had in assimilating migrants in recent years, as well as the entry of members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua.
Noem also stated that measures such as TPS encourage illegal immigration, claiming that renewals of the status could operate as “pull factors” attracting people to the United States’ borders.
Biden extended TPS protections to a record number of people, including hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Ukraine, and other conflict zones. It also reversed the first Trump administration’s attempts to end TPS programs in other nations, including El Salvador.
Despite the fact that the TPS program is transitory, Trump officials and many Republican lawmakers believe it has been abused and unjustly extended too often. In one of his first executive orders, President Trump directed his administration to guarantee that TPS is “limited in scope.”
Still, a few Republican congressmen encouraged Mr. Trump to safeguard Venezuelans from deportation. In a letter sent Friday, Florida Republican Congressman Carlos Gimenez urged the Trump administration to provide a “solution” for Venezuelan TPS holders, claiming that the majority are law-abiding migrants “seeking freedom.”