According to Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s “border czar,” the administration’s deportation policies apply only to people who are “in the country illegally,” not to the “millions of people standing in line, taking the test, doing their background investigation, paying the fees, that want to come in the right way.”
This week, more than half a million Venezuelans who’d done things “the right way” discovered that the distinction might not matter. They’d filled out forms, paid up to $545 in fees, and waited anywhere from two to 12 months to secure Temporary Protected Status, which allows them to live and work in the United States. And yet, on Wednesday, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced that these 600,000 Venezuelans would be stripped of that status and subject to deportation as of September 10.
The rules for TPS seemed simple enough. Venezuelan nationals who were on U.S. soil before a certain date were eligible. Ukrainians have their own date—as do Hondurans, Haitians, Syrians, Ethiopians, and others from a list of countries whose conditions the U.S. government has concluded “temporarily prevent the country’s nationals from returning safely,” to quote the official website. In Venezuela’s case, those conditions include a humanitarian crisis and a dictatorial regime under investigation for crimes against humanity. Trump was actually the one who’d designated Venezuela “unsafe” and given Venezuelans access to TPS in the first place, starting in 2020.
TPS is usually good for 18 months, but the status can be renewed indefinitely if the country’s situation doesn’t improve. Trump dislikes this feature. In 2018, his first administration sought to strip the status from Salvadorans, on the grounds that the earthquake that had prompted the U.S. to grant it back in 2001 was long past, even if other crises had since occurred. The courts blocked this termination before it took effect.
The Biden administration anticipated that Trump would go after TPS again, and perhaps for this reason, it extended TPS for Venezuela just before Inauguration Day. Noem vacated that order, telling Fox that Venezuelan TPS holders “were going to be able to stay here and violate our laws for another 18 months. We stopped that.” No one in the administration has tried to argue that conditions in Venezuela have improved, which, the law stipulates, would be the only justification for terminating TPS.
Legal challenges are probably coming, because no precedent has established the legality of terminating a preceding administration’s TPS extension. Further terminations could be coming too. I spoke with Yusuf Ahmad, an immigration attorney in Washington, D.C., who has been receiving lots of nervous calls from his TPS clients asking whether the status will end for good, and not only for Venezuelans. Since 2018, Emi MacLean of the ACLU told me, “Trump has made no secret of his desire to undermine the TPS program as a whole.”
So far, however, the status has been withdrawn only from Venezuelans. The last-minute nature of the extension doesn’t quite explain this, because on the same day, the Biden administration also extended TPS for El Salvador, Ukraine, and Sudan. Of these, however, Venezuela has by far the most recipients. When asked where Venezuelans will be deported to, given that Caracas has made noises about refusing them unless the U.S. accedes to certain demands, Noem suggested El Salvador, or maybe Guantánamo Bay. Daniel Di Martino, a vocal Trump supporter from Venezuela who researches immigration at the Manhattan Institute, wondered at the expense of it all. Deportation costs $50,000 per head, Di Martino told me, and deporting a TPS holder means losing a taxpayer.
One of the stranger aspects of this termination is that Trump has long had admirers among Venezuelan Americans, particularly in South Florida. Esteban Hernández, the editor in chief of Contra Poder News, a right-wing publication serving Venezuelan Floridians, told me that many in his circle felt betrayed; Trump had once courted Venezuelans. Still, Hernández couldn’t fathom that TPS really would be revoked for everyone. It would just be “bad guys,” he suggested to me.
Erick Suarez, who lived off his savings for six months as he waited for his TPS status so that he could work, told me that stripping TPS from everyone just wouldn’t make sense: “Why would they go after people who did everything the right way?”
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