Trump administration ends temporary immigration program for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans

The Trump administration is terminating an immigration program that currently protects hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants in the U.S. from deportation, paving the way for many of them to lose their legal status this spring, according to a government notice obtained by CBS News.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem this weekend revoked one of two Temporary Protected Status designations for Venezuela, which the U.S. government had previously determined was too dangerous to allow Venezuelans to return to their homeland safely.

Created in 1990, TPS has been used by Republican and Democratic administrations to grant temporary immigration protections to migrants from nations beset by war, environmental disasters or other emergencies that make it dangerous to send deportees there. The policy shields beneficiaries from deportation and makes them eligible for work permits but it does not give them permanent legal status. 

The Venezuela TPS program is by far the biggest of its kind, protecting more than 600,000 migrants from deportation, government statistics show.

The move by the Trump administration, first reported by The New York Times, will mean that an estimated 300,000 Venezuelans covered under a 2023 TPS designation will lose their work permits and deportation protections two months after Noem’s decision is officially published. Venezuelans enrolled in TPS under an earlier 2021 designation will continue to have that status through September, though those protections could also be phased out. 

Those whose TPS protections lapse and lack another immigration status will lose their ability to work in the U.S. legally and become vulnerable to being detained and deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has dramatically increased arrests across the country under President Trump. On Saturday, Mr. Trump said the Venezuelan government had agreed to accept migrant deportees from the U.S., after rejecting American deportation flights for years.

The efforts to scale back TPS echo a broader crackdown by Mr. Trump on illegal immigration and humanitarian programs that allowed some migrants to come or stay in the U.S. legally. Administration officials have also drafted plans to revoke the legal status of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who arrived in the U.S. under a sponsorship process established by the Biden administration.

Venezuelan migrants were first granted TPS in 2021 by the Biden administration, which cited the deteriorating economic and political conditions in Venezuela under the authoritarian rule of President Nicolas Maduro.

Nearly 8 million people have left Venezuela as part of the largest exodus recorded in the Western Hemisphere, according to the United Nations. While millions of Venezuelans have settled in other South American countries like Colombia, hundreds of thousands traveled to the U.S. southern border during former President Joe Biden’s administration.

Biden extended TPS protections to a record number of people, offering them to hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Ukraine and other countries in turmoil. It also reversed the first Trump administration’s attempts to terminate TPS programs for several countries, including El Salvador.

Trump officials and many Republican lawmakers believe the TPS policy has been abused and improperly extended too often, despite the program’s temporary nature. In one of his first executive orders, Mr. Trump instructed his administration to ensure TPS is “limited in scope.”

Still, a handful of Republican lawmakers had urged Mr. Trump to protect Venezuelans from deportation. In a letter Friday, Florida GOP Congressman Carlos Gimenez called on the Trump administration to offer Venezuelan TPS holders a “solution,” saying that most are law-abiding migrants “seeking freedom.”

“While members of the ‘Tren de Aragua’ gang are Venezuelans, not all Venezuelans belong to ‘Tren de Aragua,'” Gimenez said, referencing the notorious prison gang. “We must not allow the actions of a few to unfairly stigmatize an entire community.”