The Trump administration is terminating Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for almost 250,000 Venezuelan migrants — most of them in South Florida — rendering them deportable back to Venezuela's dictatorship and humanitarian crisis starting this fall.
Those affected are Venezuelans granted TPS in 2021.
TPS gives migrants from countries torn by disaster or political violence temporary but renewable protection from deportation.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Wednesday night that conditions in Venezuela have improved enough that the Venezuelans' TPS will not be renewed when it expires next week.
This, however, is in spite of the fact that Venezuela remains in the grip of a brutal dictatorship — whose security forces were recently accused by international human rights groups of murdering anti-government protesters last year after the regime stole the presidential election — as well as the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history.
But the DHS statement put stronger emphasis on the administration's determination to curtail immigration and ramp up its deportation campaign.
"Given Venezuela's substantial role in driving irregular migration and the clear magnet effect created by Temporary Protected Status, maintaining or expanding TPS for Venezuelan nationals directly undermines the Trump Administration's efforts to secure our southern border and manage migration effectively," the statement read.
"Weighing public safety, national security, migration factors, immigration policy, economic considerations, and foreign policy, it's clear that allowing Venezuelan nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is not in America's best interest."
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The U.S. Supreme Court recently allowed the Trump administration to begin deporting almost 350,000 other Venezuelan migrants who were granted TPS in 2023 — even though their TPS cancellation is still being challenged in a lower federal court.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last Friday unanimously upheld a lower court ruling that maintained temporary protected status designations for Venezuelans while they seek to overturn actions by Trump's administration.
The TPS termination for the original, 2021 class of Venezuelan migrants is expected to be challenged as well.
Many of the almost 600,000 total Venezuelan TPS holders have become established community members and entrepreneurs in enclaves like Doral in South Florida.
Venezuelan migrants have become a particular target of Trump's anti-immigration crusade ever since he associated them with the Venezuelan criminal gang known as Tren de Aragua during his presidential campaign last year.
Ironically, most Venezuelan voters in Doral and other South Florida expat communities opted for Trump in last November's election.
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