Nathaly Maestre has tried to follow her doctors’ instructions to the letter. Her obstetrician and perinatologist were clear: At 40, eight months into a high-risk pregnancy, and after a miscarriage last year, she has to avoid unnecessary stress.
But that has become impossible. In May, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip temporary legal protection from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans living in the United States. Overnight, Maestre and her partner, Luis Guillermo, found themselves without status—despite following all the rules.
“You try not to think so much about what’s happening outside,” Maestre told me in Spanish, her voice breaking. But it is hard “with all these sudden, abrupt changes.”
Fleeing persecution from pro-government militias in Venezuela, Maestre and Luis Guillermo came to the United States on tourist visas in September 2021 and later applied for asylum. In the fall of 2023, another option became available: Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. This stopgap shield from deportation for people who cannot safely return to their countries of origin because of armed conflicts, natural disasters, or other extraordinary circumstances has protected roughly 600,000 Venezuelans—until now.
President Donald Trump’s termination of TPS for Venezuelans is part of the largest delegalization campaign in modern US history. “A single act of stripping immigration status in one fell swoop,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, an attorney with the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy representing TPS holders in a lawsuit against the government. The plan, he added, is central to the administration’s mass deportation goals as it scrambles to scale up US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests to an improbable 3,000 a day. “This is a community that has recently provided information to the government about their whereabouts, rendering them all vulnerable to deportation, [which] gives the government the opportunity to go after a lot of them—very quickly.”
Adelys Ferro, executive director of the Venezuelan-American Caucus, has received thousands of messages from Venezuelans who have lost status under Trump, wondering what to do. Some have had panic attacks. Many lack travel documents because they can’t simply go to a nearby Venezuelan consulate and renew an expired passport—all services have been paused since 2023. “You have a whole community feeling hunted,” she said, “feeling persecuted all over again.”
Ferro believes Venezuelans are being scapegoated and targeted in the service of boosting ICE’s numbers. “The only way to fill their quotas and to have all this insane propaganda about Venezuelan immigrants is to make these new ‘illegals’ up,” she said.
When Maestre and Luis Guillermo’s application for TPS was approved back in January, they thought it would add an extra layer of protection on top of their pending asylum case. A onetime employee of the Central Bank of Venezuela, Maestre had protested the “dictatorial” rule of President Nicolás Maduro and barely survived a reprisal attack by armed men on motorcycles in the streets of Caracas. “My life wasn’t safe,” she said. “Not in my home, not in my mother’s house, not anywhere in Venezuela, because they follow you, they stalk you, and they watch everything you do.” TPS was a “salvation.”
But Maestre now fears being sent back to economic collapse and a government under investigation for crimes against humanity. Since 2014, nearly 8 million people—about a quarter of Venezuela’s population—have fled widespread violence, poverty, and hunger.
Like many other TPS holders, Maestre and Luis Guillermo have established a life in the United States. They live in Germantown, Maryland, where they hope to raise their first child. Before her pregnancy, Maestre waited tables at a family-owned Tex-Mex restaurant. She still occasionally drives for Uber. Luis Guillermo works at a car dealership. On Facebook and Instagram, the couple share videos of ultrasounds and messages to their future son, Leandro. “Eres la luz de nuestros ojos,” Luis Guillermo says in an April recording, before kissing Maestre’s 24-week baby bump. You’re the light of our eyes.
As much as Maestre tries to insulate herself, she can’t filter out the flood of news and talks of ICE raids and arbitrary detentions circulating in WhatsApp groups with other Venezuelans. They share recommendations from lawyers to avoid Walmart or Home Depot—the sites of operations across the country. “Even if you go to work,” she said, “you’re afraid of what might happen on the street.” These days, Maestre heads straight home after her doctors’ appointments.
“The people around us who had TPS, who are Venezuelan, and who have built a community here,” Maestre said, “right now, we’re very scared of what’s happening.”
The TPS program was created as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, signed by President George H.W. Bush. Devised to help victims of a brutal civil war raging between leftist guerrillas and El Salvador’s US-backed military junta, TPS extended relief to those who did not meet the narrow requirements of asylum.
TPS is granted in cycles of up to 18 months that can be extended. Some groups, like Salvadorans and Hondurans, have seen their protected status renewed many times. These long-term “TPSianos” have deep roots in the United States. They are employed at a higher rate than the average US citizen, pay billions of dollars in taxes, and have parented thousands of children here.
Over the last three decades, TPS has also become a lifeline for a kaleidoscope of immigrants from all over the world. As of September 2024, approximately 1.1 million active TPS holders lived in the United States. Currently, the vast majority are from Venezuela or Haiti.
On the campaign trail, Trump vilified both groups. He stoked rumors of Venezuelan gangs taking over entire towns and Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. The anti-immigrant animus was nothing new. In his first term, Trump had famously referred to some TPS nations as “shithole countries” and tried to decimate the program. (The courts intervened.)
With Trump back in office—and in need of more targets for top aide Stephen Miller’s vision of deporting 1 million people a year—the White House is doubling down on rescinding lawful status for TPS holders en masse. On day one, the president issued an executive order instructing the Department of Homeland Security to review TPS designations covering 17 countries.
His new DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, promptly rolled back former President Joe Biden’s last-ditch extension for Venezuela—contrary to the processes laid out by law. Two days later, she ended TPS for 350,000 Venezuelans who became eligible in 2023, leaving them in legal limbo starting in April. The other 250,000 or so—whose protection began in 2021—could stand to lose status in September. The Trump administration has also moved to end TPS for Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans and canceled a humanitarian parole initiative, known as CHNV, that had allowed more than 500,000 migrants from four countries, including Venezuela, to come to the United States and work for up to two years.
“It’s not just the quote, unquote criminals,” Cecilia Menjívar, a professor of sociology at UCLA’s Latino Policy & Politics Institute, said of the administration’s targets. “Now we see a far broader net that’s being cast in immigrant communities to deport a lot more people in different vulnerable statuses.”
Typically, an administration terminates TPS when conditions in the home country have improved. When ending TPS for Venezuelans, Noem instead said allowing the 2023 TPS holders to stay was “contrary to the national interest.” She has alleged that Venezuela “emptied their prisons and sent criminals to America” and suggested—without evidence—that some TPS recipients were members of the Tren de Aragua gang. (The administration designated the group a foreign terrorist organization and in March disappeared more than 230 Venezuelans to a megaprison in El Salvador, based on flimsy accusations and benign tattoos.) “The people of this country want these dirtbags out,” Noem said on Fox & Friends.
In fact, TPS recipients and CHNV parolees are among the most vetted immigrants in the country. TPS applicants undergo thorough background checks and must re-register with the government periodically to keep their benefits. They cannot have been convicted of a single felony or more than one misdemeanor. Menjívar, who recently surveyed 30,000 Venezuelans with TPS, described them as highly educated and hardworking people—in urgent need of protection.
Unable to safely return home and without a path to lawful permanent status or citizenship, TPS holders have always lived, as Menjívar puts it, in a “quasi-permanent state of legal uncertainty.” Under Trump, that legal limbo has become more dire. It is “very clear,” said Andrew I. Schoenholtz, co-director of the asylum clinic at Georgetown Law, that ending these protections “enable[s] DHS to initiate the removal of these people and…feed the mass deportation goals.”
The attack on TPS recipients is so drastic that it has drawn pushback even from the right. “If their goal is to remove as many people as possible, then certainly, canceling TPS and the parole processes are going to induce a lot of people to self-deport,” said Daniel Di Martino, a Venezuelan-born conservative economist at the Manhattan Institute who researches immigration. “But if the goal is to get rid of the dangerous people first, canceling TPS and the status of people who came here on [humanitarian] parole, regardless of what you think of the merits of those programs, is counterproductive.”
Di Martino believes it also risks driving many underground. “If they get to stay and then they don’t work [and pay taxes],” he said, “then that’s the worst of both worlds.”
In early July, I met Valentina, a 43-year-old delivery driver in Washington, DC, who asked me not to use her real name for fear of immigration enforcement. The swift change in TPS and the specter of sweeping raids have reshaped her daily life. “I go out onto the street terrified,” she said. Valentina regularly follows alerts of ICE sightings and avoids speaking Spanish to not draw attention to herself. She goes grocery shopping at night and does not leave the house before 9 in the morning, because she has heard ICE agents are prone to prowl for immigrants commuting early to work.
“At first, I felt safe and thought I could stay here,” Valentina said. “But now I don’t.” A teacher and career public servant in Venezuela, she was sexually assaulted by members of the colectivos, pro-government paramilitary groups, at her workplace. In 2017, Valentina fled after receiving death threats. She hoped to make her way north to the United States, but she did not want to cross the border illegally. Valentina looked elsewhere instead; she went to Trinidad and Tobago, then to Spain. In 2023, shortly after the Biden administration launched the CHNV program, she seized the opportunity.
“You enter legally, and suddenly, because of someone else’s whim, you’re illegal. It doesn’t make sense.”
The parole status allowed Valentina to obtain a work authorization, a Social Security number, and a driver’s license. It also gave her time to look for other forms of legal protection. Valentina applied for TPS for herself and her children and asked for asylum. Her two-year parole stay expired June 10. Two days later, the Trump administration began notifying more than half a million parolees that they were losing their employment authorization and needed to leave the country. The only legal avenue still available to Valentina is her asylum claim. “You enter legally,” she said, “and suddenly, because of someone else’s whim, you’re illegal. It doesn’t make sense.”
A single mother of three, Valentina fears being separated from her year-and-a-half-old baby, a US citizen. She has decided to leave the United States. But she doesn’t know where to go or how to start over yet again. Valentina wonders: Would the Canadians give her asylum? “The important thing is to stop living with this fear and anxiety,” she said.
Valentina opposes unlawful immigration. In our conversation, she condemned the few migrants who commit crimes in the US, giving law-following immigrants like her a bad name. “I’ve never wanted to break the laws of this country,” she told me. “I’ve never wanted to be here ‘illegally.’”
Mayra Sulbaran, founder of Casa DC Venezuela, said many Venezuelans “fell into the trap that they were going to be protected by Trump.” They believed he would free their country from Maduro’s authoritarian grip and limit immigration enforcement to people with criminal records, sparing their relatives and friends. Now, they’re grappling with a sense of betrayal. This is particularly true of Venezuelan Americans in South Florida, who helped carry the state for Trump in 2024.
Part of that frustration is directed at Marco Rubio, the former Florida senator now in charge of Trump’s State Department. He long decried the Maduro regime and co-signed a letter supporting TPS extensions for Venezuelans, saying “failure to do so would result in a very real death sentence.” Today, Rubio endorses withdrawing their protection, suggesting they can seek asylum instead. “How are you going to say that if the requirements for asylum are more specific and more demanding?” Sulbaran asked.
The Trump administration tried to justify canceling TPS by also pointing to “notable improvements” in conditions in Venezuela. But regional experts disagree. “There’s absolutely no evidence that sustains those claims,” said Laura Dib, the Venezuela program director at the Washington Office on Latin America, noting that 20 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance. The White House has also defunded efforts to integrate Venezuelan refugees into neighboring countries, which some observers warn will fuel migration to the United States.
Since Venezuela’s 2024 elections—widely considered fraudulent—Maduro’s crackdown on civil society has only gotten worse, including widespread retaliation against human rights defenders and arbitrary arrests and killings of protesters. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights calls the regime’s practices “state terrorism.” Still, deportation flights to Venezuela have resumed. “We have no information whatsoever on the conditions of people that have been deported,” Dib said. “Once they arrive to Venezuela, it’s like a black hole.”
Some TPS holders are fighting back. In February, the National TPS Alliance and seven Venezuelan recipients in California, Texas, New York, Florida, and Tennessee sued Noem and the Trump administration over ending protection for TPS beneficiaries. Cecilia Daniela Gonzalez Herrera joined the lawsuit just before her 26th birthday. “It’s terrifying to sue the United States,” she said. “I don’t think it’s something I ever thought I was going to end up doing.”
Gonzalez, who splits her time between Kissimmee, Florida, and Washington, DC, is a co-founder of the Venezuelan-American Caucus and a voting rights coordinator with the nonprofit LatinoJustice PRLDEF. She grew up in western Venezuela to parents—an attorney and a political scientist—who were vocal against the repressive regime. In 2017, her family fled to the United States.
“I have plenty of friends whose parents were also victims of persecution from the government, parents who got kidnapped,” she said. “That was my reality, and to a certain degree, it became the norm. You grew up that way, so you think it’s normal to always be living in fear.”
Gonzalez can speak out publicly because she and her family are safer than most. They had already applied for asylum, and though that case has been pending for almost eight years, losing TPS won’t automatically render them undocumented this September, when their status expires. Unlike others, they are not considering whether to self-deport or seek safety in a third country, at least for now. “My family and I may find solutions and alternatives,” she said. “But that’s not the reality of the vast majority.”
On March 31, District Court Judge Edward Chen ordered the federal government to postpone the cancellation of TPS while the case is heard in the courts. Chen found that plaintiffs were likely to succeed in showing Noem’s actions were “unauthorized by law, arbitrary and capricious, and motivated by unconstitutional animus.” The broad characterization of Venezuelan migrants as criminals and members of Tren de Aragua, he wrote in his decision, “smacks of racism.”
Lawyers for the plaintiffs have further argued that the government’s reasons for ending TPS for Venezuela “were a pretext to reach the politically-required result” and that its analysis of country conditions was “slanted and ends-oriented.” (DHS didn’t respond to an email with questions about the termination.)
The Trump administration asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to lift Chen’s order pending an appeal and, when rejected, sought a stay from the Supreme Court. On May 19, the justices issued an unsigned two-paragraph “shadow docket” ruling giving the Trump administration the green light to revoke TPS as the legal battle drags on. A little more than a week later, the Supreme Court also allowed the White House to cancel the CHNV program.
Soon after, a government webpage about TPS holders began displaying an alert gloating over the “devastating 8-1 vindication of the Trump Administration.” The Supreme Court is enabling “the administration to pursue its immigration policy without regard to legal constraints,” UCLA’s Arulanantham said, calling it “an extraordinary moment in the history of immigration law in the country.”
Since the Supreme Court’s ruling, several former Venezuelan TPS holders who fell out of status as a result of the termination have been detained and deported from the United States, according to the ACLU. In one case described in a court filing, a mother of two, including a 15-month-old US citizen, was deported with her children; the father remains in the United States. In early July, a restaurant hostess in Indiana was also deported, despite having a pending asylum application. She has been separated from her 11-month-old daughter.
Trump’s cancellation of these legal protections “will put lives at serious risk,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). He and other Democratic senators recently reintroduced legislation to grant people with TPS a pathway to lawful permanent residency. Florida representatives have additionally mounted a bipartisan push to specifically keep Venezuelans protected. TPS holders, Van Hollen said, “have become deeply rooted in our communities” and “don’t deserve to have their lives upended and families put in danger.”
But unless and until any such legislative efforts prevail, immigrants like Maestre remain vulnerable. As she and Luis Guillermo take the next steps toward asylum, their lawyer has advised them to request a remote hearing, in case ICE agents continue to detain immigrants inside courthouses. It feels, Maestre said, as though the whole system “is chasing us to get us out of here.”
With Leandro’s due date at the end of July, Maestre told me she didn’t have a Plan B. All she knows is they can’t go back to Venezuela. “I thought that by doing things the best way, as they should be, legally, according to policies, we could relax and live our lives—which we haven’t had the opportunity to do in our country,” she said. “But that’s not the case.”