Thousands of Venezuelan immigrants in Georgia could lose their protected status and become subject to deportation as early as April, after the Trump administration terminated humanitarian protections that allowed nationals from the Latin American country to legally live and work in the U.S.
According to government documents obtained by The New York Times, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security over the weekend revoked one of two Temporary Protected Status designations for Venezuela, which the Biden administration had granted because it said conditions there were too dangerous to force immigrants back to their homeland.
This first crackdown of the TPS program under President Donald Trump will affect more than 300,000 Venezuelans throughout the U.S.
The TPS program also currently protects people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Sudan and Ukraine, among other nations — although the Venezuela TPS program is by far the biggest. Georgia has the sixth most TPS participants out of all states, according to a 2024 report from the Congressional Research Service, and community leaders estimate about 6,000 of them are Venezuelan.
Venezuelans who received TPS deportation protections in 2023 will lose their temporary status 60 days after the federal government formally publishes the termination notice.
Marcial Márquez is the president of Casa Venezuela Atlanta, a group that advocates for the local Venezuelan community. He says reports of TPS being revoked have caused “anxiety, anguish and above all uncertainty.”
“We agree that any person who breaks the law, who commits crimes should be deported,” he said. But “the majority of Venezuelans who live in the U.S. are good people.”
Márquez, who also serves as a board member and safety expert at the Georgia Hispanic Construction Association, said many recent Venezuelan arrivals are currently working construction and in warehouses. Others have found opportunities in poultry plants. According to immigrant community advocates in Gainesville, getting work permits through TPS allowed Venezuelan migrants to be hired directly by the poultry companies — instead of through third-party staffing agencies — which allowed them to get benefits and higher pay.
The Biden administration first announced TPS for Venezuela in 2021. In its last days, Biden officials said conditions there remained hazardous enough to continue justifying the extension of the program, citing the “the severe humanitarian emergency the country continues to face due to political and economic crises under the inhumane (Nicolas) Maduro regime.
“These conditions have contributed to high levels of crime and violence, impacting access to food, medicine, health care, water, electricity and fuel.”
Márquez said it is confusing to rollback TPS when conditions inside Venezuela haven’t improved.
“At this moment in time, from our point of view … they’ve gotten worse,” he said.
In the documents obtained by the Times, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem acknowledged that life in Venezuela remains challenging, but she determined it was “contrary to the national interest” to keep the TPS program going.
She echoed long-standing conservative critiques of TPS, which hold that although protections are meant to be temporary, frequent renewals by federal authorities can effectively prevent them from ever lapsing.
Immigration attorney Carolina Antonini’s firm has helped dozens of Venezuelans apply for TPS in recent years. She said that many have begun separate processes to apply for more permanent asylum protections while on TPS. But those who don’t have an alternative status will find themselves immediately exposed to detention and deportation when the TPS program lapses, she said.
It’s unclear if having been part of the TPS program could make them even easier targets for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been conducting more arrests in recent weeks as agents strive to meet new Trump apprehension quotas, according to Antonini.
“Logically, you would think that if immigration has your name, if you’re on a list that would make it easier for them,” Antonini said. “But in my experience, the U.S. government has been able to find whomever they wanted, whether they were registered at some point or not.”
Under Joe Biden, the federal authorities long struggled to remove migrants to Venezuela, as the country’s government did not allow deportation flights. In a social media post on Saturday, Trump indicated Venezuela had changed its position.
Antonini said she anticipates legal challenges to the TPS decision. In Trump’s first term, federal courts blocked his attempts to terminate the status for migrants from El Salvador, Haiti and Sudan, among others.
“Years have passed, and those people still have their TPS,” Márquez said.
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