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The White House on Monday announced a temporary protective status decree that could allow tens of thousands of Venezuelans who have fled their homeland to remain in the United States with legal status.
The program marks a significant shift in US policy by the Trump administration, which has refused protection for Venezuelans even as President Trump tried to topple the left-wing government in Caracas. His administration has also secretly expelled Venezuelans despite congressional demands for protected status for refugees.
It was only on his last day in office that Trump issued an executive order postponing the removal of Venezuelans for 18 months, but not granting them temporary status and leaving them in limbo.
Fleeing poverty, hunger, disease and the brutal repression of President Nicolas Maduro, more than 4 million Venezuelans have left their country to date, according to the UN refugee agency, and more than 800,000 have requested asylum in the world.
The decision announced Monday will be made by executive order rather than going through Congress, and could benefit more than 320,000 people, administration officials said, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity without providing a reason.
“Living conditions in Venezuela reveal a country in turmoil, unable to protect its own citizens,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement. “It is during times of extraordinary and temporary circumstances like these that the United States steps in to support eligible Venezuelan nationals already here as their home countries seek to emerge from current crises.”
Venezuelans who were physically present in the United States as of Monday were eligible and would have 180 days to apply, pay fees and prove residency through invoices or other documents, according to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security and officials.
The action won praise in many circles.
“To continue to deport Venezuelans to the Maduro tragedy would be to tell them that they are a burden on our communities, a threat to our national security and an unwanted guest in our country,” said Senator Bob Menendez (DN.J .), who fought for a long time for the TPS for the Venezuelans.
“It’s huge,” said Geoff Ramsey, a longtime Venezuelan expert at the Washington office on Latin America, a human rights group. “The TPS has proven to be much more sustainable in all jurisdictions.”
Ramsey and others have said they hope Biden’s announcement heralds a clearer and broader U.S. policy on Venezuela.
So far, the Biden administration has offered few details on what it might do differently from Trump, whose policies have neither restored democracy to Venezuela nor significantly alleviated the humanitarian crisis. “We’re still waiting to see what’s new,” Ramsey said.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States will continue to recognize opposition leader Juan Guaido by Trump as the legitimate president of Venezuela.
The Biden administration has also not agreed to talks with Maduro.
A second senior administration official also briefing reporters said the US government remained “very lucid” about how the Maduro government had used delay tactics in negotiations to crack down on opponents and consolidate power.
Administration officials also rejected suggestions that President Biden’s decision was a political ploy to appease South Florida, where an unconditional Republican vote in favor of Venezuelan refugees likely contributed to the loss of the state. by Biden in the 2020 election.
“It’s not partisan at all,” said one of the officials. “The ongoing suffering and unrest that the Venezuelan people have endured is well documented … and it is neither Democrat nor Republican.”
Over the decades, the TPS program has been used in a limited way to grant some form of refugee status to people whose nations have been ravaged by natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes in the case of some Central Americans. and Haitians, and the war. As the name suggests, the status is meant to be temporary and critics have complained that too many TPS recipients have turned into permanent residents.
This led to the Trump administration, which was already sponsoring measures to curb legal and illegal immigration, to end much of the programs.
The Venezuelans were a special case.
Even as the Trump administration has insulted the ruling regime in Venezuela, it has resisted a bipartisan push – including from Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, an avowed hawk from Venezuela – to grant Venezuelans the right to stay in the United States under GST.
As the Trump administration worked to overthrow the Venezuelan government due to the horrific abuses of its citizens, authorities also secretly expelled Venezuelans from the United States, deporting them via third countries to hide their final destination and circumvent a law of 2019 against flights to or from Venezuelan airports, according to a report by Menendez, chairman of the external relations committee.
Yet on the last day of his term in office, Trump issued an executive order postponing the removal of Venezuelans for 18 months.
At the end of January, senators again introduced a bill calling for a TPS for Venezuelans.
In 2019, Senate Republicans blocked a similar measure passed by the House. Biden said during the 2020 presidential campaign that he would extend the TPS for Venezuelans.
Since 2014, the number of Venezuelans applying for refugee status has increased by 8,000%, mainly in the Americas, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
And while many Venezuelans have sought protection closer to the region, Venezuela has overtaken China in recent years as the top country of origin for asylum seekers in the United States, accounting for more than 25% of all asylum claims filed with US citizenship and immigration. Services, according to the latest data. As recently as 2013, Venezuelans weren’t even in the top 10.
Many Venezuelans still fly to the United States – especially those with more money and families in Florida, which has a large Venezuelan expat community – and seek asylum upon arrival at American airports. or after, in a process called affirmative asylum.
But a growing number of people have requested protection at the US-Mexico border. Mexico has also seen a dramatic increase in the number of Venezuelans seeking asylum there, and most applications are approved.
In the United States, Venezuelans have faced several Trump-era policies to restrict the ability to seek asylum. More than 50% of Venezuelan asylum claims are rejected on average, according to Syracuse University’s TRAC database of federal immigration statistics. In 2020, out of the nearly 2,000 Venezuelans who received a decision on their asylum claim in the US Immigration Court, just over 45%, or around 900, had their claim rejected, putting them at risk. risk of deportation.
Prior to Monday’s announcement, the Biden administration had not yet issued new TPS designations for any country, nor reinstated the TPS for those terminated by Trump, according to a letter from 314 state and national organizations urging Biden and Mayorkas to extend the TPS to 18 countries, including Venezuela.
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