Crackdown on Venezuelans in the US continues despite the earthquake disaster: ‘Why not protect those who are here?’

Three days had passed since the earthquakes, and no Venezuelan had the time or the mental space to think about immigration enforcement. It seemed that every possible misfortune had already befallen them: back home, the earthquakes had left thousands dead, injured, or missing; and in the United States, they had spent the previous year and a half living in fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), talking constantly about arrests, court hearings, and deportations.

At noon on Saturday, June 27, a group of Venezuelan food-delivery workers in Washington, D.C., gathered for lunch at their usual restaurant. ICE, which showed no regard for the grief and mourning, arrived and detained the Venezuelans who were there.

“We are terrified,” said a woman who witnessed the arrest and asked to remain anonymous. “This job is our livelihood. We are sending a lot of aid to Venezuela with our paychecks.”

Not even a natural disaster of still-incalculable proportions has prompted Donald Trump’s administration to pause its effort to carry out what it calls the largest deportation campaign in history.

In the days leading up to his immigration appointment, Nelson Contreras, 35, who arrived from Venezuela in 2022, began watching videos coming out of Caracas and La Guaira, the areas hardest hit by the catastrophe. He showed them to his wife, Ariel Whaley, whom he had married only a week earlier.

“He was working when he heard the news; he shook his head and looked very sad and affected by it,” his wife says.

Concern about his immigration check-in gradually was replaced by anguish over what was happening in his country.

Last Thursday, he attended his appointment and spent two hours with immigration officials, who instructed him to return on Saturday. That evening, Contreras left for work at a food distribution warehouse in Philadelphia, with a feeling that it might be the last time he would see Whaley.

He called her on the phone. “In the middle of the call, he suddenly said: ‘Record me.’ He wanted me to take a screenshot of the two of us. Maybe he felt that would be one of the last times he’d see my face before they sent him back to Venezuela,” she says.

Contreras’s fears proved well-founded. ICE detained him, and he is now being held in Pennsylvania while awaiting a judge’s decision.

But Whaley’s anxiety over the possibility of her husband’s deportation predates the latest crisis.

“Since Maduro’s arrest on January 3, I have lived in terror,” the woman says, referring to the Venezuelan president’s capture by the U.S. military. “The humanitarian crisis was already dire and the earthquake has worsened it enormously. It has also exposed how poorly prepared the Venezuelan government is to meet the population’s needs. I would be terrified if he, or any other Venezuelan, were sent back amid such confusion, pain, destruction and need.”

One week after the strongest earthquakes Venezuela has experienced in more than a century, authorities report more than 2,000 deaths and over 4,000 missing in a country where nature has delivered what feels like the final blow after years of economic crisis, corruption, repression and the devastation wrought by Chavista rule.

Those were the forces that drove 1.2 million Venezuelans to leave their country and settle in the United States, especially over the past decade. Now the earthquakes have once again laid bare not only the reasons Venezuelans left in search of a better future, but also why so many cannot return. Power outages have hampered rescue operations among the rubble; the healthcare system is overwhelmed; the country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves does not have enough fuel to power machinery in disaster zones; and some people have reported being threatened for publicly exposing the regime’s incompetence.

Meanwhile, the Donald Trump administration, which since January has wielded decisive influence in Venezuela and has insisted that it is a country to which migrants can safely return, not only deported nearly 14,000 Venezuelans last year but is also holding about 6,000 more in detention centers.

On Wednesday, June 24 — the day the earthquakes struck — the U.S. government operated a deportation flight from Texas carrying 147 people. Most of them later died when the hotel where Venezuelan authorities were processing their arrival in Caracas collapsed. That same night, another group of Venezuelans at the detention center in Dilley, Texas, was on the verge of being deported as well, but was returned to the facility because of the scale of the disaster.

It has only been a few days since the disaster — too soon to look beyond the mourning, the decomposing bodies and the nation’s grief. Yet Venezuelan migrants in the United States cannot help asking themselves: if ICE detains them, what country would they be returning to? And if they are sent back, how will they help their loved ones?

No distance is enough to make Yonatan Matheus feel safe or at ease. New York, where he arrived as an asylum seeker, is far from La Guaira, his hometown, but that has done nothing to lessen the pain of the tragedy. He has seen images of the rubble that was once his cousin’s home and of other relatives’ destroyed houses. It was not until midnight on Wednesday that he finally learned his family was safe.

“Several relatives and people close to me lost their homes, other families lost everything and many members of my community died. It’s a very hard feeling to explain: you want to be there to hug, help and support them, but you simply can’t,” he says.

Alongside his concern for loved ones is another burden he has carried for years: waiting for permanent residency so that he can feel secure in the United States.

“Those of us who fled persecution should not have to live with the constant fear of losing the protection that international law recognizes for people who cannot return to their country,” he insists. “In times of an emergency of this magnitude, all humanitarian measures available to protect Venezuelans should be considered. The important thing is that no one be forced to return to a country facing an emergency while many families are trying to recover.”

The fight for TPS

On June 29, five days after the earthquakes, the U.S. government — which, in addition to personnel and equipment for rescue operations, mobilized $150 million in assistance to Venezuela and contributed $100 million to the United Nations fund for the country’s recovery — publicly warned: “The T in TPS stands for TEMPORARY.”

The statement signaled that Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which in recent years has protected nationals of Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, Syria, Somalia and Venezuela, was all but finished.

The announcement followed a Supreme Court decision allowing the termination of the program for roughly 350,000 Haitians and nearly 6,000 Syrians. “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here,” the Department of Homeland Security posted on X.

Under U.S. law, TPS may be granted when humanitarian conditions make it unsafe for migrants to return to their country. Following Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, which claimed more than 300,000 lives, Haitians in the United States received that protection. Syrians who fled the repression of Bashar al-Assad were later granted the same status under the Obama administration.

Five years ago, the Biden administration extended TPS to Venezuelans because of the country’s “extraordinary and temporary conditions.” Before leaving office in 2025, Biden renewed that protection for an additional 18 months. Since then, TPS has become one of the central points of contention between Venezuelan migrants and Trump.

Since November, when then–Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem announced the end of TPS protections for Venezuelans, nearly 600,000 Venezuelans have been left without work authorization and exposed to possible detention or deportation. Now, as they focus on collecting, organizing and sending humanitarian aid to their country, Venezuelan communities across the United States are calling for those protections to be extended.

Venezuelan attorney John De la Vega, who is part of a campaign urging the Trump administration to extend TPS, believes the current circumstances clearly justify such a move.

“One of the reasons the Immigration Service can grant TPS is based on natural disasters, and it cites earthquakes as an example, and what we are seeing in Venezuela is affecting tens of thousands of Venezuelans. There isn’t even an airport for people to return to their country safely,” the lawyer says. “We are talking about the community not asking for anything extraordinary, but simply that they use and implement the law.”

This week, a coalition of politicians, activists, organizations and lawyers urged the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security to redesignate Venezuela for TPS, arguing that the earthquakes had compounded an already severe humanitarian crisis and made the country even less able to receive deportees.

José Antonio Colina, one of the signatories and president of the group Venezuelans Persecuted for Political Reasons in Exile, believes that amid “an aggressive immigration policy under which our protections have steadily been stripped away,” the community’s common request is simple: some form of legal protection. “That they are not returned to a country that is not capable of receiving them,” he says.

Beyond halting deportations, Colina hopes the government will stop ICE’s pursuit of Venezuelans and release those being held in detention centers. “If they can’t be sent to Venezuela, what will they do? Will they leave those people in immigration jails here in the United States? Until when? They sent humanitarian aid, they are sending money, they are sending rescuers. Why not give protection to the Venezuelans who are here?”

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition