On a chilly afternoon in January, just a week after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, I met Inesca, a Venezuelan mother who has lived in the United States for nearly two years. She said Trump’s election pushed her into a corner. On his first day as president, Trump announced plans to end the humanitarian parole program that had allowed her, her children, and more than 100,000 other Venezuelans to enter the United States in recent years. She was worried that the new life she had worked so hard to build would fall apart.
I went to her house and talked for hours in her small kitchen. She spoke of her two sons, Sebastian and Gabriel, and her partner Eduardo, who worked as a cook at a nearby restaurant in Doral, Florida, a city next to Miami. She described how difficult it was to leave her family and small business behind in a once-prosperous region of Venezuela now hollowed out by years of economic decline. The journey to America was grueling. It took Inesca, her sons and nephew almost seven months to cross the dangerous Darien Canyon and then across Mexico to reunite with Eduardo in Miami.
They managed to rent a safe place to live on the outskirts of Doral, find jobs and enroll the boys in school. Ineska’s eldest son was excited to earn his American high school diploma. And with the slip of a pen, the president threatened to take away the stable lives they had finally begun to build. I could hear the fear in her voice as we spoke.
I introduced myself to Ineska because I knew she wasn’t alone. I’m a ProPublica journalist and filmmaker who immigrated to the United States from Venezuela nearly 10 years ago. Luckily, I arrived with a visa that allowed me to work legally.
As I watched Trump’s second presidential campaign, I got a sense of what was to come. His return to the presidency will put millions of Venezuelans who have recently settled in the United States between two storm clouds: a hostile U.S. government and a repressive regime at home with no prospects. Many of my Venezuelan friends saw something completely different. They believed that his return would be a blessing to our community, that he would drive out those who brought trouble and protect the rest.
When I left Inesca’s house that first night, I wrote in my notebook: “This is a good family. A working family. They represent so many Venezuelans who came here in search of safety and opportunity. And in many ways, they represent me as well.” I saw in her story an opportunity to highlight the quiet anxiety that has been brewing in some parts of Doral that the sense of security they found in America could disappear overnight.
Doral is the center of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States. About 40% of the people living there emigrated from their homeland to escape the deep economic, political and social collapse that unfolded during President Nicolas Maduro’s nearly 12 years in power. His authoritarian rule and the collapse of the country’s economy caused nearly 8 million people to flee, most to other Latin American and Caribbean countries. This is the largest mass migration in the Western Hemisphere’s recent history.
When I came to the United States, most Latinos were facing the first wave of President Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. At the time, President Trump called Mexicans “bad guys.” In contrast, Venezuelans were not viewed negatively. President Trump has taken a tough stance against President Maduro, imposing heavy economic sanctions aimed at weakening his authoritarian hold on power. This stance has garnered widespread support in President Trump’s United States, particularly among Venezuelan exiles in South Florida and Doral. In the final days of his first term, President Trump issued a memorandum that temporarily protects those already in the United States from deportation, recognizing the risks Venezuelans face if they are forced to return home.
The following year, President Joe Biden opened several interim paths to allow more than 700,000 Venezuelans to live legally in the United States, with his administration granting humanitarian parole to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans like Inesca and her sons, allowing them to live and work in the United States for up to two years if they pass background checks and secure financial sponsorship. He also extended Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelans already living here, preventing deportation to unstable Venezuela and granting them work permits.
After securing humanitarian parole and entering the United States in April 2023, Inesca and her two sons headed to Florida to reunite with Eduardo. He was in Miami applying to TPS. Ineska’s nephew, who was traveling with her, had applied for asylum. They all entered the United States legally.
While some communities have benefited from Biden’s policies, many Venezuelans consider themselves part of the Latino community and have argued that the Biden administration is giving preferential treatment to asylum seekers and failing to carefully vet people entering the country. They said lax oversight allowed criminals, including members of a Venezuelan gang known as Torren de Aragua, to enter the United States. They also wanted Biden to take a stronger stance against Maduro. In 2024, Venezuelan-American voters gave Trump an easy victory in Miami-Dade County.
That loyalty has wavered since Trump returned to the White House. His administration has targeted Venezuelans with some of its most dramatic and punitive operations. In February, the federal government transported more than 230 Venezuelans to a high-security prison in El Salvador, where the men said they were beaten and assaulted. The regime branded them “the worst of the worst.”
My colleagues discovered that the U.S. government knew that the vast majority had not been convicted of any crime here. Of the 32 men convicted, only six were convicted of violent crimes, according to independent data. In response to the report, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin offered no evidence and claimed that the deportees were “terrorists, human rights violators, gang members, etc., who just don’t have rap sheets in the United States.”
At the same time, the Trump administration is trying to end legal protections for families like Ineska’s. White House press secretary Caroline Levitt said in April that Temporary Protected Status was “supposed to be used only in cases of war, storms, and destruction in an immigrant’s home country. It has been completely abused.”
“It’s like standing on a rug that has been pulled from underneath you,” Ineska told me during one of our many kitchen conversations. For Venezuelan families like hers, the idea of ”temporary relief” feels disconnected from reality. They have followed the rules and envisioned a future for their children. It is a painful contradiction to say that their safety has an expiration date when their home country remains in the same crisis from which they fled and is now in the crosshairs of the U.S. military.
Venezuelans I spoke to, including Inesca and Eduardo, said migrants who break the law should be punished, but those who follow the rules should be given the chance to stay. And in the face of regime repression, many still support President Trump’s tough stance against Maduro because they see a glimmer of hope that Venezuela may finally be moving toward a brighter future, one that Venezuelans around the world, including myself, dream of. But for the people of Doral with temporary status, the future is bleak. We see the effects of that every day. The restaurant is quiet. More rental apartments are listed. The energy that once defined this community is not the same.
I’m now an American citizen, and this milestone feels bittersweet as I watch my friends pack up for opportunities abroad. Few plan to return to Venezuela.
As the regime’s hostility loomed large for people like Ineska and her family, they feared they too would have to pack their bags. My new film, “Status: Venezuelans,” follows these men as they struggle to decide between fear and hope, whether to fight for the life they have built or leave it all behind.
