The Trump administration, still refusing to give asylum to at least 200,000 Venezuelans who fled their country's dictatorship, now is making the bizarre claim that the United States has been more generous with Venezuelan exiles than have Latin American countries.
Sorry, but it's the opposite: Despite President Trump's justified public criticism of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, few governments in the Western Hemisphere have been as selfish and cruel toward Venezuela's exiles as the Trump administration.
I was incredulous when I read the Aug. 15 interview by el Nuevo Herald's Nora Gamez Torres with Trump's national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, in which he said against all evidence that other countries in the hemisphere should be as generous with Venezuelan refugees as the United State has been.
"If we could get democracy back to Venezuela, you would not have these flows of asylum seekers," O'Brien said. "It cannot just be that if there is a problem in a nation, the answer is to go to the United States. Other great countries in the hemisphere must also be a destination."
Is he kidding? According to a new report from the 34-country Organization of American States, 85% of the 5.2 million Venezuelan migrants and refugees who have left the country in recent years have been allowed to stay in Latin American and Caribbean countries.
The report, "Venezuelan Migration and Refugee Crisis," shows that Colombia has given temporary residency status to most of its 1.8 million Venezuelan emigres, Peru has accepted 900,000 and Chile 455,000. By comparison, the United States _ the world's richest economy _ has received only 422,000 Venezuelans and refuses to give Temporary Protected Status to the large number of them who would qualify for that program. TPS protects migrants from deportation and allows them to apply for work permits.
Last year, the Democratic-majority U.S. House passed a bill to give TPS to an estimated 200,000 Venezuelan exiles. But the Senate's Republican majority did not approve a similar bill sponsored by Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. The Trump administration refused to actively push for TPS for Venezuelans.
Immigration experts tell me that, because of Trump's anti-immigration policies, the United States has been one of the few countries in the hemisphere that has not given temporary legal status to most Venezuelan exiles. What's more, it has detained many and deported some to their country.
Julio Henriquez, a Boston-based immigration attorney and coordinator of the Venezuela-based Foro Penal advocacy group, told me this week that, "More than 1,100 Venezuelans have been detained for long periods of time, in some cases for a year or more, without having ever committed any crime."
Henriquez added that, "More than 300 are still behind bars, risking COVID-19 infection and facing an uncertain future in the labyrinthine immigration system."
In addition, at least 663 Venezuelan exiles were deported from the United States to Venezuela between June 2017 and May 2019. About 800 others are still in the United States with pending deportation orders, according to Foro Penal's data.
And things may get worse for these exiles, because Trump has proposed new measures that would further restrict the numbers of Venezuelan refugees by denying asylum admissions to people entering the country from third nations.
That said, not all of Trump's Venezuela policy has been bad. The president deserves credit for having continued and intensified U.S. sanctions against the Maduro dictatorship that had begun under the Obama administration.
Never mind that, as Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton says in his book, Trump's anti-Maduro actions were just electoral politics to win the votes of Florida's Cuban Americans and Venezuelan Americans in November. And, as Bolton told me in an interview, Trump may yet meet and pose in smiling photos with Maduro _ as he has done with the dictators of Russia, China and North Korea _ after the U.S. election.
But for Trump to deny TPS to Venezuelan exiles is an act of cruelty, aside from being a monumental display of political hypocrisy. If Trump cares so much about Venezuelans, he should treat that country's exiles as generously as much poorer Latin American nations have done.
