Fort Worth, Texas – The toughest part of Ana Maria Fores Tamayo’s job is seeing the trauma etched into the faces of the refugees she helps. That trauma was clear when she and her husband travelled to Aurora, Colorado, last year to meet with Venezuelans living in the United States.
“Everyone’s afraid,” said Tamayo, 69, who leads the Refugee Support Network. Among other services, her organisation helps foreign nationals apply for programmes like temporary protected status (TPS) and humanitarian parole — two categories that allow a temporary but legal stay in the US.
“They were leaving because things were terrible there,” she said of the people she met in Colorado. “Most of them did not talk too much about it except to say that this was the chance for them to live here legally.”
TPS is a designation created by the US government in 1990 to shield foreign nationals already in the country from deportation to countries designated unsafe to return to. Humanitarian parole, meanwhile, allows people to enter the US temporarily, on the basis that they have an urgent humanitarian need.
But both categories have come under scrutiny during the second administration of US President Donald Trump.
Trump has pushed to limit immigration into the US, including by closing legal pathways like TPS and humanitarian parole.
In February, Trump announced that nearly 300,000 Venezuelans would be stripped of their TPS in early April. Then, in late March, his government announced plans to terminate humanitarian parole for approximately 530,000 Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Cubans and Haitians, effective Thursday.
But both efforts have faced legal challenges. In March, a US federal judge blocked the revocation of TPS, saying the Trump administration’s characterisation of the migrants as criminals “smacks of racism”. And on April 10, a different federal judge also issued a temporary order barring the elimination of the humanitarian parole programme.
Tamayo’s husband, Andres Pacheco, 64, told Al Jazeera that until now, TPS was a “relatively easy process” compared with asylum claims, but he worries that such temporary programmes may soon no longer be an option.
“The only problem with TPS is that it only goes up to 18 months,” said Pacheco, who runs a legal aid nonprofit for immigrants in Texas. “So these are people who live in a state of uncertainty.”
‘A warzone’ in Colorado
Despite studies consistently showing that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens, Trump cast migrant crime as a central point of his presidential campaign in 2024.
Trump also echoed unproven claims about Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang during campaign rallies, including at an October stop in Aurora, Colorado, where such fears had emerged. He went on to call the city a “warzone” and used the issue to attack Democrats and stoke voter fears, warning that “migrant criminals” would “rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill the people of the United States of America”.
“Do you see what they’re doing in Colorado? They’re taking over,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania. He added, without providing evidence: “They’re taking over real estate. They become real estate developers from Venezuela. They have equipment that our military doesn’t have.”
In the months that followed, Tamayo and Pacheco watched as Trump repeatedly spoke out against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro while, at the same time, describing Venezuelan immigrants as criminals. That portrait didn’t align with what Tamayo saw from the dozens of people they met in Aurora.
“Their country had completely collapsed, and so they had no medicines, no food, no anything. And so they just had to leave.”
Despite Trump’s criticisms, many Venezuelans living in the US voted for the president.
Immigration advocates fear the court orders blocking the dissolution of programmes like TPS and humanitarian parole for Venezuelans are only temporary barriers for the Trump administration. They say that leaves hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans living legally in the US grappling with uncertainty about their futures.
Other presidential actions have also compounded those fears. In March, the US flew more than 200 immigrants – alleged members of Tren de Aragua – to be imprisoned in El Salvador after Trump controversially invoked wartime legislation to expel them.
Luis, a Venezuelan-American Trump voter living in Dallas, told Al Jazeera he “never thought” Trump would target relief programmes that keep more than half a million Venezuelans – including some of his loved ones – safe from deportation. He asked to use only his first name for fear of retribution against his family.
“[Trump has] admitted Venezuela is not safe, and I understand he doesn’t want criminals,” said the 34-year-old. “But why does he want to get rid of honest, hardworking people? What does he want to send us back to?”
Second attempt
This is not the first time Trump has tried to end programmes like TPS.
During his first term, the president tried to strip TPS from people from El Salvador, Haiti and other nations he infamously dubbed “s***hole countries”.
Advocacy groups blocked him with lawsuits, and Marco Rubio, then a US senator and now Trump’s secretary of state, cosponsored the Venezuela TPS Act, which pushed to extend the protected status to citizens of the South American nation. Rubio also personally lobbied for Venezuelans in a letter to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
However, this year, Rubio took a new position on the matter.
“Designating Venezuela under TPS does not champion core American interests or put America and American citizens first,” he wrote.
Few other Republicans have spoken up for Venezuelans at risk of losing their legal immigration status.
US Representative Maria Salazar from Miami, Florida, called on Trump not to “punish” immigrants by revoking their humanitarian parole. Salazar, a fellow Republican, blamed the previous administration of President Joe Biden for creating a “political mess” through his use of the temporary programmes.
More than 70 percent of Salazar’s constituents are Hispanic, and nearly one-fourth are not US citizens.
“They came here fleeing failed communist countries believing in Biden’s empty promises,” Salazar wrote.
Recently, Salazar celebrated the courts blocking Trump’s manoeuvring, even going so far as to say she had “led the fight” to protect TPS. In reality, the fight has been led by groups like the National TPS Alliance, which filed the lawsuit that led to a federal court blocking Trump’s efforts to claw back the temporary status.
‘A blessing for my life’
Jose Palma, a National TPS Alliance coordinator, said he’s counselled hundreds of TPS recipients.
“We have stories of people from Honduras or El Salvador that have been in the United States for the last 25 years,” he said. “They are at risk of losing their immigration status and getting deported, even though they have established their life in the United States.”
Palma is particularly concerned about parents who are TPS beneficiaries and have started families in the US, which makes their children US citizens.
If they are ultimately deported, he said, “their kids will either need to stay in the United States without their parents, or they will be forced to go to another country”.
Liz, a native of El Salvador who is now in her 50s, arrived in the US in 2001 after a devastating earthquake.
Offering only her first name for fear of reprisals, Liz said she has since reapplied for TPS roughly a dozen times, and she calls the programme “a blessing for my life” that has allowed her to build a family and a life in a place she now considers her home.
Some fees have increased, and some documents have become more complicated, but the process has been reliable: You turn in the necessary forms, and as long as your country is on the list, you receive the status.
“TPS is at least one piece of the many we need in order to exercise our rights,” Liz said.
“Even if it’s temporary, it’s created a lot of good for the American public,” she added. “We have TPS holders who are faith leaders. We have TPS holders who are business owners providing employment to US citizens.”
Carmen, a 27-year-old Venezuelan living in Fort Worth, Texas, echoed Liz’s comments, calling TPS “a godsend” that helped her “start a life I didn’t know I would have”.
‘It’s time for you to leave’
Sindy Mata, a 30-year-old community organiser in Fort Worth, has also counselled immigrants who received TPS or humanitarian parole.
She said that, since early this year, many under temporary status received emails from the Department of Homeland Security that began: “It is time for you to leave the United States.”
Part of the administration’s strategy is to encourage immigrants to start “self-deporting”.
But Mata said the Homeland Security Department’s emails were not always having that intended effect.
“I know one person who, when they received the email, their first thought was, ‘Who else got this? Who else in the community needs advice or needs some help?’”
That’s when she worked to connect people with legal representation and organisations like Palma’s that are determined to keep TPS alive.
“It’s a reminder,” she said, “that we need to stand up for each other.”
