Laura doesn’t like to talk about crossing borders.
She sheds tears and it’s hard for her to speak. She apologises for getting emotional when she recites the first English words she hears in Arizona after running through the desert.
“(expand) you, you, illegal. This is America (expandive), you,” said the border patrol agent.
At the time, she didn’t know much English. Now she considers her to be “my god.”
“The person that is being taken care of, can you guarantee safety, provide security, treat you that way? He doesn’t know where I came from. He says what to me I don’t know if that happened,” Laura said.
Laura (resident of the Florida Panhandle, whose name was changed because she feared us from immigration and customs enforcement) is a recipient of Venezuela’s Temporary Protection Status (TPS).
She has a work visa. She has a driver’s license. She holds an engineering degree and works at a local hospital.
But since the Trump administration abolished the TPS for all Venezuelans in the US, Laura has been evaluating her options.
She knows she can’t go back.
If so, Laura, who has been involved in politics and publicly condemned government corruption, is the risk of being put in prison, or even worse.
In Venezuela, she was criticising the government outside on social media and radio during the rolling blackout and the lack of propane.
She showed USA Today Network-Florida a photo she took with Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, as well as a photo of herself protesting on the streets.
One day in 2021, a man came to her apartment looking for her. Were they members of the government or gang? Sometimes they are the same, she said.
Her neighbor called her and told her she couldn’t come back.
There she walked to Colombia, got her Colombian documents, then flew to Mexico to cross the border.
“Not all Venezuelans came here and took it to kill them,” Laura said. “We came here, we brought our purpose and projects, and the idea is to rise and grow to treat this country like this country.”
DeSantis says Trump made the “right decision” on TPS
On his ninth day, the Trump administration abolished the temporary protected status of Venezuelans in the United States, effectively leaving hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in Limbo.
President Joe Biden, secretary to the US Department of Homeland Security, has withdrawn immigration protections for around 600,000 Venezuelans and will allow TPS recipients to remain in the United States until 2026. The extension submitted has been suspended.
Currently, about half of Venezuelans whose TPS was extended in 2023 have expired on April 2nd this year.
For other Venezuelans who received the TPS in 2021, their designation expires on September 10th, and NOEMs must extend the TPS until July 12th.
“We follow this process and evaluate all these individuals in our country, including the Venezuelans here,” Noem said in Fox News.
For years, Venezuela has been plagued by social unrest and economic collapse. In January, Nicolas Maduro was sworn in for his third term, but the results of last summer’s elections are being contested by other foreign governments, including the United States, Argentina, Costa Rica, Peru and Chile.
Over 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country, most have moved to neighbouring Peru and Colombia, but many have also trekked to the United States.
Adelis Ferro, co-founder and executive director of the Venezuelan-American Caucus, said there are around 200,000 Venezuelans in Florida.
Miami, Doral, Weston and Orlando are just a few Florida cities where many TPS holders live, go to school and own homes.
“We’re not surprised, but it doesn’t make it so painful, discouraged or shocking in our community. We were the target of the entire presidential election,” Ferro said. .
“Every time, every time the topic of immigration appeared at every assembly, he said, ‘Venezuelan,'” Ferro added.
However, the move surprised Donald Trump’s Latino supporters. Ferro said that after the TPS was abolished, many Venezuelans felt betrayed by Trump, particularly the naturalized citizens who voted for him.
“They realize that it doesn’t matter what your status is,” she said. “If you are not a resident with a green card, if you are not an immigrant with some kind of work visa or something, they will try to separate your status from you.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has pushed a strict immigration enforcement bill to support Trump’s U.S. expels claims that South Florida Venezuellis are critical of his immigration agenda I did.
“I’m going there. These guys are high fives. “It’s the whole idea that people who are somehow first generation don’t want to see immigration enforcement, and that’s not the case at all. there is no.”
Throughout his six years as Governor of Desantis, he continues to promote a tough agenda for immigration. Using news time to comment on the federal response to the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border and the federal response to driving policies, Florida illegally immigrants in the country It has become one of the most unwelcome environments for us.
Recently, DeSantis defended the Trump administration’s abolition of TPS at a recent press conference in South Florida.
“We want the Fed to help them with how they want to solve that,” DeSantis said in Palm Beach County. “The granting of TPS was not legal. Let’s be honest when Biden does that. So I think what the Trump administration is doing is consistent with what the law is. They I think you’re making the right decision.”
The DeSantis administration recently took coordinated actions between Florida’s Highway Patrol and the ice to the trumpet, allegedly ending in the detention of gang members at Trende Lagua in Tallahassee.
However, officials have not answered questions about how many people are being detained and how they know how they are members of the gang. The gang’s name was also wrong in the post.
Ferro said it is no longer safe in Florida, whether or not the immigrants have a criminal history. “We want people to know exactly that we are not welcome in Florida because we push, push and push immigrants in many ways.” She said.
As of December 2024, Miami-Dade County had the most P-tax cases in immigration courts, according to the Transaction Record Access Clearinghouse, which includes a database of immigration data. The number of Venezuelans involved in deportation in Florida was around 46,000.
What will happen to TPS recipients in April?
Laura can’t remember how long it took her to run through the desert. She remembers that it was dark when they started and dark when they reached their destination. She paid a $6,500 coyote to take her across the border.
They had guns, she said, and if one of them is late, they’ll say that if they get caught they’ll kill them all. The boy, who was traveling with his mother and siblings, couldn’t keep up, she said. He had asthma and could not breathe.
Laura also has asthma. There she shared her inhaler with him and they ran together.
When they were detained on border patrols, they took their belongings, including their jackets. In the fenced area outside, they waited overnight. The wall television said it was -8 degrees Celsius or about 17 degrees Fahrenheit.
The little boy said his chest hurt and he had difficulty breathing, so the adults were in circles and crowded together, keeping the kids in the middle for warmth.
Laura wears a star and gold necklace with David Charm. It is a sign of protection, she said, reminding him that God is taking care of her.
She doesn’t know what will happen to her in April.
In Venezuela, she was a political activist. But even in Venezuela you have to stay quiet. You need to support the government. Even if you don’t have access to water or healthcare, you have to say that everything will be fine.
“If they deport me, I can start again somewhere else,” she said. “But what will happen to me if they expel me to Venezuela?”
USA Today Network’s State Watchdog Reporter AnaGoñi-Lessan-Florida can visit agonilessan@gannett.com.
