Homeland Security rescinds immigration protections for Venezuelans, despite past support

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem on Wednesday canceled the Biden administration’s 18-month extension of humanitarian protection for Venezuelans, saying she did not want her predecessor’s policy to “tie our hands.”

Days before leaving office, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said up to 600,000 Venezuelan immigrants may remain in the United States through October 2026, citing the economic and political crisis in the South American country. He had granted them protection in 2021 and 2023.

Noem indicated that she would make her own decision on the matter.

“They were going to be able to stay here and violate our laws for another 18 months, and we stopped that,” she said on “Fox & Friends.” She said she would evaluate the program to determine if it merited an extension.

If she does nothing by Saturday, protections for some Venezuelans would automatically extend until October, but they could ultimately end for all this year.

Noem argued in an eight-page memo that she should have made the decision, not Mayorkas, because the protections expire under Trump.

Venezuelans are by far the largest group protected from deportation under a 1990 law that authorizes DHS to award undocumented immigrants “temporary protected status” if their countries are experiencing war, disaster or another crisis.

The status allows immigrants to live and work in the United States for up to 18 months. DHS may renew it, though critics have long complained that the protections often last long after the emergencies have subsided.

Noem emphasized Wednesday on television and social media that she was focused on deporting criminal gang members, though they are ineligible for protection under the program, calling them “dirtbags.”

Her tone was a sharp departure from the first Trump administration, when the president and other Republicans called for clemency for millions of Venezuelan immigrants who have fled that country over the past decade.

In one of the last acts of his first term, Trump spared undocumented immigrants from Venezuela from being deported, in a signed presidential proclamation that declared the country’s situation “catastrophic.” He said millions had been forced to flee amid shortages of food and medicine.

But at the White House on Wednesday, Trump portrayed Venezuelans and other immigrants as dangerous. Without evidence, he repeated a claim that Venezuela had emptied its prisons and dispatched criminals to the United States under Biden.

Trump vowed to detain and deport them at a bill-signing ceremony for the Laken Riley Act, named for a Georgia nursing student murdered last year by a Venezuelan asylum seeker with a criminal history in the United States. The law expands mandatory immigration detention for noncitizens arrested for theft-related crimes, since her killer had been picked up for shoplifting but never detained for removal.

Noem attended the signing ceremony.

“Instead of being deported as he should have been, he was released into the United States,” Trump said of Jose Ibarra, who entered the country illegally in 2022 and had an asylum claim pending, according to a congressional report.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio led a years-long effort to grant Venezuelans temporary protected status and he called for an extension in 2022 under Biden, saying in a letter that deporting Venezuelans threatens them with a “very real death sentence.”

Rubio and the White House did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

Mayorkas granted protections to Venezuelans in March 2021 and again to more recent arrivals in July 2023. He consolidated protections for both groups on Jan. 10, granting them work permits into October 2026.

After Noem rescinded that order Wednesday, the protections now expire in April for those who applied after the 2023 designation and in September for those who applied in 2021 and were later extended.

Liskart Yepes, 30, a paralegal from Venezuela who applied in 2023, said she is frightened by the possibility of losing her temporary legal status in the coming weeks. She is applying for legal residency through her U.S. citizen husband. Since crossing the southern border, she has married and created a business in South Carolina.

Yepes financially supports her mother, father and a niece who fled to Colombia. She said they cannot return to Venezuela, calling conditions in that country “a thousand times worse.”

To apply for temporary protected status, immigrants must pay a fee and pass background checks. Criminals are ineligible, and the protection can be revoked if they commit offenses.

The House committee that investigated Ibarra did not report that he had any kind of temporary protection, according to the report. He was convicted of killing Riley last year and sentenced to life in prison.

During his first term, Trump attempted to terminate TPS for people from Haiti, El Salvador and other countries, calling them “s---hole” nations, but advocates successfully blocked him in court, arguing he had failed to consider the conditions in those countries and was motivated by racism, which he denied.

Ahilan Arulanantham, a University of California Los Angeles law professor who led the lawsuit that halted the terminations under the last administration, said they are reviewing Noem’s directive for possible litigation.