As his first term came to an end, Donald Trump shielded most Venezuelans in the United States from deportation, agreeing that the situation in their country was “catastrophic.” A year later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when he was still a Republican senator from Florida — a state with a sizable Venezuelan-American population — agreed that deporting Venezuelans would be a “death sentence.”
During his presidency, Joe Biden came to the same conclusion, extending Temporary Protected Status to nearly 350,000 Venezuelans who are in the U.S. These TPS protections were supposed to remain in place through the fall of 2026.
This week, the Trump administration announced that it’s ending those protections, making the Venezuelans at risk for deportation — despite what the president said in 2021 about the “catastrophic” conditions in the country. NBC News reported on members of the community who understandably labeled the move a betrayal.
‘Betrayed. We feel betrayed. More than betrayed. Beyond betrayed,’ said Adeyls Ferro, executive director of the Venezuelan American Caucus in Doral, Florida, a south Florida suburb dubbed ‘Doralzuela’ for its large Venezuelan population. TPS holders are ‘living a legal life in the United States,’ she said in a news conference on Monday. ‘We are not here because we came as tourists. We are here because we got kicked out from our country because … there is a cruel dictatorship in Venezuela.’
NBC News also spoke to Rafael Struve, communications director for Bienvenido, a conservative Latino group that helped elect Republicans who said the TPS curtailment has him “at a crossroads.” He added that “many Venezuelans” were “very supportive” of Trump’s 2024 candidacy.
Time will tell when, or whether, the administration reconsiders this policy, but as the second Trump administration gets underway, it’s notable just how many constituencies are making similar comments about feeling “betrayed.”
Reuters and The Associated Press recently published reports, for example, on Arab American voters in Michigan who’d backed Trump in November and started feeling dismay soon after. It stands to reason that those concerns have intensified since the Republican announced plans to “own” and “take over” Gaza and relocate Palestinians to other countries. What’s more, in the president’s inaugural address, he told Black voters, “I look forward to working with you in the years to come.” Days later, Trump began an aggressive campaign against civil rights laws and litigation. And then, of course, there’s every voter who thought the Republican would at least try to lower consumer prices and address the price of living, only to discover that it no longer appears to be a top Trump priority. A sense of betrayal, in other words, is likely to become a hallmark of the president’s second term.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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