Venezuelan-Americans who backed Trump now "shocked" by deportations

Why some thought their Venezuelan relations would be spared.

My colleague Greg Allen has a story on NPR this morning from the Venezuelan-American community in Florida. Trump won the state in 2024, and even flipped a big, urban, diverse, traditionally Democratic county: Trump “won the vote in Miami-Dade County, helped largely by Hispanics, including Venezuelan-Americans.”

Now the administration has issued a draft rule to end temporary protected status, or TPS, for “more than 300,000 Venezuelans in early April.” These are among half a million people who have fled Venezuela’s political chaos and repression over the years.

Greg quotes Adelys Ferro, a local activist, who feels “shocked.” Ferro’s words:

Beyond betrayed. They used us. During the campaign, the elected officials from the Republican party, they actually told us that he was not going to touch the documented people. They said, “No, it is with undocumented people.”

In other words, people with temporary protected status thought they had a pass. After all, the word “protected” is right there in the name.

It’s not clear from Greg’s story which Republicans the Miami-Dade voters were listening to. The fact is, some people in the Trump campaign made clear before the election that they did not consider people with TPS to have legal status. They took the position that the TPS program itself was illegal.

Vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance made an issue out of Haitians with TPS in Springfield, Ohio during the campaign. When reminded that the Haitians had permission to be in the United States, Vance kept right on saying they did not: "Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says, these people are now here legally, I'm still going to call them an illegal alien."

Kristi Noem, the new secretary of homeland security, has justified ending TPS by repeating a baseless claim about other nations emptying their prisons and “mental health facilities” to send people to the U.S. This is also no surprise, as Trump repeated this story many times while campaigning. His campaign never documented the claim, but now his administration plans to act as if it was true.

Our reporting throughout the campaign made it clear that in 2024, many Americans were voting for a choose-your-own adventure Trump. He had made an enormous variety of statements on every topic, many of them vague enough to leave uncertainty about exactly how he would execute on his priorities. Immigration was the ultimate example: Yes, he promised a mass deportation, but how sweeping would it really be? People tended to answer that question as they preferred.

Even when Trump did make explicit promises, people tended not to take him seriously if the promise made them uncomfortable. Many also assumed that constitutional checks and balances would shave off the parts of his agenda they disliked.

In 2025, it’s Trump who is choosing the adventure. The courts and Congress have only begun to respond. People are finding out what they voted for.

On some issues, it’s a surprise. Trump’s constant focus on territorial expansion, for example, has emerged since the election. For TPS it would be hard to say the same.

It’s also true that the administration’s rule for ejecting Venezuelans has not yet been published. What the administration says it will do is not always a reliable guide for what it will do. The U.S. is negotiating with Venezuela, which would have to receive the people deported. Greg Allen reports that a Republican congressman representing Florida says he is hoping people with TPS status can be “granted asylum on a case-by-case basis.” It’s hard to say where the battle ends—except that hundreds of thousands of people face deep uncertainty now.