Venezuelan migrants in the US continue to face the threat of removal after the ousting of President Nicolás Maduro as the Trump administration stands by its hardline detention and deportation agenda.
US forces’ arrest of Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores won’t stop Donald Trump’s administration from forging ahead with its ongoing campaign to strip legal protections and remove several hundred thousand Venezuelans who fled instability in their home country for the US, law professors and immigration attorneys say.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has already pledged to stay the course on eliminating deportation protections for Venezuelans in the US, saying Venezuela is “more free than it was yesterday.”
But the country’s political upheaval is poised to come up in asylum cases and federal litigation over Temporary Protected Status and humanitarian parole for Venezuelans, lawyers and scholars said.
Venezuelans who entered the US after fleeing Maduro’s regime secured those deportation protections—expanded under former President Joe Biden—that are now under assault by Trump officials.
“It seems like the emerging administration line is that with Maduro gone, Venezuelans should go home because their country will be better off,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the US Immigration Policy Program at Migration Policy Institute.
Temporary Protections
About 600,000 Venezuelans were covered at the beginning of the Trump administration by Temporary Protected Status, a program that allows immigrants to stay in the US for 18 months with work authorization when circumstances like armed conflict or public health crises make it unsafe to return to their home country.
More than 200,000 were paroled into the US using an app called CBP One at the border, while another 117,000 came to the US through a parole program for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela designed by the Biden administration to relieve pressure at the border. Some immigrants may be covered by both parole and TPS, making estimates of the Venezuelan population difficult.
Multiple lawsuits have challenged Trump administration efforts to terminate TPS protections, including several aiming to block removal of protections for Venezuelans. Although the Department of Homeland Security has claimed conditions including armed conflict improved enough to justify terminating TPS for 11 countries, it’s also leaned heavily on “national interest” justifications for removing immigrants. Multiple legal challenges have argued those decisions on the program have been motivated by racial animus.
“TPS holders who are here fled that country for a mix of political and social and economic reasons. There’s nothing that’s happened recently that suggests things are going to improve,” UCLA Law professor Ahilan Arulanantham said, referring to Venezuela. “The country remains unsafe. If anything, it’s more obvious now.”
Although a San Francisco federal court judge granted summary judgment to plaintiffs in a suit over Venezuela TPS protections and an appeals court ruled they were likely to succeed, US Supreme Court justices in October let DHS move ahead with stripping those benefits while litigation continues.
That case is scheduled to go back in front of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit next week. Arulanantham, counsel for plaintiffs in the suit, said he expects Maduro’s seizure by US forces to be raised by judges at the hearing.
Venezuelan immigrants and others lost a separate bid to preserve short-term parole protections in September when a federal appeals court in Boston overturned a lower court’s decision blocking termination of parole grants for half a million people under Biden’s program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.
Noem said Venezuelans could apply for “refugee status” in the US, an apparent reference to asylum claims filed by thousands from the country.
Seeking Asylum
Venezuelans previously with TPS status face an uphill battle to winning an asylum case, including statutory limits and a backlogged immigration court system, said Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, practice and policy counsel at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
US immigration law typically requires migrants to apply for asylum within a year of arriving in the US, potentially leaving ineligible those who have had TPS for several years, Dojaquez-Torres said.
Roughly a third of the 117,000 Venezuelans enrolled in the multi-country parole program under Biden had applied for asylum as of March 2025, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services data released in court filings.
USCIS spokesman Matthew Tragesser said Monday that the administration “will continue to process asylum and refugee requests in accordance with existing law and official policy updates.”
This comes as the second Trump administration has reshaped the Justice Department’s immigration courts, firing dozens of judges last year and launching a recruiting campaign for “deportation” judges.
DOJ has committed to quickly resolving the backlog of cases heard by these judges, who are DOJ employees and not housed within an independent court system. The number of denials of asylum without a hearing has increased since the start of Trump’s second term, from 50 in January 2025 to more than 1,200 in November, according to data from the nonprofit Mobile Pathways.
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