many are worried the action will further destabilize their home country<\/a>. Rather than making their potential return safer, many Venezuelans, like Perez, fear the conditions will worsen \u2014 deepening their need for protections to remain in the United States.<\/p>\n\u201cThere are many mixed feelings right now,\u201d Ana Gil Garcia of the Illinois Venezuelan Alliance said in Spanish. \u201cWe have many people waiting for their situation regarding TPS to be clarified, and also for their asylum cases to be resolved.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gil Garcia fears that Venezuelans won\u2019t be granted any legal pathways to stay in the United States because the Trump administration believes that by removing Maduro, \u201cthings in Venezuela have supposedly been resolved, when the opposite is true,\u201d she said. \u201cNow there is more fear than ever because no one knows how the country will act or how ordinary citizens will find peace.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perez, who was planning to leave Chicago on Wednesday, said he realized in recent months that it would be difficult for him to live a normal life after he lost his TPS.<\/p>\n
After seeing all the immigration arrests happening in Little Village this fall and how hard it was for people to make a case in court, Perez said he knew he could get arrested and deported at any time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was living under a lot of uncertainty and fear,\u201d Perez said.<\/p>\n
And while he said many Venezuelans are celebrating Maduro\u2019s capture, the same \u201ccriminal\u201d political infrastructure is still in power in Venezuela. So that uncertainty about his future has only grown since the United States captured Maduro.<\/p>\n
\u201cGiven the instability created by President Trump\u2019s reckless and illegal military action in Venezuela, Mayor Johnson renews the call for Temporary Protected Status and the opportunity to apply for asylum for the Venezuelan migrant community navigating the uncertainty caused by the Trump administration,\u201d Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a statement this week.<\/p>\n
Asked about a similar plea by Miami\u2019s mayor, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a Fox News appearance that immigrants who had TPS could apply for refugee status. But the law says that only those who are currently abroad are eligible to apply.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe need to make sure that our programs actually mean something and that we are following the law,\u201d Noem said.<\/p>\n
The Department of Homeland Security added in an X post that \u201cPresident Trump is bringing stability to Venezuela.<\/p>\n
\u201cSecretary Noem ended Temporary Protected Status for more than 500,000 Venezuelans and now they can go home to a country that they love.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Mauricio Tenorio, a history professor at the University of Chicago, disagrees. He said there are only a few examples of U.S. military intervention in Latin America that had even debatable success, whether measured by the furtherance of American political interests or the population\u2019s well-being. The vast majority of interventions have proven to be \u201ctotal failures\u201d that did not stabilize countries, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy and large, most of it is not even debatable, it\u2019s a mess,\u201d Tenorio said.<\/p>\n
In this case, the Trump administration\u2019s \u201cincoherence\u201d in explaining its actions in Venezuela and its lack of a plan for what comes next means there will be no progress in Venezuela that would allow people to return, Tenorio said. Meanwhile, there appears to be no willingness to grant Venezuelan immigrants increased access to asylum or protected status.<\/p>\n
That leaves Venezuelan nationals, whether they live there or are seeking asylum here in the United States in a difficult position.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn terms of the terrible human crisis that Venezuela has been in for the last 15 years, this means absolutely nothing,\u201d Tenorio said of the U.S. raid, saying it represented Trump showing off militarily rather than any substantive change. \u201cThe administration is not even calling for the freedom of political prisoners. It\u2019s not calling for anything else. It\u2019s the same, but without Maduro.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat they\u2019re going to produce is more immigration,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s stupidity and lack of human sense and total ignorance of history.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jose Perez, a Venezuelan attorney who arrived in Chicago in 2019, had been contemplating going back to his…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":499090,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,5386,1818],"class_list":{"0":"post-499089","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-illinois"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115854299942090902","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499089\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}