He regularly characterized them as criminals, gang members, terrorists and undesirables during his campaign and first months in office and deported hundreds of them to a much-deplored prison in El Salvador. But in the aftermath of a U.S. military raid that deposed Venezuela’s head of state, President Donald Trump seems to have recovered at least a modicum of empathy for the plight of average Venezuelans.

With ousted president Nicholás Maduro jailed in New York and broad uncertainty opening up in Caracas, Mr. Trump has assured Venezuelans that U.S. authorities will run the country. He promised that its vast oil wealth would be put to use on behalf of the Venezuelan people—and whichever U.S. oil conglomerate assumes the job of rebuilding the nation’s petroleum infrastructure.

“We’re gonna cherish a country,” Mr. Trump told reporters the day after the U.S. assault on Caracas. “We’re going to take care of, more importantly, of the people, including Venezuelans that are living in our country that were forced to leave their country, and they’re going to be taken very good care of.”

But that newfound concern has not translated into a reversal of Trump administration decisions last year to terminate Biden-era temporary protected status for Venezuelans already in the United States. Formerly protected Venezuelan residents now face the difficult choice of “self-deporting” back to their troubled homeland or figuring out how to evade the Department of Homeland Security’s expanding dragnet for immigrants bereft of legal standing.

The Venezuela crisis

Years of repression, government corruption and economic decline in Venezuela have produced one of the world’s largest migration crises. More than eight million have fled the country. According to the Migration Policy Institute, more than 764,000 Venezuelans managed to reach the United States, where two Biden administration orders in 2021 and 2023 provided temporary protection from deportation back to Venezuela for as many as 600,000.

That is, they did until last February and September, when D.H.S. Secretary Kristi Noem judged that conditions in Venezuela had so improved that temporary protected status for Venezuelans could no longer be justified. Many disagree with that assessment.

Responding to questions from America, Donald Kerwin, vice president for advocacy, research and partnerships at Jesuit Refugee Service USA, said in an email: “It would be difficult to imagine a more uncertain and combustible situation than the one that would likely greet deported Venezuelans” should they be returned to Venezuela.

He suggests that Ms. Noem should reverse her orders and extend T.P.S. to all Venezuelans who were residing in the United States as of Jan. 3, the date of the U.S. military intervention.

Contrary to a recent statement from Ms. Noem on Fox News, it is not true that Venezuelans in the United States can apply for refugee status under current D.H.S. guidelines, he said. “In addition,” Mr. Kerwin said, “the administration has placed a hold on adjudication of affirmative asylum applications and has been deporting asylum seekers, foreclosing this possibility for Venezuelans as well.”

Don’t cancel, extend T.P.S.

Kevin Appleby is senior fellow for policy and communications at the Center for Migration Studies in New York. Even before the latest turmoil, Mr. Appleby said, there was no basis for believing that Venezuelans could expect a safe homecoming. “T.P.S. should be extended until there is a democratically elected government in Venezuela, and Venezuela has been stabilized politically,” he argued. “Full stop.”

Now the Trump administration, “predictably, is going to say, and has already said, that Venezuelans should return ‘because we’ve removed Maduro.’ But they haven’t removed his regime or many of the henchmen in his regime, which is still operating.”

“You have to remove the whole cancer before it’s safe to return and they haven’t done that,” Mr. Appleby said. “In fact, they’ve created perhaps more political instability and confusion because of what happened.” He worries a backlash is brewing that could mean Venezuela’s new president Delcy Rodríguez makes an even stronger show of suppressing dissent to provide bona fides to loyalists among the Chavismo socialist movement Mr. Maduro had helped perpetuate.

And beyond the political instability and fear of renewed oppression, Venezuelans are being encouraged or compelled to return to an economy that is in tatters after years of U.S. sanctions and corruption-driven decline. But that is only part of the reason Mr. Appleby perceives repatriation as a much poorer alternative to a T.P.S. extension.

Venezuelans in the United States are the source of a remittance stream back to Venezuela that is supporting family members left behind. Were that financial support cut off, the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela would deteriorate further, according to Mr. Appleby. That in turn could propel even more migration out of Venezuela—which the Trump White House presumably seeks to extinguish.

“If there’s going to be a transition to a democratically elected government [in Venezuela], it’s going to take time, and then to economically develop the country in a way where people can live in dignity, that’s going to take time as well,” Mr. Appleby said.

“The smart move would be to extend T.P.S. and allow Venezuelans to work in this country, send back money and keep the pressure off…the country for the time being. And then at some point in the future, when the country is on more stable ground, then perhaps people can return.”

While all immigrants who have abruptly lost T.P.S. face the same tough decisions and consequences, for Venezuelans the contradictions and ironies are particularly sharp. The recent incursion in Caracas has made already unpredictable conditions in Venezuela even more chaotic.

“Something like the U.S. intervening in a country in a [military] strike and removing the president or the head of the country is not going to transform the country into a success story overnight,” Mr. Appleby said. “In fact, it creates more chaos, at least in the short term, and that’s what T.P.S. was created for: to prevent people from being sent back to chaos, to possible persecution.”

Just days after U.S. forces stormed his redoubt on a military base to arrest and remove Mr. Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, the remaining actors within the Maduro circle, several with particularly nasty reputations for ruthlessness, were rounding up citizens and journalists perceived to be too celebratory of Mr. Maduro’s unscheduled trip to New York.

Mr. Trump has claimed that the United States will be managing Venezuela’s affairs, but on the streets of Caracas the dreaded colectivos, roaming bands of die-hard Chavista loyalists willing to do violence against fellow citizens among the opposition, have been engaging in displays of force and intimidation.

Driven underground

Venezuelans facing the loss of protected status are unfortunately in good company. In recent months, Ms. Noem has lifted protective status or declined to extend it for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who had previously been able to legally work and live freely in the United States. Many thousands of them have done so long enough to start building U.S.-rooted families of their own.

Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, more than 1.5 million immigrants have lost or have been scheduled to lose their protected status in a vast revision that immigration experts have termed unprecedented. Though they did not call out the program directly in a “special message” released in November that proved deeply critical of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, the U.S. bishops noted: “We lament that some immigrants in the United States have arbitrarily lost their legal status.”

Though federal court orders have restored T.P.S. for South Sudanese and Syrian immigrants, T.P.S. holders from a number of other deeply troubled nations lost their status following Secretary Noem’s reviews.

“Most of the ones that most need it, like [formerly protected immigrant-residents] from Afghanistan, Haiti, Venezuela, Honduras—those have been revoked,” Mr. Appleby said. He added that the status has been terminated not because conditions have stabilized in the home nations of many T.P.S. holders but because of “an ideology that they shouldn’t be here based on who they are and what they look like.”

“There’s a reason that T.P.S. was extended to certain countries,” Mr. Appleby said. “There are countries that are unstable. There are countries that are dangerous. There are countries that are incredibly poor. And those countries aren’t transformed overnight.” He holds up Haiti as one example as “a very dangerous country now, one of the poorest countries in the world.” T.P.S. was revoked for Haitian residents on Nov. 28.

Haitian residents have until Feb. 3 to get their affairs in order and depart from the United States. That will mean returning the formerly protected immigrants, many of whom have been living and working for years in the United States, to Haiti’s dangerous conditions and it will mean cutting off a substantial remittance flow that had helped families in Haiti survive.

When a U.S. immigrant-resident previously protected by a T.P.S. decree loses that status, they can no longer work legally in the United States and become subject to deportation.

If they decline to accept the administration’s preferred option of self-deportation, they have to move into a kind of underground life in America, Mr. Appleby said, working off the books and avoiding encounters with government, police, and of course ICE and Border Patrol agents. Many who have lived for years in the United States, had children here and established households will have little choice but to choose that precarious option, he believes.

Imagine yourself the head of one of those mixed-status families, he suggested, “‘Would you pull your children out of the U.S. and go back to a country where you don’t have ties anymore?”

“No, you take your chances; you roll the dice, go underground and hope that you’re not deported.”

More from America

A deeper dive

The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week. For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches. This week, a report from Caracas as the U.S. incursion begins and Venezuelans awaken to new uncertainty; In Ireland a struggle to deal with homelessness continues.

Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).