The Supreme Court just opened the door for the Trump administration to revoke Temporary Protected Status for thousands of Venezuelans living in the U.S. It’s a legal decision with devastating real-world consequences — one that places countless lives in danger. Deportation, in many cases, will not mean a return to stability. It will mean being sent back to a country ruled by a dictatorship, or to detention in Salvadoran prisons under new regional migration arrangements.
This makes the bipartisan bill introduced last week by Reps. María Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), Darren Soto (D-Fla.), and Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) all the more urgent. Their proposal to redesignate protected status for Venezuela isn’t just a humane gesture — it is a lifeline, and a much-needed corrective to a policy shift that threatens to dismantle the protections that hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have relied on for years.
Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans was originally granted during the Biden administration in recognition of the dire circumstances they were fleeing. But the return of President Trump has brought a hardline stance. Hundreds of Venezuelans have been deported in recent months, many without due process. Most have no criminal records, no ties to gangs, and no realistic pathway to safety. Deportation, for many, is a sentence to further trauma, persecution, or even death.
It’s worth asking why these protections were granted in the first place. Venezuelans are not merely fleeing poverty or economic collapse. They are fleeing a dictatorship.
Under Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan state has systematically dismantled every democratic institution, including free elections, independent courts, and press freedom. Much of the political opposition has been jailed or exiled. In the 2024 election — only the latest example of this — the regime stalled the vote, manipulated the process, and has yet to publish credible results. The consensus belief worldwide is that the opposition candidate won but that the result was fabricated to the contrary.
Yet even after two decades of authoritarianism and the largest refugee crisis in the hemisphere, some voices continue to claim that U.S. sanctions — not the regime — are the primary cause of the exodus. This narrative, often backed by questionable empirical methods, is not only misleading; it’s dangerous.
Reducing Venezuela’s crisis to mere economics erases the lived reality of millions. It provides cover for those who argue that Temporary Protected Status should be revoked because this is just another wave of economic migrants. Worse, it lends credence to a damaging and false narrative that Venezuelans are criminals — people fleeing poverty who then commit crimes in the U.S. — rather than refugees escaping a repressive regime, seeking dignity and safety. This mischaracterization is not only inaccurate but also undermines U.S. moral leadership.
In recent research I conducted, we tested the supposed link between sanctions and migration by examining whether fluctuations in Venezuela’s oil revenues — a proxy for sanctions pressure — predicted migration flows. What we found was striking: more Venezuelans fled not when oil revenues fell, but when they rose. In other words, when the regime had more money to entrench itself and expand repression, hopelessness deepened — and more people fled. Even the most conservative reading of the data finds no evidence that sanctions caused the exodus.
And yet, critics — some of whom inadvertently echo the regime’s own talking points — continue to argue that the crisis is merely economic. They’re wrong. And by repeating that myth, they are helping justify the very policy shifts now putting lives at risk.
Maduro didn’t just bankrupt Venezuela. He stole its future. He took not only the people’s money, but their freedom.
Venezuelans in the United States are not economic migrants — they are refugees from a brutal dictatorship. Temporary Protected Status is not charity. It is the bare minimum a country that claims to be a beacon of liberty should offer to those fleeing persecution.
Congress has the chance — and now, the responsibility — to act.
Dany Bahar is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and an associate professor at Brown University.