The Homeland Security Department announced the end of a years-old deportation amnesty for migrants from Venezuela, saying Wednesday that the program has become too much of a threat to public safety and national security.
A quarter-million people are currently covered by the 2021 grant of Temporary Protected Status, and they stand to lose that protection, which will cost them their work permits and make them eligible for deportation.
The department urged them to go home on their own rather than wait to be arrested and deported.
The Biden administration had issued two separate grants of TPS to Venezuelans, one in 2021 and another in 2023.
Trump officials had already moved to end the 2023 designation, which also covered roughly 250,000, and the end of the 2021 designation means that a half-million migrants from Venezuela are now poised to become deportable.
TPS is supposed to be granted to citizens of countries facing war, natural disaster or political upheaval. The theory is that it gives the countries themselves more room to recover, and the migrants a reprieve from returning home to chaos.
It is supposed to last as long as the conditions in the home country persist.
Venezuela remains in upheaval, but Homeland Security said the consequences of the massive flow of illegal immigrants from that country demanded a rethink.
“Weighing public safety, national security, migration factors, immigration policy, economic considerations, and foreign policy, it’s clear that allowing Venezuelan nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is not in America’s best interest,” said Matthew Tragesser, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The Venezuelan rollback is the latest in a string of TPS terminations by the new administration, and it comes after decades in which past presidents routinely extended the designations, seemingly with more worry about upended migrants’ lives here than about judging conditions back in their homes.
Roughly 225,000 migrants from El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua have been living in the U.S. under TPS since around the turn of the century.
The Biden administration vastly expanded the numbers, and left office with about 1.1 million people living here under TPS.
Trump officials have slashed through those numbers, albeit running into some resistance from federal district court judges who said President Trump and Secretary Kristi Noem were illegally guided by racism in their decisions.
The Supreme Court had to step in and allow the 2023 Venezuelan TPS termination to proceed, over the rulings of lower courts.
Even still, a federal appeals court late last month ruled the 2023 termination was illegal. That case could return to the Supreme Court in its upcoming term.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.