The US Supreme Court has delivered a victory to Donald Trump, by allowing the American president to strip Temporary Protected Status from about 350,000 migrants from Venezuela. The order means that the Venezuelan migrants are at risk of being deported.
The US grants Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, to irregular migrants, when their home country is experiencing a war, disaster or other emergencies. The protection prevents the migrants from being deported because their safety would be at risk. The US granted TPS to migrants from Venezuela twice. First in 2021, and then again, separately, in 2023. This is because the US believes Venezuela is extremely unsafe.
A travel advisory from the US says that people going there are at " high risk of wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, and poor health infrastructure.” Yet despite its own assessment, the US government wants to send hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans back, to face that danger. This has left Venezuelan migrants in the US fearing for their lives.
The United Nations Refugee Agency says that almost 8 million people have fled Venezuela over the years. Most have gone to neighbouring nations in Latin America. But some hundreds of thousands took long and perilous journeys, to try and make a better life for themselves in the US.
The exodus from Venezuela began around 2015, and picked up steam by 2017-18. It coincided with absurd hyperinflation, which reached 1,300,000% in the 12 months to November 2018. The economic collapse was due to multiple factors. Falling global oil prices hurt Venezuela’s export sector. Western sanctions crippled trade. And Nicolás Maduro’s government is accused of exacerbating the problems.
As the economic collapse was taking place, violent crime surged. Venezuela had the world’s highest murder rate at the time. This contributed to the mass exodus. Maduro’s government responded with repression and extrajudicial killings. This also caused people to flee. The result has been that more people have fled from Venezuela than from Syria, which was the site of a brutal civil war lasting over a decade.
These are the conditions that forced millions of people to leave Venezuela. And the US government, under former President, Joe Biden, granted Temporary Protected Status to those migrants. But now, the US Supreme Court has allowed Trump to try and cancel the TPS for Venezuelan migrants. The Trump administration’s move is still being appealed in lower courts. But Venezuelan migrants could start getting deported in a few months, even if the case is ongoing.
