'Cruel': Trump Moves to End TPS for Quarter of a Million Venezuelans

As tensions between the US and Venezuela were inflamed Wednesday by the Trump administration's deadly attack on a boat off the coast of the South American country, the Department of Homeland Security announced it was ending legal protections for more than a quarter of a million Venezuelans who President Donald Trump had previously shielded from deportation.

US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) declared that allowing Venezuelan nationals to remain in the US with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was "not in America's best interests," but the move was swiftly denounced as both cruel and misguided by critics.

The administration had weighed "public safety, national security, migration factors, immigration policy, economic considerations, and foreign policy," spokesperson Matthew Tragesser said, and urged Venezuelan migrants to "self-deport." USCIS also said that "conditions in Venezuela no longer meet the TPS statutory requirements."

More than 250,000 Venezuelans who were granted TPS in 2021 have faced a September 10 expiration date on their status, but the Trump administration had the option to renew their status.

The migrants are not part of a separate group of 350,000 Venezuelans whose TPS status the Supreme Court allowed President Donald Trump to revoke in May; those migrants were granted the protections by the Biden administration in 2023.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro declared an "economic emergency" in April, attributing the country's financial struggles to Trump's tariffs. The country has also faced years of economic mismanagement and US sanctions, exacerbating the crisis, and Maduro's government has repressed protests against his controversial reelection in 2024. The UN special rapporteur on the right to food said after a visit to the country earlier this year that nearly 82% of people in Venezuela were living in poverty and more than half had insufficient income to purchase a basic food basket.

Critics on Wednesday noted that the US State Department continues to advise Americans not to travel to Venezuela, saying there is a "high risk of wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, and poor health infrastructure."

While Venezuelans "are going hungry and without food and medicine," said US Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.), "the Trump Admin. is stripping TPS for Venezuelans in the US and is claiming that conditions in Venezuela are not that bad."

Andrea Flores, vice president of immigration policy and campaigns at FWD.us, said USCIS did not make clear "how ending TPS for Venezuelans is in the best interest of the United States."

"Not only is this a mass de-legalization effort, it pushes hundreds of thousands of people out of the workforce," said Flores. "The economic consequences of the shrinking workforce impacts all of us."

Since taking office, Trump has designated the Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua a terrorist organization and has claimed it coordinates with the Maduro government—an assessment rejected by US intelligence agencies. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested about 8,000 Venezuelans in the first half of 2025, and the administration has used the Alien Enemies Act—previously only used in wartime—to expel hundreds of Venezuelans from the US. On Wednesday, a federal court ruled that Trump had illegally invoked the law.

The administration has claimed it is rounding up criminals, but an analysis in June by the libertarian Cato Institute found that 65% of people arrested by ICE had no criminal conviction, and 93% were not convicted for violent crimes.

The administration has also deployed several warships off the coast of Venezuela as he's threatened military force against drug cartels in the country, despite the lack of evidence that cartel activity takes place there. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, just 2% of all cocaine seized by the agency is in Venezuela.

On Wednesday, the administration drew outrage from human rights advocates as it announced it had attacked a boat that it claimed was transporting cocaine and linked to Tren de Aragua, killing 11 people.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, emphasized that the TPS beneficiaries who are now being ordered to "self-deport" or face expulsion "were previously granted deportation protections by Trump himself."

"Every person under this protection has been vetted at least twice," he said. "Anyone with any serious offense on their record is ineligible for protections. For the last four years, they've been working legally and paying taxes like everyone else. Now Trump's going to kick them all out."

"This is a quarter million people whose lives are about to be completely upended," he added, "for nothing but politics."