"There are reasons for them to be afraid": Immigrants are starting to feel that nowhere is safe

Since President Donald Trump signed executive orders targeting immigration earlier this year, in-person attendance at the weekly meetings hosted by Venezuelans and Immigrants Aid has dwindled. Once having to cap sessions at 100 people, the New York City-based organization forced to find ways to squeeze in a few more and ask others to come back the next week, co-founder and director Hector Arguinzones said attendance has dropped by more than half: now he never has more than 40 or 50 people show up. 

Many of the participants in the VIA's programs are Latin American immigrants with pending asylum claims or a temporary legal status, as well as some who entered using the now-defunct CBP One app and are awaiting an immigration interview. Though they've followed the rules to gain entry to the country, the escalation in enforcement actions under Trump has made them worried that their future in the United States is far more at risk than before, Arguinzones told Salon. 

"Nowadays, they're more afraid. They express that they were worried about leaving their houses. Some of them told us that they were not sending their children to school," he said. "We see that less and less people are [attending] in-person to the activities because they are afraid to be around."

"If you read the news every day — all the changes — there are reasons for them to be to be afraid now, [or] at least to take care," added Arguinzones, whose nonprofit, founded in 2016, guides largely Spanish-speaking immigrants through the asylum process, offers English classes and provides peer mental health support for new arrivals. 

As Trump carries out his campaign promise to curb immigration, he's plunged the nation's immigrant communities into turmoil. An early Department of Homeland Security directive removed restrictions on U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement raids at courts, schools and churches, leaving more immigrants susceptible to arrest and detention in places that once felt safe. The administration's indiscriminate hand in attempting to exact mass deportations has also led to the arrest and detention of tourists, protesters and green card holders. Meanwhile, DHS revocations of Temporary Protected Status extensions force thousands of Venezuelan and Haitian recipients into impending legal limbo.

Trump's most recent move will end humanitarian parole for more than 500,000 people from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua, eliminating the protections of a temporary legal status provided to immigrants from designated countries in crisis. That notice came as his administration defended sending more than 250 Venezuelan ICE detainees to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador over mere suspicion of gang affiliation, despite a federal order blocking such removals. 

The result is that immigrants — whether documented or not — are scared. In light of recent events, many Venezuelans are also upset. The treatment of the detainees, in part, even motivated the Venezuelan government to resume accepting deportees over the weekend, receiving a flight of nearly 200 people on Sunday, according to The New York Times. 

"We don't agree with Venezuelans being deported to [another] country because of the politics that the government is implementing, because there are not diplomatic relations between Venezuela and the U.S.," Arguinzones said. "Only one person being sent to another country or being deported that [has] not committed a crime ... can demonstrate that what the U.S. government is doing now is wrong."

Vanessa Dojaquez-Torres, the practice and policy counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, argued that the Trump administration's treatment of the Venezuelan detainees, as well as other moves comprising his immigration policy, indicate that the president's "overall goal" is to deport a "huge number of people." Coupled with what seems like its desire to bypass immigration court and due process, the administration, she said, doesn't appear to care much about whether the people on the chopping block have asylum claims or other avenues for relief in the country's immigration system. 

"The focus is not on providing a fair process but the end goal of deportation," Dojaquez-Torres told Salon. "And we're just watching all of the pieces settle into place to make that happen."

While Trump's crackdown has threatened a swath of U.S. residents — immigrants on TPS, asylum seekers and green card holders — Venezuelans have been "particularly caught in the crosshairs." Dojaquez-Torres argued that attention stems from the increase in Venezuelans attempting to immigrate to the U.S. in recent years as its political environment worsens under President Nicolás Maduro's authoritarian rule. 

Under the Biden administration, the number of immigrant encounters with law enforcement at the southern border skyrocketed. U.S. Customs and Border Protection counted just over 977,500 encounters in fiscal year 2019, but by fiscal year 2021, that number jumped to nearly 1,735,000 encounters and reached a peak of more than 2,475,000 in fiscal year 2023, according to CBP data. Venezuelan migrants made up just 49,000 of those encounters in fiscal year 2021, but more than 188,000 in fiscal year 2022 and 266,000 in fiscal year 2023. 

But that uptick in total encounters during the onset of the pandemic doesn't reflect the number of individuals CBP encountered, which is a smaller number, according to the Pew Research Center. COVID-era policies like Title 42, which allowed CBP to expel people from the border without formally deporting them, led to a steep rise in repeat crossers. Those migrants accounted for around a quarter of all encounters during the pandemic compared to just 7% of all encounters in the preceding fiscal year. 

During a campaign speech in September, Trump peddled unfounded claims that members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang were taking control of an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado. A February ICE action in Denver and Aurora targeting more than 100 alleged TdA members resulted in the arrests of about 30 people — only one of whom was a member of the gang, according to Fox News, which was embedded with the operation. 

Trump's and his administration's focus on eradicating the gang has since brought additional, hostile attention to an immigrant population wracked with political turbulence.  

"That was very easy rhetoric for the Trump campaign to cling onto, and especially [now] when used with the Alien Enemies Act, which uses that predatory incursion and invasion language," Dojaquez-Torres said, referencing the 1798 wartime power allowing the president to deport natives and citizens of an enemy state that Trump used to remove Venezuelan detainees last week.

In addition to revoking the extension on documented residents' temporary protected status and access to humanitarian parole, the Trump administration is also looking to dismiss Venezuelan migrants' pending immigration cases to reprocess them through expedited removal, which allows the government to deport someone without going before a judge, Dojaquez-Torres said. 

Taken together, the assault on Venezuelan immigrants' due process rights and Trump's push for mass deportations should alarm every American, she added.

"This should be a huge concern because if we are denying the basic rights and due process of one group of people, it is not too far to say that it could be denied to another group of people," Dojaquez-Torres said.

Amid the crackdown, members of the community Arguinzones serves are strapped for options, with some insisting that they will remain in the country even if they lose access to legal status because they have done nothing wrong. Others, he said, are mulling whether to leave. 

One TPS recipient his organization has connected with legal counsel told him she was so afraid of being deported in the future that she considered self-deportation. Lawyers, however, convinced her to wait for a federal judge's determination of whether the DHS rescission was lawful.

Arguinzones said that immediately after Trump's election in November, he and others were willing to wait for the then-president-elect's policy to take hold and develop because they had "always trusted the independence of U.S. institutions" to defend their rights. But watching the Trump administration appear to flout those institutions now has caught him off guard and made him fearful about doing his job, he said. The current circumstances almost remind him of the political upheaval that has wrought havoc in his home country.

"Venezuelans, we are in the middle in [what] we perceive as a situation similar in our country, where people are divided, divided because of their their beliefs ..., divided because of their political views, and divided also because [of] what is happening now in every aspect," Arguinzones said.