President Donald Trump's administration has revoked a recent Joe Biden-era extension of temporary deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the United States, according to an unpublished Department of Homeland Security document the Miami Herald has obtained.
During an interview with the Fox News program Fox and Friends last 29 January, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed that she has rescinded an 18-month extension of Temporary Protected Status for Venezuela that President Joe Biden made days before leaving the White House. That extension had been announced by Biden’s Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas.
"Before he left town, Mayorkas signed an order that said for 18 months, they were going to extend protection to people on Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which meant they were going to be able to stay here and violate our laws for another 18 months," Noem said. "We stopped that."
TPS is a federal program that shields people from countries in turmoil from deportation and grants them work permits. There were 505,400 TPS approved recipients from Venezuela as of December 2024, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The decision could have devastating consequences in Florida, the state with the largest population of Temporary Protected Status recipients in the country. Almost 60 percent of the state’s TPS beneficiaries are from Venezuela, according to federal figures.
"I feel powerless and angry that I can’t help my family. This is a country of immigrants—why are they attacking us? My family has committed no crime. They’re tearing us apart," said B. Diaz, a Venezuelan woman who lives in South Florida and who requested to use only her last name out of concern for her family’s safety. She arrived in the U.S. under parole in 2022 and applied for TPS in 2023.
At John I. Smith K-8 Center, an elementary school in Doral, many Venezuelan students and their parents were anxious and uncertain over the roll back.
The Biden administration first designated Venezuela for Temporary Protected Status in March 2021, making more than 320,000 individuals eligible to apply. That designation was expanded to include an additional 472,000 eligible Venezuelans in 2023. The designation of Venezuela for TPS status had been widely celebrated in South Florida, home to one of the largest communities of Venezuelans in the United States.