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Shooting Oneself in the Foot, Venezuela Edition
Congress needs to abolish TPS
By Dan Cadman on April 24, 2025
Clear back in 2019, during Trump 1.0, members of Congress (29 Democrats and 3 Republicans) introduced legislation to mandate the grant of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Venezuelan nationals. TPS for Venezuelans was as bad an idea then as it now, which can be seen clearly with the benefit of hindsight, and the bill did not pass.
Furthermore, the first Trump administration took no action to administratively grant TPS to Venezuelans, as it might have done under Section 244 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, 8 U.S.C. § 1254a, for which the present Trump White House might be entitled to a little schadenfreude, but for the inconvenient intervention of the next administration.
The Biden White House, through the adroit handling of then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, announced in 2021 that it was granting TPS to Venezuelan nationals. The status was renewed in 2023, and again on January 17, 2025 (three days before President Trump’s inauguration, apparently as a parting gift).
In the meantime, approximately 350,000 Venezuelans had availed themselves of that status, with an indeterminate number proving themselves in the fullness of time to be thugs of the worst sort: members and affiliates of the criminal organization Tren de Aragua (“Aragua Train”, abbreviated as TdA in the American media). These individuals quickly gained notoriety by being filmed taking over whole apartment buildings, shoving out other migrants in the process, so that they could use the apartments for their illicit drug, gun, and money dealings; by also being filmed savagely beating New York City police officers; and by other acts of murder and mayhem, including the heinous murder of Laken Riley in Georgia.
https://cis.org/Cadman/Shooting-Oneself-Foot-Venezuela-Edition
