Fort Worth, Texas – The most difficult part of Ana Maria Fores Tamayo is to see the trauma engraved on the faces of the refugees that it helps. That trauma was clear when she and her husband traveled to Aurora, Colorado, last year to meet with Venezuelans living in the United States.
“Everyone is afraid,” said Tamayo, 69, who leads the refugee support network. Among other services, their organization helps people fleeing their country of origin to request a temporary protected state (TPS) in the United States.
“They left because things were terrible there,” he said about the people with whom with Colorado. “Most of them did not talk too much about their exception to say that this was the opportunity to live here legally.”
TPS is a designation created by the United States government in 1990 to protect foreign citizens who are already in the country, from deportation to the designated countries to those who return.
President Donald Trump announced in February that almost 300,000 Venezuelans would be stripped of their TP on Thursday. But a federal judge from the United States blocked the measure the following month, saying that the characteristic of Trump administration migrants as criminals “smells of racism.”
Tamayo’s husband, Andrés Pacheco, 64, told Al Jazeera that until now, TPS was a “relatively easy process” compared to asylum statements, but he worries that the State could no longer be an option for some people.
“The only problem with TPS is that it only goes up to 18 months,” said Pacheco, who directs a non -profit organization for legal assistance for immigrants in Texas. “So these are people who live in a state of uncertainty.”
‘A Warzone’ in Colorado
In March, the Trump administration announced that it would revoke the temporary legal status of 530,000 people, including Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, according to a notice of the Federal Registry.
Although studies constantly show that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than US citizens, Trump issued migrant crime as a central point of his presidential campaign.
Trump also echoed not proven statements about the demonstrations of the campaign of duration of the Venezuela gang, the duration campaign of the Aragua gang, including an October stop in Aurora, where such fears had emerged. Then he called the city a “war zone” and used the problem to attack the Democrats and enliven the fears of the voters, warning that “migrant criminals” “would rape, loot, thief, loot and kill the people of the United States of America.”
“Do you see what they do in Colorado? They are taking charge,” Trump said in a demonstration in Pennsylvania. He added, without providing evidence: “They are taking care of real estate. They become real estate developers of Venezuela. They have teams that our Milar does not do.”
In the months that followed, Tamayo and Pacheco observed how Trump repeatedly spoke against Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro while, at the same time, he described Venezuelan immigrants as criminals. That portrait did not align with what Tamayo saw the boxes of the people with whom they are in Aurora.
“His country had collapsed completely, so they had no medications, no food, or anything. And they had to leave.”
Despite Trump’s criticism, many Venezuelans living in the United States voted for the president.
And although a federal judge temporarily plays the Trump administration to end TPS for Venezuelans, this has no easy fears, since many are now dealing with the growing uncertainty of their future.
Presidential actions such as those tasks in March, when the United States flew to more than 200 immigrants, alleged members of the Aragua train, be imprisoned in El Salvador after Trump controversial legislation invoked in times of war to expel fears.
Luis, a Venezuelan-American Trump voter who lives in Dallas, told Al Jazeera to “never think” that Trump would go to the help program that keeps more than half a million Venezuelans, including someone Frome Frome Frome Frome Frome Frome Frome Frome Frome Frome Frome Frome Fr. He asked to use only his first name for fear of compensation against his family.
“[Trump has] He admitted that Venezuela is not safe, and I understand that it is not who is not who criminals, “said the 34 -year -old man. What do you want to send us back?”
Second attempt
This is not the first time Trump tries to finish the program.
Duration in his first term, the president tried to strip TPS of people from El Salvador, Haiti and other nations that infamous “countries of S *** Hole”.
The defense groups blocked him with demands, and Marco Rubio, then American senator and now Trump’s secretary of state, Cossponsosowon The Venezuela TPS and personally pressed for Venezuelans in a letter to the then Secretary of the State Rex Tillerson.
However, this year, Rubio touches a new position on the matter.
“Appointing Venezuela under TPS does not defend the central US interests or puts US citizens first,” Hey.
Few other Republicans have spoken to Venezuelans.
The American representative Maria Salazar de Miami, Florida, asked Trump not to “punish” immigrants revoking their humanitarian probation, a path to legal status organized by the Biden administration. More than 70 percent of Salazar’s components are Hispanic, and almost a room are not US citizens.
“They came here fleeing from the failed communist countries that believed in the empty promises of Biden,” Salazar wrote.
Recently, Salazar celebrated the courts that block Trump’s maneuvers, coming to say that he had “brought the fight” to protect TPS. Actually, the fight has been directed by groups such as the TPS National Alliance, which filed the lawsuit that led the courts to block Trump’s movements.
‘A blessing for my life’
José Palma, national coordinator of the TPS Alliance, said he has advised hundreds of TPS receptors.
“We have stories of people from Honduras or El Salvador who have been in the United States during the last 25 years,” he said. “They are at risk of losing their state of immigration and being deported, just even if they have established their lives in the United States.”
Palma is particularly concerned with parents who are beneficiaries of TPS and have begun to the family in the United States, which makes their children US citizens.
If they are finally deported, he said: “Your children will need to stay in the United States without their parents, or are forced to go to another country.”
Liz, a native or El Salvador who is now 50, arrived in the United States in 2001 after an devastating earthquake.
Liz, who only gave his first name for fear of reprisals, said he has spread approximately one box on TPS, and calls the program “A blessing for my life” that has allowed him to build a family and a home of life.
Some rates have increased, and some documents have become more complicated, but the process has a reliable bone: it turns in the necessary forms, and while their country is on the list, the State recurrent.
“TPS is at least part of the many we need to exercise our rights,” Liz said.
“Even if it is temporary, it has created a lot of good for the American public,” Liz said about TPS. “We have TPS holders who are religious leaders. We have TPS holders who are business owners who give employment to US citizens.”
Carmen, a 27 -year -old Venezuelan who lives in Fort Worth, Texas, echoed Liz’s comments, calling TPS “a gift from heaven” that helped “start a life that I didn’t know I would have.”
‘It’s time for you to go’
Sindy Mata, a 30 -year -old community organizer in Fort Worth, has also advised immigrants and Humanitarian probation receptors, which is permission to enter and remain temporarily in the United States for urgent reasons.
She said it extended earlier this year, many under temporary status resorted to electronic emails from the Department of National Security that began: “It’s time for the United States to leave.”
Part of the administration’s strategy is to encourage immigrants to start “self -support.”
But Mata said that the emails of the Department of National Security did not always have that planned effect.
“I know a person who, when he recovered email, his first thought,” Who else has this? Who else in the community needs advice or needs help? “
It was then that he worked to connect people with legal representation and organizations such as Palma who are determined to keep TPS alive.
“It’s a reminder,” he said, “that we need to defend each other.”