Florida-based Venezuelan organizations rejoiced Tuesday after the Biden administration extended crucial immigration relief for Venezuelans, but urged officials to make more people eligible and come up with long-term immigration solutions.
By Miami Herald – Syra Ortiz-Blanes
Jul 12, 2022
Venezuela will have Temporary Protected Status designation – which lets people from countries in turmoil live and work temporarily in the United States – for another 18 months, the Department of Homeland Security announced Monday. About 343,000 Venezuelans people are eligible, the agency said.
However, the extension does not apply to anyone who arrived after March 8, 2021. Several advocacy groups, Venezuela’s Washington, D.C., embassy and U.S. and Florida lawmakers have repeatedly asked the administration to allow later arrivals to qualify for TPS.
Between March 2021 and May 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had nearly 145,000 encounters with Venezuelan nationals at the U.S.-México border, according to federal government statistics. And U.S. lawmakers have previously estimated that as many as 250,000 Venezuelans came to the United States during 2021 and the first six months of this year.
“We are very grateful, we are very happy for the … Venezuelans that are benefiting with that decision of extension,” said Venezuelan American Caucus Executive Director Adelys Ferro, “But we keep working for the redesignation and we will not stop.”
PERMANENT PATHWAYS
At a Tuesday media conference, Venezuelan groups from across the state thanked the Biden administration for the 18-month extension, which expires in March 2024. But they also advocated for a permanent immigration fix, including citizenship, for current TPS holders, and for the expansion of TPS benefits to Venezuelans who came after March 2021.
María Antonieta Díaz, president of the Venezuelan American Alliance, said she was grateful for the extension. But she also noted that many people had been waiting for over a year for their TPS applications to be approved and urged Homeland Security to process them as quickly as possible. She also described the TPS extension as a “long-awaited relief,” but said that it was a “temporary respite” to a crisis in their homeland with no end in sight.
“The turbulent political situation and economic devastation in Venezuela caused by the [Nicolás] Maduro regime is not a temporary situation and it will not improve in the next 18 months, unfortunately,” she said.
Cecilia González, a TPS recipient who fled Venezuela escaping political persecution, said she worked nearly three years in Central Florida’s hotel industry and two jobs to finance her education. Like Díaz, she asked for a path to permanent residence for TPS holders.
“We will be able to enable families like mine and many others to achieve so much more in this country,” she said at the media event.
‘ESSENTIALLY IN LIMBO’
For most Venezuelans who arrived after March 2021, their immigration options primarily remain limited to seeking asylum, said lawyers who spoke to the Miami Herald.
“They are essentially in limbo. They are part of an inefficient and complicated asylum process,” said Maureen Porras, director of Church World Service Immigration Legal Services and a candidate for Doral’s city council.
Porras has clients who have waited for more than a year for their immigration court hearing after having arrived in the U.S., and others who have to wear ankle monitoring bracelets as part of an alternative-to-detention program.
She also said that jurisdictional issues between the immigration court and the asylum office – such as immigration authorities not properly or promptly filing necessary documents – can keep immigrants from moving forward in the asylum process.
“They find themselves without work permission, without filing an asylum application, or with filing an asylum application that gets rejected,” she said.
John de la Vega, a Miami-based immigration lawyer who works with many Venezuelans, said that some people who come to the U.S. with tourist visas might be able to apply for work visas or family petitions.
Miami-based Catholic Legal Services has noted an uptick in the number of Venezuelans, along with Nicaraguans and Cubans, coming for walk-in appointments to their offices in the last year, its executive director, Randy McGrorty, told the Herald. He added that the reason the government has a retroactive deadline for Temporary Protected Status is to not encourage future irregular migration in dangerous conditions.
But McGrorty also noted that the federal government had redesignated Haiti for Temporary Protected Status twice in the past 12 years: First, in January 2011, after having designated the Caribbean country for the program after the devastating 2010 earthquake, and then again last May. In August Haiti was redesignated once more, after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
“In the past, when situations are not just ongoing but have worsened or perhaps a new factor has been added in, DHS has redesignated the country based on this new criteria and given new dates,” said McGrorty.
A QUARTER MILLION VENEZUELANS HAVE APPLIE
As of May, about 245,000 Venezuelans had applied to the program, said Brian Fincheltub, consulate affairs director at the Venezuelan embassy in a press release. About 35% of them have been approved for the protections so far. Only about 90 applications had been denied, a rejection rate he described to the Miami Herald as “very positive news.”
Fincheltub told the Herald that in practice, approval for TPS applications is taking between 13 and 15 months. But he added that it’s important to note that people have applied in different time frames.
“It is important to break it down into two groups so as not to generate a perception that all these cases are behind schedule,” he said, adding that the Venezuelan embassy will continue pushing for a Venezuela redesignation so more people can qualify for TPS.
“Unfortunately, what we are experiencing in Venezuela is a humanitarian issue, and … those people who are currently leaving the country, every day there are more and they are not doing it because they want to, but because they are escaping.”
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