Racism and Classism at the Heart of Rescission of Venezuelan TPS 

Elliott Young is Professor of History at Lewis & Clark College and the author of Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World’s Largest Immigrant Detention System. This post is part of an ongoing special blog series examining the current state of US immigration law and enforcement in the wake of Trump’s election and the lasting implications of his policies.

The Trump administration’s rescission of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelans is based in racism, classism, and stigmatization of non-white migrants. On March 31, Federal Judge Edward M. Chen found that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s February 2025 termination of TPS for Venezuelans would cause irreparable harm to the impacted families, cost US businesses billions of dollars, and damage the health and safety of communities across the country. In particular, Judge Chen found “There is also evidence of discriminatory animus by President Trump and that his intent and actions bore a direct nexus to the actions taken by Secretary Noem in the instant case.” Terminating TPS for Venezuelans, Chen wrote, was “unprecedented.”  

TPS has been used for thirty-five years to allow migrants from nations facing natural disasters, armed conflict, or other major political instability, to live and work in the United States. Some TPS recipients, such as those from El Salvador, have been under such “temporary” protection for almost a quarter century.  

An estimated 607,000 Venezuelans are current TPS recipients, 348,000 of whom were registered under the 2023 designation. Given that TPS eligibility requirements bar individuals with any felony conviction or more than one misdemeanor, this group of Venezuelan immigrants is, by definition, not comprised of dangerous criminals. They also bar anyone who is ineligible for asylum and anyone inadmissible under INA section 212(a), including “non-waivable criminal and security-related grounds.” Using the same logic, Trump revoked the Biden era humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, but on March 14, a federal judge temporarily blocked that order. 

The general demographic profile of highly educated, young working immigrants and the eligibility rules for TPS suggest a portrait of Venezuelan TPS holders very different than the one painted by President Trump and Secretary Noem of gang members, dangerous criminals, and people with mental illness.  

During the 2024 electoral campaign, Donald Trump drew on this racist history, saying in one interview, “Look at what’s happening with some of these towns that are being talked about all over the world, but in a very horrible way, occupied by members of savage prison gangs from Venezuela.” In the same interview, TrumpHe further asserted falsely that the Venezuelan government had sent the criminal migrants to the United States. As Trump put it, “In Venezuela, their crime rate went down 72%. You know why? - because they took the criminals out of Caracas, and they put them along your border. And they said, if you ever come back, we’re going to kill you.” The news organization Axios analyzed Trump’s speeches, interviews, debates, and rallies between September 1, 2023, and October 2, 2024, finding that Trump made 70 references to Venezuelans as criminals. The reelected president’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, has repeatedly echoed the “Venezuela sending criminals” talking point. 

There is no evidence substantiating these assertions.  In the order terminating the 2023 TPS status for Venezuelans and accompanying public statements, Secretary Noem has repeatedly alleged connections between them and the criminal gang Tren de Aragua (TDA). For example, in her January 29, 2025 interview announcing the termination, she stated that “the American people . . . want these dirtbags out of the country.” At her confirmation hearing, Secretary Noem said: “This extension [of TPS] of over 600,000 Venezuelans [] is alarming when we look at what we’ve seen in different states, including Colorado, with gangs doing damage and harming the individuals and the people that live there.” If there was any significant criminal involvement by any of the 600,000 TPS-holding Venezuelans and the Tren de Aragua or any other criminal organization, they would be ineligible for TPS status. Instead, what President Trump and Secretary Noem have done is stigmatize hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants with the criminal behavior of a few individuals who are most likely not among the TPS-protected group. 

This rhetoric of immigrants as dangerous criminals and national security threats has a long history in the United States, stretching back to the early days of the Republic (see work by Elliott Young). Trump and Noem have resuscitated, at times almost verbatim, such language. In the 1980s, Cuban Mariel refugees, for example, were framed as mentally ill and violent criminals. Using similar narratives to those adopted by Trump and Noem, President Jimmy Carter accused Fidel Castro of emptying his jails and mental hospitals and sending the worst of the worst to the United States. As Carter put it, “We will not permit our country to be used as a dumping ground for criminals who represent a danger to our society, and we will begin exclusion proceedings against these people at once.” In the Mariel case, while some Cubans had criminal backgrounds or histories of mental illness, the stigma was attached to the entire group. In his Republican Convention speech in July 2024, Donald Trump echoed the rhetoric about the Mariel Cubans, falsely claiming that migration from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, amounted to “the greatest invasion in history.” As Trump put it, “They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. . . . They’re emptying out their insane asylums. And terrorists at numbers that we’ve never seen before. Bad things are going to happen.” Now, the target is 600,000 Venezuelan TPS holders and all of the migrants admitted under Biden’s humanitarian parole program. 

The political and economic crisis in Venezuela has only become more extreme in the last few years. Although GDP has rebounded and inflation has come down, GDP is still just a fourth of what it was in 2012, and inflation is currently around 60% a year. President Maduro has consolidated his rule, stealing the election in July 2024 and violently repressing opponents of the regime. This is why almost 8 million Venezuelans, almost a quarter of the population, have fled the country, why few would want to return, and why TPS is necessary.   

While there is no evidence that Venezuelan migrants are disproportionately criminal, and plenty of evidence that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born US citizens, TPS holders are by definition people with neither a felony conviction nor more than one misdemeanor, due to the TPS statute’s eligibility requirements. As a group, Venezuelan immigrants are better educated and participate more in the labor force than either other immigrants or native-born US citizens. However, there has been a demographic shift in the last 25 years between the older arrivals, who were wealthier, higher-skilled laborers, and the new arrivals who are poorer and less educated. This class divide maps onto race given that Black and darker-skinned Venezuelans are more likely than whites to be poor. Theseis class and racial divides areis at the heart of the stereotypes about new Venezuelan migrants as criminals and gang members. The irresponsible and unfounded comments by politicians and other officials about Venezuelan immigrant criminality should not be used as an excuse to rescind TPS protections for Venezuelans. Rather, they should be understood within the context of a long history of racist and classist tropes characterizing immigrants as diseased, mentally ill, and criminals. 

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