The Immigrants Most Vulnerable to Trump’s Mass Deportation Plans Entered the Country Legally

One afternoon, in November, 2022, Emily was on her way to church, in Maracaibo, Venezuela, when she received a video call from her husband. It had been two years since they’d seen each other in person. He was a policeman who had fled the country after refusing to arrest pro-democracy demonstrators. Emily and their two children, who were seven years old and eleven months old, had stayed behind. Travelling north was expensive, and the journey would have taken the family through the dangerous jungle of the Darién Gap, between Colombia and Panama. “We didn’t have a visa or a legal way to enter the United States,” Emily told me. “I couldn’t subject my kids to that trip.”

Emily worked as a lawyer and lived in the same neighborhood as her father and one of her sisters. Within months of her husband’s departure, she started seeing patrol cars circling her block. Men called to say they’d kill her if her husband didn’t return. One day, a group of armed agents broke into her house looking for her husband. They shut her crying children away in another room, and beat her, demanding that she reveal where her husband was. After a neighbor called the police, the men scattered. Emily sold her car, replaced her phone, and began living from “house to house,” she said—staying with relatives, rarely going outside, relying on her sister to help look after the children. “I was so stressed from being shut in, from hiding,” she told me.

Now, as her husband appeared on the screen of her phone, he was in a hospital gown, with cords attached to his chest. He took short, shallow breaths. Doctors in North Carolina, where her husband had been working in construction, had just given him a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Emily had spent the past two years researching visas that might allow them to reunite, but there was no U.S. Embassy in Venezuela, which made the task nearly impossible. Through a friend in Colombia, she inquired at consular offices there, but it was too risky to leave Venezuela for an appointment—she doubted she could get back in. When Emily called her husband back the next day, he was asleep, and too weak to talk. Some friends of his who were with him in the hospital room answered the phone and told Emily that he’d contemplated returning to Venezuela, to see his family before he died.

That fall, in response to a growing exodus from Venezuela, where an increasingly brazen dictatorship presided over a collapsed economy, the Biden Administration announced a program for Venezuelans built around a legal tool called humanitarian parole. Those who passed the U.S. government’s “national security and public safety vetting” would be allowed into the country for up to two years; during that time, they could work legally. To qualify, a “U.S.-based supporter” needed to sponsor them, and they had to purchase their own airfare.

Parole is a long-standing executive authority, used by Democratic and Republican Presidents for decades, but Biden made it the linchpin of his immigration policy. World events had collided with a moribund Congress, forcing the Administration to take a series of unilateral actions. When the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan, in the summer of 2021, Biden brought seventy-seven thousand Afghans into the U.S. through parole. After Russia invaded Ukraine the following year, the Administration, together with a network of advocates, enlisted volunteers to take in more than a hundred and eighty thousand Ukrainians. For weeks, Ukrainian war refugees had been massing at the U.S. southern border. “Almost immediately, the gatherings at ports of entry dissipated, and people began accessing the program,” Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, told me earlier this year. “We then applied it to the Venezuelans.”

In 2023, the government expanded the Venezuelan parole program to cover a total of thirty thousand migrants each month from Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba—three countries that, together with Venezuela, accounted for large numbers of people arriving at the border. Within two months, arrivals at the southern border from these four countries dropped by nearly ninety per cent. Other migrants, using a government app, could schedule appointments to be paroled into the U.S. at ports of entry. By the start of 2024, more than a million people had made use of what the Administration has called its “parole pathways.”

Emily learned about the program from a post on Instagram. “We didn’t know anyone in the U.S.,” she said. “We didn’t have any relatives there or friends or acquaintances.” A doctor in Washington State who had sponsored forty-nine people had been giving advice to others on social media. Emily reached out to him but got no response; then she noticed that someone named Sandra McAnany, a fifty-seven-year-old grandmother and widow who lived in Wisconsin, had commented on the doctor’s posts. Emily sent her a message, along with photographs of her husband’s hospital chart, pictures of their two children, and a portrait from their wedding.

When McAnany first heard about the Biden policy, she was immediately drawn to the idea of sponsoring people in need. She remembered, in particular, how her five sons had grown up with friends who were the children of undocumented Mexicans working in a meat-packing plant near their home. One of her daughters-in-law was Venezuelan, and she had spent some time in Colombia doing relief work. Conscious of the responsibility it entailed, McAnany had decided to sponsor five people, and she’d already submitted those applications when she and Emily began speaking. Their conversations led McAnany to change her plans; she went on to sponsor seventeen people in total. “Emily is really important to me,” McAnany told me. “So super resilient, digging deep. And it wasn’t, like, ‘Poor me,’ or anything like that . . . she almost turned into the daughter I’ve never had.”

In late September, 2023, with McAnany as their sponsor, Emily, her sister, and her children drove across the Venezuelan border into Colombia. From there, they boarded a flight to Miami, where, after a long delay, they caught a connecting flight to Atlanta. It was one-thirty in the morning when they stepped into the terminal. Emily’s husband was waiting for them. “Papi!” Emily’s son shouted when he caught sight of him. The boy, now two, had been an infant when he’d last seen his father in person. “He had been worried that his own son wouldn’t recognize him,” Emily said. “Humanitarian parole was complete salvation. Salvation from politics. Salvation from repression. Salvation from a family situation that was terrifying.” She went on, “I understand that a country shouldn’t just let everyone in. Parole is secure. You don’t expose yourself. If you’re doing everything right, you follow the law, and meet the requirements, it’s all going to be fine.”

Donald Trump campaigned on an explicit promise to carry out mass deportations nationwide. The scale of what’s to come is difficult to know, but Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, told the Times that the new Administration will deport a million people a year. That figure is not without precedent. Yet every aspect of the operation will be complicated, requiring far more detention space, the aid of the Department of Defense, staffing surges across the federal government, extensive interagency coördination, and the acquiescence of foreign governments that are willing to accept planes full of deportees. It will also involve protracted legal fights and possible showdowns with resistant law enforcement at the state and local levels.

In the past, when Presidential Administrations have increased the number of deportations, a large share of those swept up were arrested at or near the border. At the moment, owing to a series of harsher policies adopted by the Biden Administration and the government of Mexico, the volume of arrivals is lower than it’s been in years. What is perhaps most alarming about Trump’s plans is the likelihood that he will turn to the interior of the country, where an estimated eleven million people are undocumented, many of whom have lived in the U.S. for more than ten years. In the past decade, according to Department of Homeland Security data shared with The New Yorker, the number of deportations that originated with an arrest inside the country by Immigration and Customs Enforcement hasn’t exceeded one hundred and five thousand in a single year. It will take the Trump Administration months, if not longer, to ramp up the necessary machinery to reach its stated goals, but in the immediate term the priority for Trump will presumably be to find those who can most easily be arrested and deported. The million or so parolees who entered the country during the Biden years seem a likely place to start.

On the campaign trail, Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, dismissed Biden’s parole program for Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Cubans, which is responsible for more than half a million people entering the country, as illegitimate. It didn’t matter that the policy had withstood a legal challenge brought by a group of twenty-one Republican states in federal court. Trump has continually referred to the parolees, all of whom are here lawfully, as “illegal.” This fall, when Trump and Vance spread lies about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating the pets of local residents, other Republicans sidestepped the outrageous allegations by attacking Biden’s “mass parole” policies. On CNN, Tom Emmer, the G.O.P. House Majority Whip, said, “We’ve got an Administration that is lawless, and they allowed migrants from these different countries to come into this country. And they flew them into places like Ohio.”

You might think that those who entered the country under the President’s signature border policy would enjoy some measure of credit as migrants who, to use a phrase favored by politicians, “came the right way.” But Biden’s strategy always carried one glaring risk: parole leaves people in limbo once it expires after two years. With Trump entering office, such people may actually be more vulnerable. Not only do they represent a Biden policy that Trump is intent on dismantling but the government already has much of their personal information, including recent addresses, which they willingly handed over. “I strongly believe that the people who came in through this program will be lumped in with criminals and new arrivals as priorities for arrest,” a senior congressional staffer told me. “They have a target on their backs. All the new arrivals are seen as people who were just let in.”

A few weeks before the election, the Department of Homeland Security faced a choice: Would it renew parole for the initial group of Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Cubans whose status would expire first? The timing wasn’t ideal, a D.H.S. official told me. Members of the Biden Administration were skittish about incurring more attacks on their immigration record. In the case of Afghans and Ukrainians, who’d started entering the country in 2021 and 2022, D.H.S. had readily renewed their parole. This time, for the population of Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Cubans, it did not. According to D.H.S., Venezuelans, Haitians, and Cubans had alternative paths to remain in the country. A different status, given to citizens of specially designated countries, called Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., is available to Venezuelans and Haitians who recently arrived in the U.S. before certain dates; Cubans, owing to a quirk in the immigration system, can apply for permanent residency after living in the U.S. for a year.

Monika Langarica, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at U.C.L.A., estimated that the Biden Administration’s recent decision left about two hundred thousand parole recipients unaccounted for. That included about a hundred thousand Nicaraguans, as well as tens of thousands of Venezuelans and Haitians who came after the cutoff dates for T.P.S. Even those who have applied for asylum or for T.P.S. face delays. “There are pretty long wait times for people with parole who have applied for T.P.S.,” Langarica told me. “There are people who could fall into this window where their parole is expiring but they’ve not yet gotten filtered into another status or been issued employment authorization. A re-parole process would cover them.”

In the period between now and Inauguration Day, on January 20th, the Biden Administration could still give immigrants additional layers of protection before Trump takes office. One of the most obvious possibilities is to expand T.P.S. for Nicaraguans, based on the indisputable fact that the country’s authoritarian regime has been carrying out a brutal repression of perceived opponents, including members of the press, civil society, and the Catholic Church. So far, however, the Administration appears unwilling to do so, just as it remains opposed to renewing parole for those who entered through Biden’s “pathways.” Trump almost certainly will revoke parole. Either way, the senior congressional staffer told me, “parole is a weak protection compared to T.P.S.”

When Trump tried to end T.P.S. for certain nationalities in his first term, federal courts blocked him on the grounds that he had a “predetermined presidential agenda” that betrayed a racial “animus.” According to a former Biden Administration official with knowledge of current talks, the State Department supports expanding T.P.S. for Nicaraguans, based on a straightforward analysis of what’s happening in the country, but Mayorkas, at D.H.S., is opposed. (A D.H.S. spokesperson said that this was false and that “no decision has been made.”) “Extending T.P.S. used to be one of the easiest things Democrats supported,” the senior congressional staffer told me. But the Administration’s approach is now constrained by anxieties that it might seem brash or opportunistic on its way out. “It’s becoming evident that they believe immigration was one of the main factors in the electoral defeat,” the staffer said. “They don’t want to take actions that would double down on what they believe is a failed political strategy.”

For a President who considers Trump a fascist and has warned about the horrors of mass deportation, the atmosphere of Biden’s White House has struck several people I spoke with as curiously sedate. Another source at D.H.S. said that there are “two camps” in the Administration. The first has pushed for strong, decisive action before Biden leaves office; the other, which the source described as a “counterpush,” preferred “an orderly transition.” “There’s a lot of back-and-forth,” the person told me.

Recently, I spoke with a thirty-seven-year-old father of two from Nicaragua whom I’ll call Manuel. When we spoke, by phone, his voice was plaintive and strained. “My wife and daughter had to leave the country first,” he said. This was in 2022. Government agents were harassing the family because Manuel and his wife had participated in anti-government protests a few years earlier. Manuel and the couple’s son came to the U.S. through Biden’s humanitarian-parole program late last year. The family has applied for asylum, but they’re still waiting for a preliminary interview. “I’m trying to do everything I can to follow the laws and procedures of this country,” he said. “But it’s sad, because going back to Nicaragua now, after having been here in the U.S., is more dangerous.” In the eyes of the Nicaraguan dictatorship and its sympathizers, the fact that Manuel left for the United States might make him seem like he was plotting against the government. “I don’t even want to think about what would happen if I went back,” he said.

For Manuel and others in his position, everything depends on a combination of legal technicalities and bureaucratic processing. Emily’s husband, who arrived in the U.S. in early January, 2021, applied for T.P.S. and was finally approved last month. His work permit came earlier, through his application for asylum, which he filed shortly after entering the country. Emily and the rest of her family didn’t arrive until September, 2023, two months after the eligibility deadline for T.P.S. Four months ago, they all applied for asylum but have yet to be called for their first appointment.

As she waits, each morning, at four o’clock, Emily leaves for work at a factory where she boxes shoes for a clothing manufacturer. She returns home a little after five in the evening, exhausted but grateful for the job, which she has thanks to her parole status. Her husband underwent several months of chemotherapy, and he owes close to fifteen thousand dollars in outstanding medical fees, but his cancer appears to be in remission. The family has Social Security numbers and files taxes. “I’m pretty worried and anxious about Trump coming in,” Emily told me. “All the newspapers are generating terror to hide out and leave. We can’t do that. We have to do what’s within our power. We can’t be blind.”

In Venezuela, she said, she would be “just another statistic” of someone else killed by the government. “You can’t just come here and admire the landscapes,” she told me. “You have to come here to work. To work hard, long days, to work harder than you’ve ever been used to working. Above all, you have to have conviction that this country can transform your life.” ♦