WASHINGTON – About 320,000 Venezuelans living in the United States received an 18-month suspension on Monday for the threat of deportation, while the Biden government sought to highlight how dangerous that country has become under President Nicolás Maduro.
Immigrants will also be allowed to work legally in the United States as part of the temporary protection status that the government has issued when considering next steps in a one-year American pressure campaign to get Maduro out of power.
“Living conditions in Venezuela reveal a country in crisis, unable to protect its own citizens,” said Alejandro N. Mayorkas, secretary of homeland security, in a statement. “It is in times of extraordinary and temporary circumstances like these that the United States comes forward to support the qualified Venezuelan citizens who are already present here, while their country seeks to recover from the current crises.”
Venezuela is mired in one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world under Maduro, who, through a mix of corruption and neglect, oversaw the decay of the country’s oil infrastructure that has sustained its economy. The United Nations estimates that up to 94 percent of Venezuela’s population lives in poverty, with millions of people deprived of regular access to water, food and medicines.
Two senior Biden government officials said the new protections would be offered to those who could prove they live in the United States as of Monday. The deadline aims to discourage smugglers from attracting other Venezuelans to make the arduous journey to the United States at a time when the Biden government is already struggling to accommodate thousands of Central American migrants heading to the southern border.
President Biden was expected to provide temporary protection to Venezuelan immigrants, as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken endorsed during the Senate confirmation hearing in January.
Although the Trump administration resisted issuing the same protections – despite intense lobbying by Maduro’s opponents – President Donald J. Trump delayed the deportations of many Venezuelans to the United States on his last day in office.
Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuelan expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a policy group, said that legal protection status is generally more durable than a presidential order, and noted that the Department of Homeland Security did not have time to fully enact the Trump Deportations Deferred for 18 Months.
Carlos Vecchio, the Venezuelan opposition envoy to Washington, called the new protections “a fair, urgent and necessary measure that is finally a reality”.
The United States has been at the forefront of an international campaign to bring Maduro out of power since the disputed elections in 2018. It is one of the few foreign policy priorities promoted by the Biden and Trump governments, each of which recognizes Juan Guaidó, the leader of the opposition and former head of the National Assembly of Venezuela, as the country’s legitimate leader.
But one of the officials who informed reporters on Monday, on condition that he not be named, said the Biden government was considering whether to suspend a series of economic sanctions that experts believe had cost the Venezuelan government about $ 31 billion. since 2017.
The official said the review would assess whether the economic pressure exerted on Maduro and his government would be worth the risk of aggravating the dire living conditions of Venezuelans.
The new protections were welcomed by Democrats and Republicans in Congress, who seemed divided over Trump’s approach to immigration policy.
Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, said he supported the protections, although “it is critical that we continue to work with our democratic allies to ensure a Venezuela free from tyranny and to ensure that this temporary status in the United States does not become permanent.”
Senators Bob Menendez of New Jersey and Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, both Democrats, noted that previous efforts to allow Venezuelan immigrants to remain in the United States have been blocked by supporters of the former president in Congress.
“For years, the world has watched in horror at the humanitarian and humanitarian political crises that have transformed Venezuela into a failed state,” the senators said in a joint statement. “Despite these disastrous and dangerous conditions, Venezuelans were still forcibly deported back to their country by the Trump administration.”
Mr. Trump tried to remove the protection of some 400,000 immigrants living and working in the United States under a program that Congress passed in 1990 for foreigners who fled their homes because of conflicts and natural disasters. In September, a federal appeals court supported the Trump administration’s argument that immigrants from places like El Salvador, Haiti and Sudan, who were recovering from disasters or political turmoil, no longer needed refuge in the United States.
Monday’s announcement signaled that the Biden government would likely continue with at least some of the protections.
Roberto Marrero, a Venezuelan opposition leader who moved to Florida after spending a year and a half in prison in Venezuela, called Monday’s decision a “bittersweet victory”.
“It gives us protection,” he said, “but it also reminds us that we are here because there is a dictatorship in our country.”
Lara Jakes reported from Washington, and Anatoly Kurmanaev from Bogota, Colombia.