The recently opened Arepa Pa’ Los Pana restaurant is one of the several Venezuelan businesses in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood. (Photo by Igor Studenkov/for Chronicle Media)

Two weeks after President Donald Trump began his second term, the Chicago area Venezuelan community found themselves in uncertain legal waters.

Under the Biden Administration, Venezuelans immigrants who arrived in United States between 2021 and 2023 were eligible for Temporary Protected Status. This legal status allows immigrants from countries that the Secretary of Homeland Security deems to be too dangerous to return to in the near term to live and work in United States for a period of time that may be extended if the conditions don’t improve. There are currently 14 TPS designated countries, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Sudan, Ukraine and Venezuela.

On Jan. 10, then-Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas extended TPS eligibility for Sudan, Ukraine and Venezuela for 18 months. On Jan. 28, the newly confirmed Secretary Kristi Noem revoked the extension for Venezuela. This means that TPS status will expire either on April 7 or Sept. 10, depending on when the immigrants arrived. Chicago area Venezuelan advocacy organizations told Chronicle Media that they are trying to keep the community calm as they explore legal options.

TPS status can be granted if a country is going through war, natural disaster, economic collapse or other upheaval. In Venezuela’s case, there were two designations — one for immigrants that arrived after March 8, 2021, and one for immigrants who arrived after July 30, 2023. Both signations cited economic hardships and political repressions under President Nicholas Maduro.

Amnesty International’s 2023 report noted that “critics of President Maduro’s government were arbitrarily detained, forcibly disappeared and tortured with the acquiescence of the judicial system.”

“The government acknowledged 455 cases of enforced disappearance reported since 2015, the majority of which had not been resolved,” it stated. “Impunity for ongoing extrajudicial executions by the security forces persisted. Despite some releases at the end of the year, politically motivated arbitrary detentions remained systematic.”

The report also stated that “the majority of the population [were] experiencing severe food insecurity,” the public health system was “in a state of collapse” and that “those deported back to the country faced arbitrary arrest.”

After the extension was terminated, Noem had until Feb. 1 to extend the 2023 designation. Her office announced that it wouldn’t, stating that it “is contrary to the national interest to permit the covered Venezuelan nationals to remain temporarily in the United States.” The immigrants covered by the 2021 designation will keep their designation until Sept. 10. Noem must decide whether to extend that designation until at least 60 days before deadline.

According to the 2020 census, Chicago had around 4,000 Venezuelan immigrants. In 2022 and 2023, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott bused asylum-seekers from Central and South American countries to major northern cities, including Chicago. About 75 percent of those new arrivals, or around 30,000 people, came from Venezuela.

While the asylum seeker status allows them to reside in United States while their application is being processed, it doesn’t allow them to legally work. A TPS removed that restriction, allowed them to travel and created firmer protections from deportation.

Ana Gil-Garcia, co-founder of the Illinois Venezuelan Alliance, estimated that around 15,000 Venezuelan immigrants got TPS. Given that the significant portion of Chicago area’s Venezuelan immigrants arrived on or after the fall of 2022, she said, the April deadline would impact them most.

“We are in a very emotional emergency,” Gil-Garcia told Chronicle Media. “The phones of the Illinois Venezuelan Alliance are ringing, asking for help, asking for clarification, asking for what to do, asking whether I should submit myself to ICE and let them take me?”

Even though the designation doesn’t expire until April 7, many Venezuelans who spoke to the alliance are leery of going outside and going to work. Gil-Garcia compared the situation to COVID-19 lockdowns.

“You’re not going anywhere, trying to be careful what you say, what you do, you don’t go to the [store], you don’t buy anything,” she said. “And we can’t live like that.”

Gil-Garcia said that several factors make the situation more challenging for Venezuelans than other immigrants. Since the United States doesn’t have formal diplomatic relations with Venezuela, they can’t ask the local consulate or an embassy for legal help, the way, for example, Mexican immigrants can. The Venezuelans who got 2023 TPS had their passports taken away as part of the application process, so they won’t be able to leave the United States once their status expires.

In an appearance on Fox and Friends shortly after revoking the extension, Noem justified the decision by characterizing Venezuelan immigrants as criminals.

“The people of this country want these dirtbags out,” she said. “They want their communities to be safe.”

It is a characterization that Gil-Garcia rejects.

“We have families that decided to open a small business, you know, we have families with children in the school system,” she said. “It’s a very minor percentage that committed criminal acts, but we cannot really go across the board and generalize against [the entire Venezuelan community].”

Panas en Chicago was founded in 2016 to support Venezuelan immigrants as they building their lives in United States. In an interview two days after Noem terminated the TPS extension, Luciana Diaz, the nonprofit’s CEO, said that “some bad guys” arrived as asylum-seekers, and she has no issue with them getting deported. But she said they are “a small percentage who don’t represent real Venezuelans.”

“We are worried about the innocents, people who don’t have criminal [history], who are scared to go back to Venezuela, who started a life here in Chicago,” she said. “We are really hard workers, we work hard. A lot of Venezuelans have two jobs, three jobs in Chicago.”

The 2024 Marshall Project analysis found no correlation between asylum-seekers being bused to northern cities and crime rates. While some cities saw increases, bothers didn’t — and even in Chicago, the spike was short-lived.

Both Diaz and Gil-Garcia said that, at the moment, there wasn’t much they could do except to let the community know about their rights and keep an eye on what’s coming out of Washington. They said they’ve been urging Venezuelans not to make hasty decisions and be leery of rumors.

“I say to my people — don’t follow social media, don’t follow some influencers,” Diaz said. “What we have to do is wait [for] official news from the government.”

Gil-Garcia said that one thing that gave her hope was what happened when the first Trump Administration tried to end TPS for El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Sudan in 2017. The ensuing lawsuit halted enforcement and was eventually settled in the plaintiffs’ favor. But Gil-Garcia said that, as of Feb. 5, she wasn’t aware of any such lawsuit on behalf of Venezuelans.

Diaz said that she has faith that everything will eventually work out.

“We are people who have faith, we are people who trust in God. In this moment, we trust in God’s control,” she said. “We are telling our community to calm down, to be patient, and to have the faith.”