What happens now? The Murky Futures of Venezuelan Migrants Just Got Murkier

Versión en Español
March 2026

When Nicolas Maduro was captured by U.S. special forces on January 3 of this year, many Venezuelans reported breathing a big sigh of relief. Immediately after, many began to ask, “What happens now?” President Trump offered a blunt response: “We’re going to run the country, essentially.” He moved quickly to secure U.S. control of Venezuelan oil and compliance from the Maduro regime loyalists he left in place.

Marco Rubio was tasked with clarifying Trump’s words and implementing a three-phase plan. The first phase was about preventing migration in either direction, along with chaos or violence. This has allegedly been accomplished. The current phase is about “recovery,” focused on the oil industry. The last is about elections: “In the long run, our intention is for Venezuela to have a democratically elected government.”

Two months in, Venezuelans continue to experience a great deal of uncertainty about their future. They worry about how long this “long-run” will be; how long until the rule of law and constitutional rights are re-established and the institutions recover. As well as how long until oil rents, now controlled by the U.S., will begin to make a difference in the everyday lives of most Venezuelans who today live in poverty.

It turns out that for President Trump, running the country ‘essentially’ meant appointing himself “absentee landlord,” and dictating orders from Mar-a-Lago. It also meant appointing an effective capataz from the old regime, who would execute his extractivist economic agenda and quell any unrest that might perturb his plans. Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s vice president, was tapped for that job. In exchange for her compliance, she and her immediate circle of Chavistas could avoid a fate worse than Maduro’s and retain political power for an unknown period. Trump, in turn, could promise prospective oil and minerals investors a “safe business environment” and avoid a politically costly occupation—a win-win.

How this new joint regime will respond to the needs and aspirations of millions of Venezuelans abroad is everybody’s guess. This type of U.S.-managed regime has no historical precedent. It is Venezuela instead that is providing it in real time. Given these limitations, our only clues may be found in the history of how each government approached the exodus at key junctures, as well as in ongoing developments. Elsewhere, I offer a more detailed account of that history.

The Chavista regime approached its diaspora with a politically calibrated mixture of punitive measures, willful neglect and occasional welcomes. There is little reason to believe this formula will change much. Venezuelans abroad, particularly those who established a beachhead in the U.S., represent one of the most active and vocal segments of the Chavista opposition.

For its part, U.S. government responses have changed along with changes in the socio-economic profiles of Venezuelan immigrants, and American voters’ sentiments about who belongs and how many. Early waves (from about 2005 to about 2015) enjoyed the benefit of generous policies and a welcoming climate. These Venezuelans were more likely to arrive by plane, be in possession of a U.S. visa and hold savings in dollars. A significant percentage were highly educated and English proficient; they were upper-middle class professionals or entrepreneurs. Most could be marked as racially “white;” many had dual nationality and access to European passports. They are unlikely to ever return; they supported Trump in high numbers and, until recently, felt their future and their good image in the U.S. was secured.

Subsequent waves of migrants encountered increasingly harsh barriers to entry and fewer opportunities to make a living in the U.S. Most still ranked above other immigrants in terms of levels of education. However, they were less likely to speak English and more likely to be poor. The last wave formed circa 2019 and was composed of those arriving from other Latin American countries and Venezuela’s poorest regions. Many traveled by land, lacked access to a U.S. visa, and were quickly marked as “less white.” Huge numbers amassed along the Mexican-U.S. border fueling the ranks of undocumented and asylum-seeking Venezuelans. Few viewed returning as a viable option, and most still don’t.

It is this last wave that triggered an odious switch in government migration policy and popular sentiments toward them. Blanket characterizations of Venezuelans in the U.S went from being “great people” to “criminal aliens” between Trump’s first and current term. Even Venezuelans began to echo Trump’s anti-immigrant tropes and view the latest arrivals as less deserving. Some may have regrets.

President Biden had to walk a tightrope after the first Trump administration, balancing his party’s traditionally liberal stand toward immigrants and an American public growing increasingly weary of the huge exodus amassing at the border. He created a TPS (Temporary Protected Status) designation for nearly 250,000 Venezuelans, a number that grew to more than 600,000, and awarded humanitarian parole to more than 17,000. By the same token, Biden extended Trump’s pandemic-era Title 42 which forced Venezuelan asylum seekers to wait in Mexico. He also ended his term without renewing humanitarian parole, leaving hundreds of Venezuelans with little choice but to apply for an uncertain asylum status.

From the start of his second and current term, Trump sought to reverse all of Biden’s liberal policies and focus mainly on enforcement. He canceled TPS, issued travel bans, paused asylum processing, and deported thousands, many to third countries. Some detainees disappeared into remote prisons and were prevented from reaching relatives and attorneys. Federal courts have often ruled against Trump’s actions, but a sympathetic Supreme Court has reversed many of those rulings.

Those who escaped Venezuela’s increasingly authoritarian and corrupt regime, today find themselves in the unenviable position of deciding whether to return to a country where relatively little has changed for most of them, or stay in another whose government is acquiring similar authoritarian traits and wants them out. The future of all Venezuelans, migrants included, got even murkier under this unprecedented Trump-Delcy joint regime.

What are the likely scenarios to develop at this point? Trump is steadfast in his commitment to accelerate Venezuelan migrants’ return and to stop future flows from reaching the U.S. He expects Delcy to collaborate. Those with expired TPS or humanitarian paroles, along with many others hoping for asylum, are at highest risk of deportation. Together, Venezuelans in the process of asylum, plus those holding expired TPS and Humanitarian Parole, constitute more than half of the current Venezuelan immigrant population in the U.S. In their determined quest to not fall into illegality, they are now easily located for deportation through the ICE’s unprecedented access to government data bases. The future of the hundreds of thousands of displaced Venezuelans, of those in transit, or who were asked to remain in Mexico while seeking U.S. asylum is particularly grim.

Delcy may not be keen on the idea of millions of returning migrants opposed to her regime; or poor Venezuelans she cannot feed. But she may have little say in the matter. Late-breaking developments have added new urgency for Rubio to resolve the Venezuelan case as Trump has moved on to new world global ventures. The U.S. and Venezuela have re-established diplomatic relations which will help expedite or restrict the movement of peoples and capital between their two countries. There is little time for elections and Delcy has suddenly been formally recognized by Trump as the “elected” president of Venezuela.

Under Delcy’s presidency, migrants would likely be treated with the same mixture of neglect, minimal support, and punitive measures. The return of stigmatized migrants, as well as competition for the U.S-administered resources, could pressure the regime into limiting assistance to new arrivals or to those stranded in transit and third countries. Delcy’s brother and head of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodriguez, already signaled that a new amnesty law will not apply to Venezuelans who had applied to TPS or political asylum under the “false claim” that they had been persecuted by the Maduro regime. “Preventing” future migration without addressing the same, but even more powerful, drivers that triggered the exodus is a fool’s errand. Today, thousands of Venezuelans living in mining, indigenous, coastal and border communities are confronting severe environmental crises that are nowhere addressed in Rubio’s three-phase plan.

It’s all-but-certain that the U.S. government will stay the course, regardless of who wins the next U.S. or Venezuelan elections—if there are any. New visas are already being reserved for top talent, wealthy investors, and white refugees. Democrats may re-introduce some humanity into the immigration discourse, but the door will most likely remain shut for most. The era of migration that began in the 1960s, is now over and the U.S. is no longer a preferred destination. Other than Spain, very few other countries are still extending a warm welcome to Venezuelan migrants. What is certain, is that despite their diminished power and resources, Venezuelans will continue to move, as humans always have, against all odds and whenever they sense it’s necessary to protect their lives, their livelihoods and their families. Rubio’s declaration that the first phase of “preventing migration” has been accomplished is premature, to say the least.

Note: Dr. Lourdes Gouveia is the founding director of the Office of Latino/Latin American Studies (OLLAS) and an Emerita Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. She has published several academic articles and book chapters on Venezuelan migration in the Americas, as well as community research reports on the Latino community in Nebraska.