U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem delivers remarks to staff at the Department of Homeland Security headquarters on Jan. 28, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta-Pool/Getty Images)
Six days after taking office, the Trump administration canceled temporary protected status for the 350,000 Venezuelans who received it in 2023. Now a nonpartisan research organization is saying the ruling is likely illegal because the Department of Homeland Security did nothing to check if it’s safe to return to the impoverished, crime-infested country.
Homeland Security Secretary Krisi Noem canceled the protections four days after Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost led 17 other Republican attorneys general in calling on the immigrant-averse administration to review counties’ Temporary Protected Status designations.
Yost claimed some were safe countries to return to, but he didn’t name any. When asked to, his office said that wasn’t Yost’s job.
Estimated to have the highest crime rate in the world, Venezuela has been impoverished for the past decade as a result of economic mismanagement by anti-democratic socialists Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro. The country is said to be dominated by mega-gangs that engage in drug trafficking, extortion, kidnappings, and contract killings. And the U.S. Justice Department has charged the Maduro government itself with narco-terrorism, corruption, drug trafficking, and other crimes.
Unless it’s blocked, Noem’s order gives the 350,000 protected Venezuelans 60 days after its issue to leave.
Yet, according to the report released last week by the National Foundation for American Policy, Noem’s agency didn’t do the first thing to ensure that it’s safe to send people back there.
“In the Federal Register notice terminating (Temporary Protected Status) for Venezuela, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not cite a single source for the conclusion that there are ‘notable improvements in several areas’ in Venezuela,” it said. “That contradicted the assessment DHS delivered two weeks earlier under (Biden appointee) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, which cited 52 sources to support its conclusion that conditions in Venezuela warranted a continuation of TPS.”
Noem’s action probably violates the law, the report said.
“It is arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act to ignore key facets of the TPS statute to achieve a political result,” the report said. “In the 2019 case Saget v Trump, a district court found that the Trump administration’s TPS termination for Haiti was likely unlawful and granted a nationwide injunction. ‘The sequence of events leading up to the decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS was a stark departure from ordinary procedure, suggestive of a predetermined outcome not anchored in an objective assessment, but instead a politically motivated agenda,’ according to the court.”
In canceling the protected status of Venezuelans who were granted it in 2023, Noem — who had taken office days earlier — said that members of the gang Tren de Aragua had such status and were committing crimes, so TPS for Venezuela was not in the national interest.
The research organization Insight Crime reports that there’s little evidence that members of the gang are committing significant amounts of crime in the United States, much less doing so under Temporary Protected Status. Instead, the analysis said, such claims might be used as an excuse for mass deportations of Venezuelans who had earlier been told they could stay in the U.S. because it was too dangerous to go home.
The report by the National Foundation for American Policy added another relevant fact: The Department of Homeland Security doesn’t renew protected status for people who commit crime.
In a statement announcing his call for the Trump administration to consider canceling Temporary Protected Status designations for some countries, Yost claimed some were now safe.
“This program has been applied too loosely, allowing noncitizens to live here indefinitely, even after it’s safe for them to return home,” Yost, who is making a 2026 run for governor, said.
He didn’t name an individual recipient or a country with TPS status that would be safe. Of the 17 such countries, 11 are on the U.S. State Department’s do not travel list. All have significant security problems, whether from criminal gangs, civil unrest, or extrajudicial arrest, torture, and execution by their governments.
Haiti is a particular basket case as it grinds on in a state of near-anarchy. But the earlier court ruling against him and facts on the ground didn’t stop Trump and some Ohio politicians from attacking Springfield’s Haitians last summer.
They were terrorized after Trump and now-Vice President J.D. Vance spread the racist lie that Haitian protectees were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets. That sparked dozens of bomb threats — including at elementary schools — and reports of physical attacks on Haitian migrants.
Yost joined the pile-on by creating a false equivalence between claims churning through the rumor mill and statements by the city government saying that Haitian residents were not doing what those rumors claimed.
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