The Trump Administration is revoking temporary protected status for more than 600,000 Venezuelan migrants across the US, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Wednesday morning.
The newly confirmed DHS secretary slammed her predecessor Alejandro Mayorkas for tying the Trump Administration’s hands and signing an order giving the staggering amount of Venezuelan migrants temporary protected status so they could “stay here and violate the laws” for another 18 months.
“We fought that today. We signed an executive order within the Department of Homeland Security that we are not going to follow through on what they did to tie our hands,” she announced on Fox News.
The new order would allow federal agents to “evaluate all these individuals that are in our country, including the Venezuelans that are here and the members of TDA (Tren de Aragua),” Noem said.
Noem, 53, noted that during her participation in the first raids in New York City since Trump’s crackdown, residents were thanking federal agents on the streets for nabbing criminal aliens.
“The people of this country want these debates out. They want their communities to be safe. It was so amazing to me to see people walk by us on the street early morning and just say thank you, thank you for being here,” she said.
The move by the Biden Administration, which would grant Venezuelan migrants an additional 18 months to access work permits through the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, was given an extension a little over a week before Trump re-entered the White House.
TPS provides work permits for migrants from up to 16 countries who want to stay in America rather than return to their home nations and face armed conflict, political instability or other threatening conditions.
The Biden Administration cited Venezuela’s “severe humanitarian emergency” when announcing the extension.
Trump, 78, scrapped TPS during his first term and expelled around 400,000 migrants before running into legal challenges.
The existing extensions do not expire until April, or September for some, and Noem’s rollback requires her to decide what to do with those protections by Saturday, The New York Times reported.
Venezuelan migrants have fled to the US in recent years as the country’s authoritarian leader, President Nicolás Maduro has brought on economic collapse and widespread ruin.
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