Give Venezuelans safe refuge here.

Where We Stand

It’s among the few things elected Republicans and Democrats in Florida can agree on lately. And in this case, common ground is common sense.

Thousands of Venezuelans have fled to the United States to escape violence, political repression and economic hardship at home. The Trump administration needs to add them to the list of foreign nationals who are temporarily permitted to live and work in this country without the risk of deportation.

Last week Florida’s senior U.S. senator, Democrat Bill Nelson, called on the administration to grant Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans in the United States. In May the administration extended TPS for Haitians; their home country is still struggling to recover from a punishing string of calamities, including an earthquake, a cholera epidemic, a long drought and a hurricane. “Just as in Haiti with natural disasters, there is a political disaster in Venezuela,” Nelson said.

Meanwhile, the Miami Herald recently reported that Florida’s junior U.S. senator, Republican Marco Rubio, has been working on the same goal as Nelson for months behind the scenes. He sent a letter in March seeking TPS for Venezuelans to U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly. “In light of the ongoing political, economic, social and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, it is not in the best interests of the United States to deport non-violent Venezuelan nationals back to the country at this time,” Rubio wrote.

Kelly is now the White House chief of staff, and has been succeeded at the Homeland Security Department by Acting Secretary Elaine Duke. The secretary has the authority to grant TPS to foreign nationals in the United States when circumstances in their home country — wars, natural disasters, epidemics or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions” — would threaten their safe return, or prevent their country from successfully reintegrating them. There’s no reasonable dispute that Venezuela meets this description. Government corruption and economic mismanagement have caused hyperinflation and shortages of food, medicine and other basics. Political violence amid a government crackdown on the opposition has claimed the lives of more than 120 people in recent months.

In July the authoritarian government of President Nicolas Maduro held an election, boycotted by the opposition, to name a new national assembly of loyalists to rewrite the country’s constitution to expand and cement his hold on power. Political opponents have been rounded up and thrown in prison.

Developments in Venezuela reverberate in Florida. There are at least 100,000 Venezuelans here, more than in any other state. That total includes permanent legal residents and naturalized American citizens, as well as those Venezuelan nationals driven away by Maduro’s misrule.

While most Venezuelans in Florida live in Broward and MiamiDade counties, more than 28,000 votes were cast in Central Florida in July in a straw poll conducted around the world to give Venezuelans living abroad an opportunity to express their opposition to the Maduro regime’s repression.

President Trump vowed during his campaign to take a hard line on immigration, but TPS is not a path to permanent legal status. It’s a temporary measure to allow foreign nationals to work legally and contribute fully to their communities. Making this allowance for Venezuelans makes far more sense, practically and morally, than sending them back into the clutches of the Maduro regime.