Asylum rhetoric running into reality
Trump backs fight vs. Maduro, but US mostly rejecting Venezuela exodus
TIJUANA, Mexico — Lionel Ortega had worked as an engineer for nearly 40 years for the Venezuelan state oil company when he walked off the job last October, defying authorities who demanded he stay and oversee repairs to the crumbling infrastructure that is choking off the lifeblood of the country’s beleaguered government.
“We are in a crisis in Venezuela,” Ortega told the welders he oversaw. “If you need to stay, you should stay.”
Men working for the government of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro got to Ortega’s home before he could. They beat up his wife and children and burned his home to the ground, Ortega said recently at a shelter in the hills of Tijuana.
“They are asking for you,” Ortega’s wife told him. “Don’t come home.”
Ortega fled north, joining a wave of Venezuelans seeking asylum elsewhere in the hemisphere. Nearly 3.9 million people have fled Venezuela, with millions more expected to follow this year, according to William Spindler, spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency.
As a result, Venezuela has overtaken China to become the No. 1 country of origin for those claiming asylum in the U.S. upon arrival or shortly after, with nearly 30,000 Venezuelans applying for asylum with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in 2018. Nearly one-third of claims filed with the agency come from Venezuelans, the most of any country by far, according to the latest data.
That has created a dilemma for the Trump administration in which its foreign policy, which considers Maduro’s government an oppressive dictatorship, is colliding with its immigration policy, which has sought aggressively to hold down the number of people admitted to the country through asylum.
President Donald Trump has railed against asylum applicants, saying that many are engaging in a “hoax” and a “big, fat con job.”
Many Central American asylum-seekers, who are Trump’s primary target, fall into a different category than the Venezuelans. But because of the foreign policy focus on Venezuela, the asylum-seekers from that country pose a more direct challenge to the administration’s antiimmigration agenda.
Only about 2% of those granted asylum in the U.S. are Venezuelan, according to a Homeland Security report in March. While approval rates appear to be increasing, about 50% of Venezuelan asylum claims are denied, on average. Those denied asylum are at risk of deportation back to their home country.
The administration has resisted a bipartisan push — including from Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, an avowed hawk on Venezuela — to grant Venezuelans the right to stay in the U.S. under so-called temporary protected status. That program, designed to deal with people fleeing natural disasters or civil unrest, offers recipients protection from removal and the right to work legally in the U.S. But administration officials have sought to dismantle the program as part of their wider efforts to reduce immigration.
“There’s obviously a huge contradiction between the way the U.S. government characterizes the Venezuelan regime and the refusal to have a more flexible immigration policy toward Venezuelans,” said Cynthia Arnson, director of the Latin American program at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank.
The Trump administration has stepped up deportations of Venezuelans.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 336 Venezuelans last year, far fewer than the tens of thousands of Central Americans being removed each year, but a 35% increase over the year prior.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who has pushed for granting temporary status to Venezuelans, said Trump’s policy is counterproductive.
“Blocking Venezuelan refugees from seeking safe haven and forcing them to return home at this very dangerous time plays right into Maduro’s hands,” Durbin said.
The economic implosion of Venezuela, whose vast oil resources once helped make it South America’s wealthiest country, is nearly unprecedented in modern history outside a war zone.
The world’s highest inflation rate, scarcity of food and basic services, skyrocketing homicides, and corruption and persecution from Maduro’s increasingly authoritarian regime have precipitated one of the largest migrations in the Western Hemisphere.
Trump has responded with crippling sanctions intended to force Maduro to step down and hand over power to Juan Guaido, the opposition leader whom the United States and many other nations recognize as interim president. American officials have threatened military intervention and called on Venezuelans to help overthrow Maduro’s regime, though Guaido has failed to mobilize such a popular uprising.
But the sanctions, particularly on Venezuela’s state oil company, where Ortega worked, have exacerbated the country’s collapse, experts say. The penalties make it tougher for Venezuela to import food and medication, and are accelerating the exodus, said Adam Isacson, a defense expert at the Washington Office on Latin America.
The vast majority of Venezuelans have fled to neighboring countries, with some 1.2 million in Colombia.
Mexico has also seen an increase in Venezuelans seeking asylum there. Most are approved.
While many Venezuelans fly to the United States, an increasing number of Venezuelan asylum-seekers are likely to show up in Tijuana and present themselves at the U.S. border with thousands of others, like Ortega.
“The Maduro government considers me a traitor,” he said. “I can’t go back because I will be killed.”