Biden grants TPS to Venezuelans, plans new sanctions on Maduro
The Biden administration
President Joe Biden offered humanitarian protections to Venezuelans that will ease the threat of deportation for over 320,000 eligible individuals who have sought refuge in the United States.
offered humanitarian protections to Venezuelans on Monday that would alleviate the threat of deportation for over 320,000 eligible individuals who have
sought refuge in the United States.
The administration determined that Venezuelans qualify for Temporary Protected Status and also vowed to review imposing new sanctions that would further isolate Nicolás Maduro. Over 5.4 million Venezuelans have fled their country in recent years, according to the United Nations, among the largest displacement crises in the world.
“The living conditions in Venezuela reveal a country in turmoil, unable to protect its own citizens,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement. “It is in times of extraordinary and temporary circumstances like these that the United States steps forward to support eligible Venezuelan
nationals already present here, while their home country seeks to right itself out of the current crises.”
Eligible Venezuelans have 180 days to apply for the protective status, which requires a $50 application fee, an $85 biometrics fee and a $410 fee for those seeking work authorization. Individuals will also undergo a background check and are required to provide proof they entered the United States before the March 8 order was issued.
Once granted, the protective status lasts for up to 18 months. Biden administration officials underscored that TPS protections could be extended, but that they are not permanent, and that the action should not be a signal to Venezuelans outside of the United States to come.
“We very much expect that smugglers and other unscrupulous individuals will be now claiming that the border is open, and that is not the case,” one administration official told reporters in a call.
For years, a bipartisan group of senators lobbied former President Donald Trump to grant TPS to Venezuelans.
Instead, on the last day of his presidency, he issued a memorandum deferring the forced departure of Venezuelans without legal status in the United States.
In addition to fulfilling a campaign promise by President Joe Biden, the TPS designation puts to rest a years-long fight in Congress. Republicans in the U.S. Senate blocked attempts to pass TPS, and the Trump administration didn’t act until after the 2020 election.
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said he supports the TPS designation.
“Venezuela remains a nation in crisis,” Rubio said in a statement. “I have long advocated providing muchneeded relief to help eligible Venezuelan nationals residing in the U.S. with a work permit and a temporary solution, which is exactly what the Trump Administration did earlier this year. I am glad the Biden Administration shares that commitment, and I support granting TPS status to eligible Venezuelan nationals currently in the U.S.”
The Deferred Enforced Departure (DED) order issued by Trump remains in place, and “the protection is essentially the same,” a Biden administration official said. But TPS provides a structure for these individuals more grounded in law.
“The individuals who apply for and receive TPS and are also covered by DED don’t need to apply for employment authorization documents under both programs,” the official said. “People can make their selection, if you will.”
But Miami Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, who authored legislation that would grant TPS to Venezuelans, said in a statement that Venezuelans applying for work authorization under TPS will need to pay fees that do not exist under the DED designation. Diaz-Balart has asked the Department of Homeland Security for clarification on the procedures to obtain work authorization under DED.
“Rather than Venezuelans automatically being protected by DED, as they were under the Trump Administration, they will need to apply for TPS and pay a fee, which was not required under DED,” Diaz-Balart said in a statement.
DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the differences in the work authorization process.
The TPS designation comes after Florida Republicans campaigned on Venezuela
policy for years, using the nation’s humanitarian crisis as a rallying cry for Venezuelans and other Hispanics in Miami-Dade County. Republicans repeatedly hammered local Democrats for statements by others in the party that were seen as conciliatory toward the Maduro regime and Cuba.
While South Florida Democrats pushed back against statements by some in their party who referred to the recognition of Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate leader as “a U.S.-backed coup,” Hispanic voters in MiamiDade County swung sharply toward Republicans during the 2020 election and helped Trump win Florida by 3.3%.
Local Democrats celebrated the TPS designation on Monday.
“By using the law to lift the threat of deportation and grant employment authorization, the Biden administration helps hundreds of thousands of families stay safe and earn a living without fear of being returned to Maduro’s dangerous and cruel regime,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who represents thousands of Venezuelan Americans in Broward and Miami-Dade counties.
As of this week, 19 Venezuelans remained detained at the Broward Transitional Center in South Florida — the
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center that for years has remained the hub facility for Venezuelans awaiting deportation. It is unclear how many are detained nationwide.
U.S. SANCTIONS ALONE ‘HAVE NOT SUCCEEDED’
Following in line with the Trump administration, Biden is continuing to recognize the 2015 National Assembly as the last remaining democratic institution in Venezuela, and Guaidó as the nation’s interim president.
Leaders of the Venezuelan community in the United States immediately celebrated the announcement.
“This measure will allow them to live, work and be legally protected in the United States, resting on the knowledge that they will not be deported,” said Carlos Vecchio, Guaidó’s diplomatic representative to the United States. “Venezuelans are hardworking, intelligent and productive people that have much to contribute to the progress and prosperity of the United States.”
Biden officials said the administration is working to broaden a pressure campaign on Maduro that began under Trump by coordinating new sanctions with several other countries, including allies in Latin America
and the European Union. The U.S. has instituted stricter sanctions than any other nation thus far. Opposition leaders have been pressing other countries to institute similar measures in a bid to further isolate Maduro.
“We have to recognize here that unilateral sanctions over the last four years have not succeeded in achieving an electoral outcome in the country,” a second senior administration official said.
“The United States is going to continue to increase the pressure,” the official said. “It’s going to expand that pressure multilaterally to ensure that those that are guilty of human rights abuses, that are robbing the Venezuelan people, that are engaged in rampant criminal activity find no quarter anywhere until they sit down to the table in earnest.”
Michael Wilner: 202-383-6083, @mawilner Antonio Maria Delgado: 305-3762180, https://twitter.com/ DelgadoAntonioM
Alex Daugherty: 202-383-6049, @alextdaugherty
Monique O. Madan: 305-376-2108, @MoniqueOMadan
Jury selection for a former Minneapolis police officer charged in George Floyd’s death was halted before it began Monday by the state’s effort to add a third-degree murder charge.
As hundreds of protesters rallied outside the courthouse to call for Derek Chauvin’s conviction, Judge Peter Cahill said he did not have jurisdiction to rule on whether the thirddegree murder charge should be reinstated while the issue is being appealed.
Cahill initially ruled jury selection would begin as scheduled, but after prosecutors asked the Court of Appeals to put the case on hold, the judge sent the potential jurors home for the day and the rest of the day was spent ruling on motions. Cahill later said jury selection would resume Tuesday barring an order from the appellate court.
There was no indication when that court will rule, but a hold could delay Chauvin’s trial for weeks.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed to dismiss 16 potential jurors “for cause” based on their answers to a lengthy questionnaire. Those dismissals weren’t debated in court but can happen for a host of reasons, such as views that indicate a juror can’t be impartial.
Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter in Floyd’s death. The Court of Appeals last week ordered Cahill to consider reinstating a third-degree murder charge that he had dismissed. Legal experts say reinstating the charge would improve the odds of getting a conviction. Chauvin’s attorney, Eric Nelson, said Monday he would ask the state Supreme Court to review the issue.
For the unintentional second-degree murder charge, prosecutors have to prove Chauvin’s conduct was a “substantial causal factor“in Floyd’s death, and that Chauvin was committing felony assault at the time. For third-degree murder, they must prove that Chauvin’s actions caused Floyd’s death, and that his actions were reckless and without regard for human life.
Floyd was declared dead May 25 after Chauvin, who is white, pressed his knee against the Black man’s neck for about nine minutes, holding his position even after Floyd went limp. Floyd’s death sparked sometimes violent protests in Minneapolis and beyond and led to a nationwide reckoning on race.
Chauvin and three other officers were fired; the others face an August trial on charges of aiding and abetting.
Inside the courtroom, Bridgett Floyd, George Floyd’s sister, sat in the seat allocated to Floyd’s family.
Afterward, Floyd said her family is glad the trial has finally arrived and is “praying for justice.”
“I sat in the courthouse today and looked at the officer who took my brother’s life,” she said. “That officer took a great man, a great father, a great brother, a great uncle.”
Jury selection could take at least three weeks.
A Supreme Court justice on Monday annulled all convictions against former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a ruling that potentially would allow him to run again for the presidency next year.
The decision also laid bare the country’s political divisions, with leftists celebrating their 75-yearold leader’s return to the political arena as conservatives said the rulings were tantamount to impunity.
Others saw the ruling, based on procedural grounds, as an attempt to preserve a vast embattled corruption investigation that has led to convictions of powerful businessmen and politicians but has been accused of impropriety.
The decision by Justice Luiz Edson Fachin drew
no conclusions about the mammoth “Car Wash” investigation centered on state-run giant Petrobras, from which the da Silva probes emerged. It said, instead, that the federal court that convicted da Silva twice of corruption and money laundering, didn’t have jurisdiction to put the leftist leader on trial.
Fachin said the cases
will be sent to the federal court of Brazil’s Federal District, where they can begin anew.
But Deltan Dallagnol, who prosecuted da Silva as head of the the Car Wash task force, said on Twitter that the ruling might end the case against the former president altogether because the statute of limitations might have run out. Da Silva still faces other
prosecutions in Brasilia, but those are far from any final decision.
Da Silva’s lawyers issued a statement welcoming the decision, saying it “is aligned with everything we have said for more than five years in these suits.”
But Brazilian media reported that the country’s prosecutor-general Augusto Aras, an ally of conservative President Jair Bolsonaro, is preparing to appeal the decision.
Da Silva has been a dominant figure in Brazilian politics for decades, first as firebrand metalworkers’ union organizer who launched failed bids for the presidency, then as the charismatic everyman whose popularity grew on the job as president from 2003 to 2010 thanks to hefty government handouts to the poor and infrastructure investments during the country’s commodities boom.
He left office with an approval rating in the mid-80s, and former U.S. President Barack Obama referred to him as the most popular politician on
Earth. But his star fell in recent years as Brazil’s economy slumped and corruption scandals involving the former leader and those around him gained traction.
He was boxed out of the 2018 election by the first of his two criminal convictions, which came in July 2017.
To have the Biden administration reopen the for-profit shelter for unaccompanied migrant children is an affront to the spirit of multiculturalism that defines South Florida.
It is imperative that lawmakers push for increased transparency to ensure detained children are safe and in good health, considering widespread allegations of sexual abuse and neglect.
Under the Trump administration, several federal and state lawmakers, alongside human-rights NGOs, were denied entry to the facility.
Democrats (and Republicans, too) need to allow scrutiny of these detention centers, so the public can rest assured the Biden administration is delivering on its promises to reunite the separated families and end immigrants’ indefinite detention.
– Jackson Ribler, Homestead