The current presidential administration is protecting Americans by preventing Venezuelan drug boats from delivering their deadly payloads and trying to remove Venezuelan gang members from the United States.
However, the Venezuelans are receiving support in their attempts to remain in the U.S.
How, why, and who, supplies that support?
Biden-Harris Team Imports Venezuelans
In 2021,the Biden-Harris administration permitted the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Alejandro Mayorkas to designate Venezuelans as eligible for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for two years to allow its citizens to obtain work in the U.S. and not be deported.
The TPS program was established by the U.S. Congress as part of the Immigration Act of 1990 to provide humanitarian relief for non-citizens whose countries were facing ongoing armed conflicts, environmental disasters, or other extraordinary circumstances that made their return unsafe.
In 2022 the Biden-Harris-Mayorkas team made Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), eligible for a temporary humanitarian parole program.
Q: “Humanitarian” for whom?
In January 2023 the Biden-Harris-Mayorkas team extended the TPS status for two more years, which permitted 117,000 Venezuelans to enter from January 2023 to December 2024.
It is estimated that – since that administration denies keeping count – that under the CHNV program, 500,000 unvetted immigrants were flown over the border patrol and into the U.S. Approximately 49% of the Venezuelans were flown to Florida and 14% to Texas.
Q: California only received 3%; was that a “coincidence” or a political plan?
In January 2025 the Biden-Harris-Mayorkas team extended the TPS for two more years for the estimated 607,000 Venezuelans covered.
Trump Team Labeling and Deporting
On February 20, 2025, President Donald Trump‘s administration designated the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). This action was part of a broader effort by the administration to target transnational criminal organizations to reduce crime and drugs.
In February 2025 President Donald Trump and the Secretary of DHS Kristi Noem ended the TPS program and focused on deporting those illegals who had criminal records.
Obama Judge Tries to Stop Deportations
On February 20, 2025, the National TPS Alliance and Venezuelan TPS holders filed a lawsuit against the United States DHS challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to terminate TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans. The plaintiffs, despite there only being 3% in California, selected the Federal District Court in San Francisco, or more specifically Judge Edward Chen, appointed by Obama, who as a senior judge has some input into which cases he takes.
In March 2025, as predicted, Judge Chen issued a national Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) prohibiting DHS from ending the TPS designation and its extensions. Judge Chen calling Secretary Noem’s conduct “unprecedented” and suggesting that her decision had been “predicated on negative stereotypes” about Venezuelans migrants, conveyed more about the judge’s prejudice than it did about Secretary Noem.
Emergency Orders
On May 19, the Supreme Court issued an Emergency Order blocking Judge Chen’s TRO. Of course, Justice Ketanji Jackson – appointed by Biden – dissented. The case was returned to Judge Chen for fact finding.
On September 5, Judge Chen ruled that Secretary Noem had acted unlawfully in ending the 2023 designation of TPS and its extension. Judge Chen distinguished this decision from the one the justices had paused in May by writing in a footnote that the earlier order “only concerns the preliminary relief ordered by this Court in postponing agency action.” That order did not, he stated, stop him “from adjudicating the case on the merits and entering a final judgment issuing relief.”
After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit declined to block Chen’s Sept. 5 ruling, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court for an Emergency Order because the justices’ “prior order makes the lower courts’ denial of a stay indefensible,” and he pointed to what he characterized as “an ongoing parade of lower-court decisions that have threatened ‘the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress’ by disregarding or defying this Court’s stay orders.”
Supreme Court Stops Obama Judge
On October 3, in an unsigned order the Supreme Court once again cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan nationals of their protected status under the TPS program by pausing the ruling by Judge Chen.
The Court wrote that roughly four-and-a-half months ago they blocked a temporary order by the same judge and “The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here.”
Of course, the three Democratic appointees – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – dissented.
Who, How, Why?
This case illustrates the who and why of the support the Biden-Harris team used to increase, and keep, the Venezuelan gangs and drugs in the U.S. but leaves unanswered:
Q: Why?
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Thank you, Brent, excellent column. And I love your sly question at the end: Why? My answer, for what it's worth: If Antifa can be deemed an International Terrorist Organization, then shouldn't the Biden administration be deemed one, too?
The goal of the Left is to destroy the cohesiveness of the U.S. In my opinion Progressives are a cult, and if they are not a cult, they operate like a cult by requiring uniformity of thought, intimidating its members from considering different thoughts by, inter alia, threatening harm to those who express different ideas, and demonizing those who are outsiders. Berney