Carlos Rodríguez had finally begun to feel at home in the United States. He’d fled Venezuela in 2018 and spent the last six years building a future in Miami. He saved money with the dream of putting a down payment on a small house, adopted a dog after his first promotion and was quietly planning how to propose to his girlfriend.

But on Thursday night, the faint smell of coffee lingered in his apartment as he folded the last kitchen towel into a box — taking apart, piece by piece, the life he had worked so hard to create. The next day, he’d be giving his dog to the neighbors, ending his two-year relationship and boarding a flight to Spain.

Rodríguez, 30, is among the more than 600,000 Venezuelans who have, as of Friday, lost temporary protected status, or TPS — a designation that shielded them from deportation and allowed many to work and live in the United States. Overnight, some lost the jobs they’d held for years; others closed shops, walked away from leases and left homes standing empty. Many have also lost their licenses, health insurance and access to routine care.

The decision to revoke the protection triggered what Venezuelan American activist Adelys Ferro called “the largest mass illegalization of a group in this country’s history.” And it comes at a time when President Donald Trump is sinking alleged Venezuelan drug boats and gathering U.S. forces in the region, raising the possibility of land strikes.

“These are people who did everything by the book, paid taxes, had no criminal records, opened businesses and contributed to their communities,” Ferro said. “Now from one day to the other they’re subject to deportation and have become collateral damage in this cruel, unjust and inhumane political game.”

Across the country, the calculus looks different in each household. Many are scrambling to try to stay — waiting on pending asylum or change-of-status petitions, searching for lawyers, hoping for any reprieve that might keep them from deportation. Others, like Rodríguez, have decided to start over elsewhere. But even that has proved difficult.

After years of living here under TPS, countless Venezuelans now have expired passports and no embassy to renew them. The only place that would accept them with those documents is the very country they fled — one still gripped by an authoritarian regime.

“They’re essentially sending us back into the hands of our jailer,” said a 56-year-old Venezuelan journalist, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he fears retaliation from both the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. Fleeing politicians’ threats, the journalist arrived in the U.S. in 2016 and filed for asylum. The case has yet to be adjudicated, which made TPS crucial — giving him a measure of stability and a firmer legal footing.

“There’s just no winning: You can stay here and risk ending up in a detention center, or go back to Venezuela and end up in El Helicoide,” he said, referring to a notorious torture center in the South American nation.

Federal officials have argued that the TPS program for Venezuelans — which was first granted in 2021 under the Biden administration — became a “magnet” for “irregular migration” from that country. In a Federal Register notice from February, the Trump administration contended that there had been notable improvements in Venezuela in areas such as the “economy, public health, and crime.”

However, the assertion is belied by a year marked by political repression, economic collapse and mounting threats of war.

In 2024, Nicolás Maduro claimed victory in the presidential election despite voting center receipts collected by the opposition, and verified by The Washington Post and independent election observers, showing a landslide victory for the opposition candidate. He then unleashed a sweeping crackdown that has resulted in hundreds of detentions. Venezuela’s economy remains crippled. And the country is now hemmed in by the largest U.S. military presence off South America in decades — and bracing for a possible war.

The State Department also continues to caution Americans against traveling to Venezuela under any circumstance, warning of the “high risk of wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, and poor health infrastructure.”

Several immigration lawyers and experts raised concerns that the cancellation of TPS could force Venezuelans to return to potentially dangerous conditions in their homeland — even though U.S. immigration law “says that we cannot send people to a country where they would face persecution or torture,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst and attorney at the Migration Policy Institute. Some Venezuelans have been frantically scrubbing their social media and messaging accounts — deleting old posts, photos, even casual comments that mention the Venezuelan government or the opposition — in case they’re forced to return.

Florida-based immigration attorney John De La Vega said the administration’s decision to cancel TPS has felt like “a slap in the face” to Venezuelans in the U.S.

“On one hand, the government is telling citizens to leave Venezuela immediately and to not travel there, but on the other it’s saying that it will take away TPS because there are opportunities there,” he said. “It just doesn’t make sense and really shook up people here.”

Sudden farewells

Over the past weeks, Orlando has begun to feel like Caracas did in 2017, when a wave of protests and political persecution sent thousands of Venezuelans fleeing abroad: “Una ciudad de despedidas” — a city of farewells — said María, who agreed to speak on the condition of partial anonymity.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” she said. “It’s this heavy environment where people feel like they have to leave because there’s no hope.”

Every week, María’s group chats have filled with invitations to send-offs and updates about friends who have either left on their own or been detained and deported. Her best friend recently fled to Europe — departing before she could sell her home, which she is now trying to do from afar. Recently, María drove by an acquaintance’s restaurant and discovered it shuttered. She had also left the country.

“It’s been a year of absolute despair,” María said.

For months, Venezuelans have watched their fate volley among courts. The Trump administration announced the termination of the 2023 TPS designation — covering some 300,000 Venezuelans who arrived in the U.S. on or before July 31, 2023 — in February. A federal district court briefly blocked the termination, but the Supreme Court lifted that injunction in May, allowing the administration to move forward.

Then, in early September, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would also terminate the 2021 designation — the version protecting most long-term Venezuelan residents — and published the notice days later in the Federal Register, setting an effective end date of Nov. 7. That month, the district court issued a final order requiring the Trump administration to keep the TPS protections through October 2026, but the Supreme Court once again shot down the mandate. That case remains pending in federal appellate court.

Caught in that legal whiplash, María scrambled to find a way to stay legally in the United States. She applied for a student visa, hoping to start a master’s program. In October, she moved up her wedding to her longtime boyfriend by two months so she could file a green-card petition before TPS expired — the deadline after which she would lose her legal status and the ability to adjust it from within the United States.

While those petitions remain pending, she has already lost her authorization to work. A human resources specialist at a hotel, María said she had to lay off Venezuelan employees whose protections under the 2023 designation ended earlier this year — before handing in her own two weeks’ notice.

Likewise, in Washington, D.C., 29-year-old Diego Añez found himself racing against time. When the uncertainty around TPS began, his company stepped in to sponsor him for an H-1B work visa. Yet even with that safety net, he spent months in limbo, putting off plans to move into a bigger apartment because he was unsure if he would be allowed to stay.

“Everything was changing from one week to the next, so you felt like you couldn’t make long-term plans,” Añez said. “My biggest takeaway is that you just can’t plan more than a couple of weeks ahead.”

De La Vega, the attorney, said he suspected that the majority of Venezuelans would attempt to remain in the U.S. Throughout the year, his office has received a surge of calls and requests for help.

“People are anxious, but they’re also looking for lawyers because they truly cannot return to their country,” he said. “People are willing and trying to find alternatives to stay in the U.S. — where they have built their lives and have spent many years already — instead of returning to a place with all-time-high tensions. I mean, who wants to go back there now?”

‘A witch hunt’

But even those with open immigration cases to fall back on feel increasingly vulnerable, particularly as the Trump administration’s crackdown ensnares people with pending asylum claims and protections that would typically shield them from deportation. The targeting of Venezuelans — and the rhetoric surrounding them — has deepened that fear.

“Even though I know I’ve followed the law and have permission to be here, I’m still made to feel like a criminal,” said Reinaldo De Fernández, 24, who has a pending asylum case.

After being threatened by a politician in Venezuela, De Fernández said, he arrived in the United States in 2022 through humanitarian parole and was granted TPS the following year. In the time since, he’s earned an ESL certificate, a U.S. high school diploma and a college degree. He landed his dream job in journalism and helped build a school for children in his Indigenous Wayuu community in La Guajira, at Venezuela’s northwestern tip. In July, he represented that community at a United Nations human rights summit.

“I’m eternally grateful to this country for giving me the opportunities I had only dreamed of before,” De Fernández said. “Which makes what’s happening so heartbreaking. They’re criminalizing us, even though we’re trying to do good, pay taxes, build our careers and contribute to this country.”

When TPS was first revoked, De Fernández nearly lost his job. He was living in Los Angeles, where an uptick in immigration raids and arrests left him afraid to leave his home. He began taking overnight shifts to avoid being outside during the day.

“Nowadays, you just don’t feel protected enough with an open asylum case because outside it feels like a witch hunt is going on,” he said.

The cancellation of TPS and other Biden-era parole programs could worsen an already overwhelmed asylum system, said Bush-Joseph of the Migration Policy Institute. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has more than 1.5 million pending asylum cases, with 2.4 million more awaiting hearings in immigration courts, she said.

For Bush-Joseph, the moment underscores just how fragile protections like TPS have always been. The temporary status was never meant to be permanent, she said, yet over time it became a stand-in for the immigration reform Congress didn’t deliver.

“What we’re seeing now reflects how tenuous many people’s footing has been — in some cases, for decades,” she said. “Because Congress hasn’t acted, successive administrations — Trump’s, Biden’s and now this one — have increasingly turned to executive actions to deal with immigration issues. That’s how we ended up with so many people on temporary protected status in the first place.”

In Florida, the end of TPS feels like a personal heartbreak for Helene Villalonga, a Venezuelan American activist who spent more than a decade fighting for her community to receive the protection. Since the early 2010s, she has walked the halls of Congress, meeting with lawmakers from both parties and pleading for Venezuelans to be shielded from the dangers she knows too well. In 2009, her son was deported to Venezuela, she said — forced into hiding and later beaten by men connected to the government, she said.

“How can I not take it personally when the texts I’m receiving right now remind me of all the fear and anxiety I had when my son was deported?” Villalonga said. “What pains me most is that this has become a political issue — and that no one seems to acknowledge that nothing in Venezuela has changed.