The Trump Administration said Thursday Venezuelan Dictator-President Nicolás Maduro will again accept deported Venezuelans — a move experts say indicates a controversial oil deal is still likely, and which Venezuelans in the U.S. and South Florida say makes them more vulnerable to expulsion.
Trump’s envoy, Richard Grenell, announced on social media that Maduro had agreed to resume flying deportees from the U.S. back to Venezuela.
Maduro stopped those cooperative flights last month in response to Trump re-tightening oil sanctions against Maduro’s regime — which, in turn, resulted from outcry among Venezuelan exiles after Grenell remarked that Trump "was not interested in regime change" in Venezuela.
But experts on U.S.-Venezuela relations say Maduro would not be re-cooperating with Trump on receiving Venezuelan deportees unless he was hearing signals that the oil sanctions will eventually be loosened again.
“The Trump Administration and Trump himself are indeed not really interested in regime change in Venezuela," Phil Gunson, senior Venezuela analyst for the nonprofit International Crisis Group, told WLRN from Caracas.
"They’re looking to come to a deal — and that focuses on the willingness of Maduro to take back Venezuelan migrants, and a deal on Venezuelan oil.”
I am pleased to announce that Venezuela has agreed to resume flights to pick up their citizens who broke U.S. Immigration Laws and entered the U.S. illegally.
— Richard Grenell (@RichardGrenell) March 13, 2025
The flights will resume Friday.
READ MORE: Trump revokes Venezuela oil license after backlash from envoy's remarks
Trump recently cancelled deportation protections known as Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants in the U.S.
Venezuelan migrants have figured prominently in Trump's anti-immigration crusade because, during last year's presidential election, much of his MAGA voter based associated them with a small group of Venezuelan migrants tied to a violent Venezuelan gang known as Tren de Aragua, which had committed crimes in U.S. cities like New York and Aurora, Colorado.
As a result, even law-abiding Venezuelans who stand to lose TPS now now feel vulnerable again after hearing Maduro will, in fact, continue receiving deportees.
That angst is sharper because, while Trump promised that his deportation dragnet was interested only in migrants who've committed crimes, many of the almost 400 Venezuelan deportees the Maduro regime had flown back to Venezuela before stopping the flights last month did not have criminal records.
“If you were harboring some hopes that Maduro’s refusal [to take deportees] would make it difficult for Venezuelans to be sent back, this definitely opens a door that seemed to be closed," said Maria Alejandra Marquez, who heads the Venezuela watchdog INRAV in Miami.
The administration's decision to end TPS for Venezuelans affects two groups. The first — slated to expire next month — is for more than 348,000 Venezuelans in the U.S. The other is for the roughly 300,00 Venezuelans whose TPS permits are set to expire at the end of September.
The Venezuelan diaspora's other big question, of course, is whether Trump intends to keep leaning on Maduro's brutal and disastrous regime — which stole last summer's presidential election after vote tallies proved he had lost to opposition candidate Edmundo González by a landslide — or if he plans to keep pursuing the sort of bilateral relationship analysts like Gunson foresee.
Late last month, facing the backlash from Grenell's regime-change remarks, Trump announced he was revoking a license that allowed the U.S. oil firm Chevron to pump and export crude from Venezuela. It marked a major blow to Maduro, whose collapsed economy needs the revenue generated by oil production.
Maduro had in January agreed to receive Venezuelan deportees from the U.S., in what most diplomatic experts said was a deal that in which the U.S. would keep the Chevron license intact.
"On the one hand, Maduro very much needs large amounts of the kind of foreign capital that license represents, which is key to fixing his wrecked economy," said Gunson.
"But on the other, when you look at Trump's foreign policy worldwide, there's very much a focus on: how can we get our hands on strategic resources and commodities like minerals and oil — and much less on: how do we advance the cause of democracy."
In his Chevron announcement last month, Trump said a big reason he revoked the oil license was that Maduro was not ferrying Venezuelan deportees from the U.S. back to Venezuela "at the rapid pace that they had agreed to."
Axios reported that Trump may have also decided to revoke the license following pressure from Miami's three Republican members of Congress — who have long opposed any efforts to help Maduro maintain power, and who represent the bulk of South Florida's Venezuelan community, the largest in the U.S.
Citing four unnamed sources, Axios reported that U.S. Rep.'s Mario Diaz-Balart, Carlos Gimenez and Maria Elvira Salazar "suggested" they would withhold their votes on a contentious House budget resolution that Trump wanted approved. The House passed it 217-215.
