COMMENTARY Venezuelans and other migrant groups see leaders like Marco Rubio no longer have their backs — because today, boosting deportations matters more than bolstering democracy.
When Donald Trump launched his political comeback in late 2023 by declaring immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” I tried to warn migrant communities such as Venezuelans that he meant them, too.
A lot of Venezuelans, you see, prefer that America consider them a white cohort — meaning, not really “Latinos” in that blood-poisoned way that xenophobes, like Trump, think of Latinos.
So when they heard Trump’s call to purify the homeland’s hemoglobin, those Venezuelans told themselves: “He’s not talking about me. He’s talking about those foreign-looking Guatemalan Maya out in the Redland picking tomatoes.”
Ditto last year, when they heard Trump’s abominable lie that Haitians were “eating people’s pets” in Ohio. Venezuelans reassured themselves: “He would never brand us that way.”
Until he did.
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Until he associated all Venezuelans with criminals, specifically the Venezuelan gang known as Tren de Aragua.
That equally abominable conflation has given Trump and his administration a pretext for deporting hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants — an effort the Supreme Court OK’d this week when it said Trump can revoke their Temporary Protected Status. That TPS shields them from being sent back to Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis and brutal dictatorship.
Quite a bit has been written and broadcast in the days since the high court's ruling about the raw and understandable sense of betrayal being registered in Venezuelan enclaves like Doral — where Trump won almost two-thirds of the vote last November.
It matters little to this administration if migrants get sent back to despotic if not deadly conditions programs like TPS were created to guard them from.
But something else happened this week — not in Washington D.C. but in El Salvador — to remind Venezuelans of the gaping disconnect between their migrant plight and Trump's MAGA priorities.
Sunday night, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s police arrested leading human rights activist Ruth López. She’s accused, with no evidence, of “embezzlement;” she’s being held in an undisclosed location with no access to legal representation.
Jose Miguel Cruz, who heads Florida International University’s Center for the Administration of Justice and is himself Salvadoran, told me López’s detention is “a serious warning” from the authoritarian Bukele that her sort of open criticism of his regime “won’t be tolerated.”
'World's coolest dictator'
This is the same Bukele who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator” and is currently Trump’s favorite leader in Latin America. That’s largely because Bukele has been taking hundreds of deported Venezuelan and other migrants from the U.S. — all accused, often falsely and with no due process, of being gangbanger “terrorists” — into his notorious CECOT high-security prison.
This is also the same Bukele whom Trump’s Secretary of State, Miami’s own Marco Rubio, again defended on Capitol Hill this week — just a couple days after López vanished — when questioned about the administration’s questionable defense of global democracy.
What does that all have to do with Venezuelans? Or Haitians or Salvadorans or any other migrant group in Trump’s expulsion crosshairs?
It’s all an indication of that very real concern Rubio heard at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing this week — that deportation ranks higher than democracy in the halls of Trump 2.0.
That it matters little to this administration if people get sent back en masse to the kind of despotic if not deadly conditions that programs like TPS were created to guard them from, whether it’s socialist dictatorship in Venezuela, gang dictatorship in Haiti … or Bukele dictatorship in El Salvador.
That’s why Rubio, who once championed TPS for groups like Venezuelans but now endorses its elimination, has signed on to Trump’s nativist crusade. It’s why Rubio, who as a U.S. Senator once exalted America’s pro-democracy work around the world via agencies like USAID, now parrots Trump’s decree that neither that work nor those agencies are “in the U.S.’s interests.”
Don't forget that Trump — the man who derailed Rubio’s presidential ambitions a decade ago while mocking him as “Little Marco” — is now mentioning Rubio in the same breath with Vice President JD Vance as a worthy presidential successor in 2028. So Rubio — the man who back then called Trump a fear-mongering “con artist” — now treats Trump like Winston Churchill.
As a result, migrant communities, especially Venezuelans, are watching as leaders who they once thought had their backs now back away and chase the kind of Faustian bargain that's seducing Rubio.
Call it rather the Bukelean bargain that’s poisoning the decency of our country.
