Since President Trump took office again, Venezuelans have been a particular target of his controversial crackdown on migrants — and a new Florida International University poll suggests that's quickly eroded the enthusiastic support he and his party enjoyed among Florida's Venezuelans last November.
In its survey of hundreds of Florida Venezuelans — "Deported, Divided, Determined: The Venezuelan American Political Landscape" — FIU's Latino Public Opinion Forum presents a community polarized and largely soured on Trump, as well as leading Florida Republicans like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Miami's GOP congressional delegation.
Almost 80% of the respondents, half of whom are U.S. citizen voters, say Trump's move to end Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelan migrants — which a federal judge has currently put on pause — is unjust. Almost as many say the same about his ending their humanitarian parole, an executive action that has also been halted by a federal court halt.
And most feel Trump’s deportation of Venezuelans to El Salvador — after accusing them of being "terrorist" gang members without due process — is not lawful. In that case, too, a federal judge has ruled that Trump's use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in those cases is not constitutional.
"This survey definitely shows that the Venezuelan community is not monolithic now. There is a very profound polarization, between those who've been in this country longer and those who came in the last decade or so."FIU political science professor Eduardo Gamarra.
Those responses to Trump's immigration policies and about Trump himself, however, are starkly divided between Florida Venezuelans who have been in the U.S. for 15 years or longer — who tend to remain supportive of Trump — and those who are more recently arrived.
"This survey definitely shows that the Venezuelan community is not monolithic now," FIU political science professor Eduardo Gamarra, who heads the Latino Public Opinion Forum, told WLRN.
"There is a very profound polarization, between those who've been in this country longer and those who came in the last decade or so, and also between those voted for Trump and are still happy with that choice and those who voted for him and now regret it."
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In fact, of the Venezuelans who voted for Trump in November — often referred to as MAGAzuelans — half in the FIU survey now say they regret or have mixed feelings about their choice.
Almost 40% of them said they will in the future vote for either a Democratic, independent or non-MAGA candidate.
That's all a marked turnaround from November, when Trump won almost two-thirds of the vote in Florida’s largest Venezuelan enclave, the city of Doral (aka Doralzuela).
One of the poll's notable points is that only 32% of the Florida Venezuelan respondents who voted in November said openly that they voted for Trump — despite the 61% he scored in Doral — while more than a fifth preferred not to say whom they voted for.
Gamarra says it would require more research to determine if that suggests a sizable cohort of Venezuelan Trump voters no longer want to admit their vote for him. But he says it's not unusual to see voters in such surveys take that tack when things seem to being going badly for a president or politician they backed.
Popularity of other GOP figures also hit
The survey also indicates Florida Venezuelans are down on state Republican figures like Rubio, who has supported Trump's Venezuelan TPS policy. The poll registers a 60% unfavorable view of him.
Likewise, 43% of respondents say Miami-Dade County's U.S. Representatives, Mario Diaz-Balart, Maria Elvira Salazar and Carlos Gimenez, have not adequately stood up for the Venezuelan diaspora amid Trump's actions on both immigration and his approach to confronting Venezuela's brutal left-wing dictatorship.
That trio has urged Trump to tread more softly on immigration benefits for Venezuelans. And Salazar in particular has sponsored legislation that would put many Venezuelans migrants on a path to legal residency.
Still, asked if they would back any of those three in 2026 midterm elections, 41% of the survey's voter respondents said no and only 31% said yes.
Gamarra points out that Florida's Venezuelan electorate totals only about 100,000 voters. Still, that bloc helped Trump win Miami-Dade County in November — the first time a Republican presidential candidate had done that since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
"If this polarization in the Venezuelan electorate deepens," Gamarra says, "it could make things closer in Miami's congressional districts in 2026."
The other side of that polarization coin, of course, is that half of Venezuelan Trump voters, according to the survey, say they don't regret their choice.
That's especially true of those who have been in the U.S. longer and tend to agree with Trump's hardline on immigration because they often feel more recently arrived Venezuelans have been a liability to the diaspora.
Critics of that more established Venezuelan exile cohort, however, say its disparaging attitude has given Trump a pretext for associating all Venezuelan migrants with criminals like Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang whose presence in the U.S. was a staple of Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric during the 2024 campaign.
The FIU survey also features several quotes and testimonials from respondents:
"You can't make overnight decision that crush people's dreams," one angry Venezuelan humanitarian parole recipient wrote about Trump's attempt to end the program immediately, making migrants deportable even if they still have months left on the parole to be here legally.
"We followed the rules. Now we're left anxious and stressed by leaders who change their minds depending on how they wake up."
One respondent who is a U.S. citizen, however, wrote that Trump is right because Venezuela's dictatorship "used [U.S.] open-border policies [under former President Biden] as a Trojan horse to infiltrate criminal groups like Tren de Aragua" in to the U.S.
Several national polls in recent weeks marking Trump first 100 days in office have shown a steep drop in his approval rating among Latinos in general.
