Venezuelan exile entertainer Leo Colina has been taking to Instagram lately with extemporaneous gaita songs celebrating court orders to keep immigration programs like Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and humanitarian parole alive.
"We're raising our glasses," Colina sings, "because they're back!"
"I have many, many friends and family here who benefit from those programs," Colina, a legal U.S. resident in Miami, told WLRN. "I'm ecstatic for them!"
So why aren't more migrants singing along with Colina?
After all, in recent weeks, federal judges have indeed blocked President Trump’s attempts to cancel TPS — which shields migrants from deportation back to dangerous or repressive countries — for more than half a million Venezuelan migrants.
They've done the same regarding humanitarian parole, which has allowed more than half a million migrants from Venezuela and three other countries to enter the U.S. legally instead of illegally over the southern border.
It's all no doubt a happy reprieve for the beneficiaries.
But lurking beneath that hope is a sober reality: the Trump Administration is likely to keep fighting, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, to end those programs and make more than a million and a half lawful migrants — most of them here in Florida — subject to his sweeping deportation crusade.
They would, in effect, join the estimated 11 million people who live in the country illegally, including 1.2 million in Florida, according to the Pew Research Center.
In the meantime, Trump critics say there’s no guarantee that he will respect court rulings like those handed down last week that halted his plan to cancel TPS and humanitarian parole this week.
In fact, they point out he’s shown an astonishing willingness to ignore orders in other immigration cases — like his efforts to accuse Venezuelan migrants, with no due process, of being "terrorist" gang members and deport them to a high-security prison in El Salvador.
Which is why Venezuelan migrants like "Junior" still sound much more wary than merry right now.
“I am lucky if I can still sleep at night," Junior old WLRN.
"It’s…it’s haunting me.”
Junior has lived in Broward County since early 2024. He arrived in the U.S. on the humanitarian parole program started by President Biden in 2022, which lets migrants from the crisis-torn countries of Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua stay in the U.S. — if they have a sponsor — for two years with work permits.
Junior is a nickname; he asked WLRN not to use his real name because he’s trying to upgrade his immigration status to political asylum. What's haunting him are all the uncertain scenarios migrants like him still face.
“I am going to go to this appointment that I have to move from humanitarian parole to political asylum," Junior said over coffee at a Venezuelan eatery near Hollywood.
"But if I go, then I’m scared that ICE [U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement] officers are waiting for people there. I'm keeping a positive frame of mind, but it's still there in the back of my mind, and it's just not going to go away in spite of the encouraging court ruling."
Junior and other humanitarian parole program recipients are wondering how long last week’s court order protecting their parole, from a U.S. District Court judge in Boston, will hold up.
Should it be reversed on appeal, they ask, will ICE be waiting to deport them at, say, asylum petition appointments like the one Junior’s going to in the coming days? That fear is sharper now, in fact, because Trump just ordered immigration judges, whom his Justice Department oversees, to deny almost all asylum requests.
“I am nervous that they'll deny my political asylum," Junior said, "and then it’s easier for them to deport me.”
READ MORE: Taken by ICE moments after securing a path to legal migrant status: A Honduran's story
Still, Junior says he’s optimistic the court ruling preserving his humanitarian parole until next year will, in fact, protect him from that fate.
And he’s confident he has a strong asylum case. The U.N. has accused Venezuela’s left-wing dictatorship of crimes against humanity — and Junior, who opposes the regime, says he experienced that brutality a few years ago in eastern Venezuelan when police came to his home looking for anti-government demonstrators and threatened him.
“Around two o’clock in the morning, they used a crowbar to force open my apartment," Junior recalled, "because in that particular neighborhood where I lived, everybody there was protesting, including myself, and the cops always want somebody to blame as a ringleader.
"So they warned me: 'Well, we know where you live. And it doesn’t take anything to make you disappear.'”
Days later, Junior says he watched those same cops kill a teenaged protester.
“A tear gas bomb was shot directly into his chest, not more than 20 feet distance. And I just said, ‘You know what, the hell with it, I’m ... I’m outta here.'”
But Junior, a business manager and graphic designer, says he’s been disappointed to see Trump is punishing even lawful migrants like himself, especially Venezuelans, the way Venezuela’s dictatorship looked for scapegoats to blame on that country's problems when it came to power a quarter century ago.
“What I’m seeing is a reflection of what happened in my country back then — the theatrical populist behavior of the President. And in this country, Trump is saying that Venezuelans are all criminals.”
"It was like someone taking my heart from my chest. We were promised two years — then they say: 'You’re going back to the same situation right now.'"Peter
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — who, like Trump, insists it is "not in the interests of the U.S." to continue immigration programs like TPS and humanitarian parole — seemed to encourage a migrant-demonizing mindset early in the new Trump administration when she argued for eliminating TPS for Venezuelans.
“This program has been abused — and this extension of TPS for over 600,000 Venezuelans as well is alarming when you look at what we’ve seen in different states ... with gangs doing damage and harming the people that live there," she said.
Noem was referring to the violent Venezuelan criminal gang known as Tren de Aragua — who, while their presence is concerning, represent a miniscule share of all Venezuelan migrants in the U.S., the vast majority of whom are law-abiding and hard-working, if their success in U.S. enclaves like Doral, outside Miami, is any indication.
Making it to tomorrow
Noem is also fighting in court to cut short TPS for more than half a million Haitians — who are also the largest group of humanitarian parole beneficiaries.
One of them is Peter (who also asked WLRN to use his nickname, not his real name) a young Haitian migrant who came to Broward County in late 2023 on humanitarian parole and also has TPS. Since arriving here, Peter has mastered English, works full-time for a delivery service and is studying to become a mechanic.
“For me, to come here in the United States — that was like a miracle," Peter told WLRN. "Thank you, United States, to give me this opportunity.”
It's a miracle, says Peter, referring to not being killed by the powerful, violent gangs that rule Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and his neighborhood there, Delmas, as well as much of the rest of Haiti.
Last year the gangs were responsible for more than 5,600 murders in Haiti, and they’ve driven more than a million Haitians from their homes, according to the U.N.
“In Port-au-Prince, people don’t know if they’re going to make it to tomorrow," Peter said. "Delmas, it’s chaos now.”
Peter decided he had to leave Haiti a couple years ago when the gangs kidnapped and killed his best friend’s father, a taxi driver in Delmas.
“The gangs call, they say they have the father of my friend," Peter recalled.
And his family managed to find the ransom, right?, so that they can release him back. But even though they give the ransom, he didn’t make it [alive] anyway.”
Peter says memories of those traumas made it all the more painful when the Trump administration last month ordered the immediate cancellation of all humanitarian paroles — even though his still had almost a year left to go — not to mention TPS for Haitians, which wasn’t supposed to expire until February of 2026 but may now end in August.
When Peter heard the news about the humanitarian parole, he said, "It was like someone is taking my heart out from my chest, because we were promised to stay for two years — we just have some time to breathe, and then they tell you: 'You’re going back to the same situation" in Haiti.
"I’m speechless about that.”
He's gratified by the federal court ruling restoring his parole for the time being, and he's hoping a federal lawsuit filed by Haitian migrants to block Trump's revocation of TPS for Haitians will have the same success.
Either way, Peter, like many other parole recipients, is scrambling now to adjust his own status to the more permanent political asylum — given the gang terror awaiting Haitians if they’re sent back to Haiti.
Meanwhile, lawyers are trying to forecast whether or not the U.S. Supreme Court will ratify the lower court rulings protecting TPS and humanitarian parole should those cases arrive there.
“There are legal principles that should inform the judges’ decisions," said Frandley Julien, an immigration attorney in North Miami who has many Haitian clients dealing with the TPS and humanitarian parole struggles.
The two most important doctrines to consider, he says, are what's known as promissory estoppel, a basis of contract law, and continuity of the state, an important pillar of international relations.
Julien says it's one thing if the Trump administration wanted to do away with executive-created programs like TPS and humanitarian parole for future migrants. But he argues it would be a disturbing precedent for the U.S. to go back on its word by cutting short the immigration protection timelines it had already laid out, contractually, for those migrants like Junior and Peter.
“If the previous administration made a promise to the beneficiaries, the next one needs to abide by the promise," Julien said.
"Otherwise there’s no value, for example, in the United States signing international treaties.”
The Trump administration nonetheless insists it is not bound to carry out immigration executive orders that the previous Biden administration made. Still, says Julien:
“We’re seeing a divorce from all these principles that have been dear to the United States.”
Principles, he points out, that separate the United States from so many of the countries these migrants have been fleeing.
