Action by the Trump administration to cancel protected immigration status for people from Venezuela has migrants — and the city workers assigned to help them — grappling for any possible path forward.
At the bustling NYC Asylum Seeker Application Help Center in Hell’s Kitchen on Wednesday, three Venezuelans seeking help with renewing Temporary Protected Status under a Biden administration extension issued shortly before President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Each described a dramatically different experience.
One was told to wait 15 days and see where the final details of Trump’s rollback land, another was told to come back next week to seek a new appointment, while a third managed to submit their paperwork for an extension — though it is unlikely the federal Department of Homeland Security will process it.
“There’s a lot of us Venezuelans trying to do the right thing. If the president takes that away, oh my God,” said Alejandro Monsalves, 28, in Spanish, after he was told to come back in 15 days. “We’re in a moment of uncertainty.”
Venezuelans, the largest single group in New York City migrant shelters, have been racing to renew their TPS applications following a last-minute move by the Biden administration to extend that protection through October of 2026.
This week, however, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem signed an action vacating that Biden extension, meaning most Venezuelans will lose their protection from deportation in April if the memo survives legal challenges.
Adding uncertainty, the memo requires Noem to decide by Saturday whether or not to extend TPS for Venezuelans. If she does nothing, the provision would be renewed automatically for six months. In the meantime, Trump diplomatic envoy Richard Grenell is expected to meet with President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela on Friday, according to CNN.
The confusion was palpable among some workers at the center as they reckoned with the incoming news during the first week of Trump’s second term in office.
“Everything is crazy and changing moment to moment,” said a source familiar with operations of the center — which has filed tens of thousands of applications for asylum, TPS and other forms of immigration relief for migrants.
Liz Garcia, a spokesperson for City Hall, confirmed on Thursday afternoon that the application center had paused filing TPS extension paperwork for Venezuelans while the center evaluates the shifting guidance from the White House.
Late Extension
TPS is a form of immigration relief that temporarily shields people from deportation and conveys legal status to people who hail from countries the U.S. deems too unstable or unsafe to return to. Seventeen countries including Venezuela have the designation.
The source familiar with operations at the site said the center continued to file some TPS extensions for Venezuelans on Wednesday in the hopes they might be processed if they had been postmarked before the rule officially changed.
“Maybe they’ll still get through,” they mused. We just don’t know.”
Garcia, the spokesperson for City Hall, said the Asylum Application Help Center had helped 11,500 Venezuelans apply for TPS and work authorization since it opened in 2023.
Since then, she noted, between 35 and 40% of people living in the city’s migrant shelters at any given time have been from Venezuela, as gang and political violence along with food shortages have exploded under the leadership of Maduro, who clung to power last summer despite widespread evidence the opposition candidate won the presidential election.
While many Venezuelans are also eligible to file asylum claims, TPS has offered a more immediate route to legal status, as well as swifter access to work permits. Immigration attorneys are now urging Venezuelans who may not have already applied for asylum to do so given the uncertainty around the future of the TPS designation.
“If they have a fear of returning and they have not filed for asylum they should consider filing an application for filing now,” said Melissa Chua, the co-director of the Immigrant Protection Unit of the New York Legal Assistance Group.
Outside the application center this week, 30-year-old Elianys Palma said she’d managed to submit her TPS extension paperwork Wednesday.
“They told me that [the memo] hadn’t been signed yet and there was still a chance to renew TPS,” she said in Spanish.
The mother of two young girls had been able to secure work authorization through TPS and was working as a cleaner in office buildings.
“We left a dictatorship in Venezuela. There’s no resources, no hospitals, schools, nothing,” Palma said, adding she was nervous about losing TPS when it expires in April.
“More than anything we came for them,” she said, referring to her two girls, “a better future, an education, for their health.”
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