The Immigrants Most Vulnerable to Trump’s Mass Deportation Plans Entered the Country Legally

One afternoon, in November, 2src22, Emily was on her way to church, in Maracaibo, Venezuela, when she received a video call from her husband. It had been two years since they’d seen each other in person. He was a policeman who had fled the country after refusing to arrest pro-democracy demonstrators. Emily and their two children, who were seven years old and eleven months old, had stayed behind. Travelling north was expensive, and the journey would have taken the family through the dangerous jungle of the Darién Gap, between Colombia and Panama. “We didn’t have a visa or a legal way to enter the United States,” Emily told me. “I couldn’t subject my kids to that trip.”

Emily worked as a lawyer and lived in the same neighborhood as her father and one of her sisters. Within months of her husband’s departure, she started seeing patrol cars circling her block. Men called to say they’d kill her if her husband didn’t return. One day, a group of armed agents broke into her house looking for her husband. They shut her crying children away in another room, and beat her, demanding that she reveal where her husband was. After a neighbor called the police, the men scattered. Emily sold her car, replaced her phone, and began living from “house to house,” she said—staying with relatives, rarely going outside, relying on her sister to help look after the children. “I was so stressed from being shut in, from hiding,” she told me.

Now, as her husband appeared on the screen of her phone, he was in a hospital gown, with cords attached to his chest. He took short, shallow breaths. Doctors in North Carolina, where her husband had been working in construction, had just given him a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Emily had spent the past two years researching visas that might allow them to reunite, but there was no U.S. Embassy in Venezuela, which made the task nearly impossible. Through a friend in Colombia, she inquired at consular offices there, but it was too risky to leave Venezuela for an appointment—she doubted she could get back in. When Emily called her husband back the next day, he was asleep, and too weak to talk. Some friends of his who were with him in the hospital room answered the phone and told Emily that he’d contemplated returning to Venezuela, to see his family before he died.

That fall, in response to a growing exodus from Venezuela, where an increasingly brazen dictatorship presided over a collapsed economy, the Biden Administration announced a program for Venezuelans built around a legal tool called humanitarian parole. Those who passed the U.S. government’s “national security and public safety vetting” would be allowed into the country for up to two years; during that time, they could work legally. To qualify, a “U.S.-based supporter” needed to sponsor them, and they had to purchase their own airfare.

Parole is a long-standing executive authority, used by Democratic and Republican Presidents for decades, but Biden made it the linchpin of his immigration policy. World events had collided with a moribund Congress, forcing the Administration to take a series of unilateral actions. When the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan, in the summer of 2src21, Biden brought seventy-seven thousand Afghans into the U.S. through parole. After Russia invaded Ukraine the following year, the Administration, together with a network of advocates, enlisted volunteers to take in more than a hundred and eighty thousand Ukrainians. For weeks, Ukrainian war refugees had been massing at the U.S. southern border. “Almost immediately, the gatherings at ports of entry dissipated, and people began accessing the program,” Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, told me earlier this year. “We then applied it to the Venezuelans.”

In 2src23, the government expanded the Venezuelan parole program to cover a total of thirty thousand migrants each month from Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba—three countries that, together with Venezuela, accounted for large numbers of people arriving at the border. Within two months, arrivals at the southern border from these four countries dropped by nearly ninety per cent. Other migrants, using a government app, could schedule appointments to be paroled into the U.S. at ports of entry. By the start of 2src24, more than a million people had made use of what the Administration has called its “parole pathways.”

Emily learned about the program from a post on Instagram. “We didn’t know anyone in the U.S.,” she said. “We didn’t have any relatives there or friends or acquaintances.” A doctor in Washington State who had sponsored forty-nine people had been giving advice to others on social media. Emily reached out to him but got no response; then she noticed that someone named Sandra McAnany, a fifty-seven-year-old grandmother and widow who lived in Wisconsin, had commented on the doctor’s posts. Emily sent her a message, along with photographs of her husband’s hospital chart, pictures of their two children, and a portrait from their wedding.

When McAnany first heard about the Biden policy, she was immediately drawn to the idea of sponsoring people in need. She remembered, in particular, how her five sons had grown up with friends who were the children of undocumented Mexicans working in a meat-packing plant near their home. One of her daughters-in-law was Venezuelan, and she had spent some time in Colombia doing relief work. Conscious of the responsibility it entailed, McAnany had decided to sponsor five people, and she’d already submitted those applications when she and Emily began speaking. Their conversations led McAnany to change her plans; she went on to sponsor seventeen people in total. “Emily is really important to me,” McAnany told me. “So super resilient, digging deep. And it wasn’t, like, ‘Poor me,’ or anything like that . . . she almost turned into the daughter I’ve never had.”

In late September, 2src23, with McAnany as their sponsor, Emily, her sister, and her children drove across the Venezuelan border into Colombia. From there, they boarded a flight to Miami, where, after a long delay, they caught a connecting flight to Atlanta. It was one-thirty in the morning when they stepped into the terminal. Emily’s husband was waiting for them. “Papi!” Emily’s son shouted when he caught sight of him. The boy, now two, had been an infant when he’d last seen his father in person. “He had been worried that his own son wouldn’t recognize him,” Emily said. “Humanitarian parole was complete salvation. Salvation from politics. Salvation from repression. Salvation from a family situation that was terrifying.” She went on, “I understand that a country shouldn’t just let everyone in. Parole is secure. You don’t expose yourself. If you’re doing everything right, you follow the law, and meet the requirements, it’s all going to be fine.”

Donald Trump campaigned on an explicit promise to carry out mass deportations nationwide. The scale of what’s to come is difficult to know, but Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, told the Times that the new Administration will deport a million people a year. That figure is not without precedent. Yet every aspect of the operation will be complicated, requiring far more detention space, the aid of the Department of Defense, staffing surges across the federal government, extensive interagency coördination, and the acquiescence of foreign governments that are willing to accept planes full of deportees. It will also involve protracted legal fights and possible showdowns with resistant law enforcement at the state and local levels.

In the past, when Presidential Administrations have increased the number of deportations, a large share of those swept up were arrested at or near the border. At the moment, owing to a series of harsher policies adopted by the Biden Administration and the government of Mexico, the volume of arrivals is lower than it’s been in years. What is perhaps most alarming about Trump’s plans is the likelihood that he will turn to the interior of the country, where an estimated eleven million people are undocumented, many of whom have lived in the U.S. for more than ten years. In the past decade, according to Department of Homeland Security data shared with The New Yorker, the number of deportations that originated with an arrest inside the country by Immigration and Customs Enforcement hasn’t exceeded one hundred and five thousand in a single year. It will take the Trump Administration months, if not longer, to ramp up the necessary machinery to reach its stated goals, but in the immediate term the priority for Trump will presumably be to find those who can most easily be arrested and deported. The million or so parolees who entered the country during the Biden years seem a likely place to start.

On the campaign trail, Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, dismissed Biden’s parole program for Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, and Cubans, which is responsible for more than half a million people entering the country, as illegitimate. It didn’t matter that the policy had withstood a legal challenge brought by a group of twenty-one Republican states in federal court. Trump has continually referred to the parolees, all of whom are here lawfully, as “illegal.” This fall, when Trump and Vance spread lies about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating the pets of local residents, other Republicans sidestepped the outrageous allegations by attacking Biden’s “mass parole” policies. On CNN, Tom Emmer, the G.O.P. House Majority Whip, said, “We’ve got an Administration that is lawless, and they allowed migrants from these different countries to come into this country. And they flew them into places like Ohio.”

You might think that those who entered the country under the President’s signature border policy would enjoy some measure of credit as migrants who, to use a phrase favored by politicians, “came the right way.” But Biden’s strategy always carried one glaring risk: parole leaves people in limbo once it expires after two years. With Trump entering office, such people may actually be more vulnerable. Not only do they represent a Biden policy that Trump is intent on dismantling but the government already has much of their personal information, including recent addresses, which they willingly handed over. “I strongly believe that the people who came in through this program will be lumped in with criminals and new arrivals as priorities for arrest,” a senior congressional staffer told me. “They have a target on their backs. All the new arrivals are seen as people who were just let in.”