2026 Update: Venezuelan Asylum Seeker’s Nightmare in Trump’s America

In the summer of 2020, I was working as a paralegal in Austin, Texas, helping migrants prepare asylum applications from afar. A signature policy of Donald Trump’s first presidency, the Migrant Protection Protocols, forced tens of thousands of asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases crawled through US border courts. Many never made it that far. Court notices never arrived. Others were kidnapped, assaulted, or raped by cartel members. All were desperate for legal help.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had let that first phone call go to voicemail. The connection was poor, the words breaking up, but I understood immediately why she was calling. By then, I had received dozens like it.

Venezuelan Asylum Seeker

My phone number circulated quickly along the border. By the time Irma, a Venezuelan woman recently expelled from the US back into Mexico, called me, I had a rehearsed response. We were full. I could not take on anyone else. Irma asked that her name be changed, fearing retaliation from US authorities.

She did not give me the chance to refuse.

Within minutes she told me her son had died after Mexican immigration officials deported him to Colombia. He had diabetes, she said, and suffered respiratory complications, possibly linked to Covid. Then she began to cry.

“Tell me,” she asked softly in Spanish, “how can I bring his ashes to me?”

I paused. I had been instructed not to accept new clients. But something stopped me. Irma spoke as if she already trusted me, already loved me. She called me mija, my daughter. There was no suspicion in her voice, nothing I could hide behind.

I persuaded my supervisor to make a rare exception and provide limited help. For months, we spoke almost every night as she prepared for an asylum hearing that kept being postponed as the pandemic shut courts across the country. I never found a way to reunite her with her son’s ashes. They stayed in Colombia, along with his widow and children.

Over the years, I watched her uneven struggle with the US immigration system. She reached the United States. She reunited with family. She gained legal status. Then she lost it again. I kept answering her calls.

Now, more than five years later, after US forces struck Caracas and seized Venezuela’s president while Trump’s administration intensified its assault on asylum seekers at home, I find it harder to share Irma’s faith in American justice. Watching the damage inflicted by the immigration system, I keep returning to the same questions. Had I helped at all. Could anyone help. Or had she simply exchanged one danger for another.

Irma’s life before exile feels distant now. When Nicolás Maduro took power in 2013, she was a campesina, a small scale farmer. She loved the work, the act of coaxing life from the soil. At first, she hoped Maduro, a former bus driver, would govern for ordinary people.

Within a year, that hope collapsed. Armed men began snatching people from the streets. These were colectivos, government aligned paramilitaries who crushed dissent and looted those they targeted. Under Maduro, repression hardened into a system.

Irma had once benefited from earlier land reforms, receiving farmland she cultivated with her brother. But when local officials began stealing harvests and selling them for profit, she spoke out. That was enough.

She watched colectivos beat her brother and drag him away in a black truck. Hours later, she found him in the morgue.

Weeks later, they returned. They destroyed her farm, beat her, tied her up, and dumped her by the roadside with a warning to abandon her “radicalism.”

She fled soon after, joining the millions forced out of Venezuela.

At the US Mexico border, she crossed the Rio Grande and knelt before the first immigration officer she saw, begging for asylum. She was detained for days in a freezing cell, then expelled to Ciudad Juárez under Migrant Protection Protocols.

Her son died while trying to reach her. She called me from a shelter days later. Months after that, she was homeless, sleeping inside the construction site where she worked. She told me she endured repeated sexual assaults from a man who threatened to kill her if she spoke.

Still, she waited. Even as Covid shut down the courts. Even as Trump’s presidency dragged on. Time, she believed, was the last ally she had.

When Joe Biden won the 2020 election, she was elated. She was eventually allowed into the US, reunited with family in Houston, granted Temporary Protected Status, and found work. She dreamed of opening a food truck selling arepas.

She told me she had never expected joy like that.

Then Trump returned to power.

In 2025, executive orders rolled back humanitarian protections. Temporary Protected Status was stripped from hundreds of thousands, including Irma. She lost her job after a co worker reported her status. She moved to Austin, hoping fewer immigration raids would mean safety.

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She stopped going to church. She feared picking up her grandson from school. She feared detention, disappearance, silence.

Her fear is not abstract. At the nonprofit where I now work, clients have been starved, denied medicine, held in windowless cells under constant light. A massive expansion of enforcement has fueled raids across the country. Many arrested had legal status. Most had no criminal record. Deaths in custody have mounted.

Irma recognizes the pattern. Poor and vulnerable people seized without warning. Vans. Silence.

Political scientists call this process victim inversion. Targeting those least able to fight back is a hallmark of democratic collapse. In Venezuela, it was political dissidents. In the US, it is noncitizens.

Irma understands this instinctively. She does not celebrate the downfall of Maduro if it comes at the hands of a man she sees using the same logic of power. She prays instead. She prays for Trump, for immigration agents, for softened hearts. But she does not expect mercy.

“I’ve lived through it,” she told me. “Death, eviction, persecution. I know how fast everything can fall apart.”

She fears that what she escaped is catching up with her again.

And she is afraid that this time, there will be nowhere left to run.