Thousands of Venezuelans in Colorado lose legal status, move into the shadows

The change places them in danger of detention.

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The man came with his family to the U.S. in 2019 to escape a constant threat of violence in Venezuela, where his wife worked for a local police department.

They arrived during Donald Trump’s first term, applied for asylum here and then felt like the Biden administration had all but invited them to stay by granting them temporary protected status.

Now, that measure of safety may be gone.

“It’s quite frustrating,” the man said in Spanish recently in an interview at his home. “I can’t stay. I can’t go back. I have nothing. We have already tried to make our life here.”

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The family is among thousands of Venezuelans in Colorado — many of whom were sent here from Texas by order of the Republican governor there — who are now a step closer to removal with the loss of temporary protection.

They include a manager at a prominent Colorado factory who is studying for a master’s degree and has two American-born children, a wife and a home he owns. A former human resources executive who now works at a restaurant and whose son was granted a full-ride scholarship to the University of Colorado thanks to his outstanding grades. And her husband, who followed his wife to the United States because of fears for her safety, but saved enough money to buy the family a home in the outer Denver suburbs.

Trump was the first president in 35 years to decide to “de-document” a group of people with legal status in this country. Roughly 300,000 of them nationally lost status on Nov. 7, 2025, while another group, 300,000 or 400,000 people who arrived later, lost status earlier this year.

The timing is curious. Trump is eliminating protections for people here at the same time tensions are increasing with Venezuela and he declared the nation a “no-fly zone.” That would seem to make it difficult to send people back, but the Venezuelan government has continued to negotiate repatriation flights on a case-by-case basis. A non-profit organization tracked 20 removal flights to Venezuela between February and August.

Even without that, the loss of protected status, or TPS, is not an automatic step toward removal. The Colorado immigrants interviewed for this article all have pending asylum claims, which grants them temporary work authorization and some process to follow before being deported. That means for now, much of their daily lives have yet to change: they are continuing to work, pay rent or mortgages and raise their kids.

But there is a lurking uncertainty: They’re now subject to detention without warning, even if they continue to follow all the rules. CPR News agreed to not use their names.

“That’s what keeps us awake at night,” said the man, sitting in his kitchen with his wife.

Even though the couple both held professional jobs back in their home country, they now work in restaurants in metro Denver. They bought a suburban home, and their kids are in school. The oldest attends CU Denver.

“You come fleeing from a place where you can’t be, and then you arrive in a country where it seems you can’t stay either and you don’t have a country you can safely go back to,” the man said.

What is TPS, and why does it matter

Congress created the TPS program in 1990 to bring coherence and predictability to a practice that presidents dating back to the 1950s employed.

It was designed to be insulated from politics and was a mechanism for the State Department to allow non-criminals from countries to work and live in the United States temporarily for humanitarian reasons.

Haiti, Nepal, South Sudan and El Salvador, among other places, are all countries where TPS has been granted over the last 30 years. The status, granted by the president through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is given to people from countries with an ongoing problem, like an armed conflict, a civil war, an environmental disaster or an epidemic.

In the past, presidents have both granted the protection and allowed those protections to expire; former presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton did that with El Salvador.

Kevin J. Beaty/DenveriteA Venezuelan family still has legal work authorizations but because of the Trump administration’s abrupt halt to Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans, they now fear detention.

But immigration historians say that no president has ever ended the legal status of hundreds of thousands of people living in the United States overnight.

“It’s abnormal what’s happening,” said Jessica Bansal, a lawyer with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, a group based in California that is among a collaboration legally challenging the Trump administration’s decision to end TPS for Venezuelans and other nationalities. “The law is pretty clear that they can’t take away what they’ve already granted.”

By definition and requirements, TPS holders can’t have a criminal record and are granted work authorizations so they can get jobs and buy homes and start bank accounts while they’re living in the United States. They are fingerprinted annually and have to pay for background checks for their TPS cards.

There are some former TPS holders from El Salvador who arrived here decades ago to work as janitors and in food service at the University of Colorado Boulder. They were such stalwart employees that the university decided to sponsor them, and they are here now legally.

As of March, there were 1.2 million TPS holders in the United States. Almost half of them were Venezuelans. Another 330,000 were Haitians. And Salvadorans made up 170,000, according to a Congressional report.

‘What am I going to do now?’

Contrary to the current administration’s claims about the Venezuelan new arrivals, several of the attorneys representing those interviewed for the story said their clients have never had a day on American soil without legal status. That’s because when the United States announces a TPS designation, it actually draws people to the United States from foreign lands to come and apply for TPS and work in the United States.

The industrial engineer at a food company, for example, said he always had a lingering fear that his status was going to be eliminated, so he tried to make himself indispensable.

He graduated in Venezuela with an engineering degree in 2015. He arrived on a visitor visa to the United States in 2019 after he said he was beaten for protesting against the current Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro’s government.

Once he got here, he timely filed for asylum with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services due to the persecution and torture he said he experienced in Venezuela. He then also successfully applied for TPS once Venezuela was designated. Since then, his asylum claim was denied by the federal government, and he is now in deportation proceedings, but he is asking a judge to review that denial, said Conor Gleason, his attorney from the Meyer Law Firm.

In his current job at a factory in Denver, he has worked his way up to a supervisor level and is studying at a local university to get a master’s degree. He owns a house and has two American-born children.

“It’s the psychological part, what am I going to do now?” he said, in an interview in Spanish. “What am I going to do with my job if I lose it? What about my kids if I’m deported at any moment?”

The Colorado Department of Local Affairs has no exact estimate on how many Venezuelans live in Colorado currently. Back in January 2022, it was less than 10,000, but then roughly 40,000 of them arrived later that year and the following to Denver from Texas when the governor sent buses of migrants to Democratic-controlled states across the country.

A hollow victory against the Trump administration

Trump initially announced he was ending TPS for Venezuelans shortly after his inauguration in late January. This past year, his administration also revoked TPS for Hondurans, Nicaraguans and the Nepalese.

Attorneys, including Bansal, immediately sought relief in a federal court in Northern California on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans living across the country, who arrived with a promise from the federal government that, at least temporarily, they would be immune both from detention and deportation if they followed laws.

A federal judge agreed with the group and temporarily blocked the administration, giving the Venezuelans status again. The Trump administration appealed that decision to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld that ruling.

The immigrants rejoiced, lawyers said.

Jose Luis Magana/APDHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin speaks during a news conference at ICE Headquarters in Washington, Wednesday, May 21, 2025.

Then, in October, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a one-paragraph stay from its so-called shadow docket, saying that it would cause harm for the federal government to be bound by this ruling. Legal status was revoked again until the