On October 3, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to end Temporary Protected Status for roughly 600,000 Venezuelans living in the United States, effective November 7, 2025. Although the exact mechanisms and details are unclear at this time, the message from DHS is: “Venezuelans, leave.”
Proponents of the Administration’s position (there is no official Opinion from SCOTUS, as the ruling was part of its shadow docket) argue that (1) the Secretary of DHS has discretion to determine designate whether a country is safe enough for individuals to return from the US, (2) “Temporary Protected Status” was always meant to be temporary, and (3) the situation in Venezuela has improved enough that Venezuelans in the U.S. may now safely return to Venezuela. As a lawyer who volunteers with immigrants, I admit that the two legal bases—Secretary’s broad discretion and the temporary nature of TPS—carry some weight, and I will not address them here.
Instead, I write today to highlight what I believe is an imminent human rights crisis that should influence Secretary Noem’s determination whether Venezuela is a safe place to send 600,000 human beings. On one hand, it is well known around the globe that Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro is a brutal dictator bent on absolute power at all costs. On the other hand, based on allegations that Maduro is facilitating narcotics trafficking, President Trump is aggressively increasing pressure on the Maduro regime, possibly seeking regime change (Maduro’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado, a recent recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, has been openly lobbying for President Trump’s intervention). Caught between these two opposing perilous forces, 600,000 Venezuelans fled to the U.S. to escape Maduro and the disastrous conditions he has created for all Venezuelans.
How Did We Get Here?
In 2021, the Department of Homeland Security determined that Venezuela was experiencing “extraordinary and temporary conditions” that prevented Venezuelans in the U.S. from returning safely. This determination triggered DHS to offer Temporary Protected Status to eligible Venezuelans in the U.S. This 2021 determination found that the circumstances in Venezuela were dire, in large part, due to former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s campaign to upset Venezuela’s democratic processes and consolidate the power of the government in himself and his trusted inner circle. The determination cited Maduro’s political machinations, crimes against humanity, and his regime’s disastrous initiatives that collapsed the economy, the health care system, the food distribution system, and public utilities. That the country with the largest oil reserves in the world should find itself in these dire straits is a testament to Maduro’s myopia, placing himself first with zero concern for the 32 million people that live in Venezuela.
Even before Maduro’s 2018 power-grab, his regime was repeatedly and credibly accused of crimes against humanity (see, e.g., the 2014 Report by the U.N. Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission into alleged abuses). The brutality of the Maduro regime has only intensified as Maduro continues his assumption of absolute political power. A 2024 investigation by the U.N. Human Rights Council found credible evidence to support allegations of Maduro’s continued crimes against humanity, such as torture (including beatings, suffocations, electrical shocks, and sexual violence against women and children), violent and deadly repression of pro-democracy demonstrations, arbitrary arrests and detentions, and disappearances. While the list goes on, the summary is brief: Maduro will do anything to stay in power.
U.S. Pressure Campaign
President Trump’s Administration would like to see Maduro deposed. Since the beginning of this year, the U.S. has built up its military presence in the region. In January, the U.S. military had relatively few people, planes, or ships near Venezuela. Today, the U.S. has stationed 10% of the Navy’s actively deployed fleet in nearby waters, including the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford—the Navy’s largest aircraft carrier —and has deployed thousands of Marines as well.
In August of this year, Attorney General Bondi authorized a reward of $50,000,000 for facilitating the arrest of Maduro. Recently, it has been widely reported that U.S. officials attempted to leverage that reward to encourage Maduro’s pilot to divert a routine flight into a jurisdiction where the U.S. could extradite him. On October 16, President Trump publicly acknowledged that he authorized the C.I.A. to engage in operations within Venezuela. Ten days later, Maduro announced that he had captured individuals he believes are connected with the CIA in a plot to incite and justify armed hostilities between Venezuela and the U.S.
Each day brings more reports of the U.S. Armed Forces destroying vessels with alleged ties to Venezuelan drug trafficking. 64 individuals have been killed as of this writing. Detailed information on the attacks is not available. While it’s clear not all deceased are Venezuelans, they have been the explicit targets of attacks for which the Department of War has made country of origin information publicly available.
A Recipe for Human Rights Abuses
In light of President Trump’s intensifying pressure on Maduro and Maduro believing that he has already discovered two U.S.-backed attempts to oust him from power, how will Maduro now treat the 600,000 Venezuelans arriving from years in the U.S.?
It’s said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. Unfortunately, dictators throughout history and around the globe follow the same cursed limerick - when their power is challenged, they brutally reassert it. If history is any guide, a mass torturer viewing himself in a struggle for survival with forces both within his country (the pro-democracy movement led by María Corina Machado) and from outside (President Trump’s increasingly aggressive display of power) will view any new arrivals as potential provocateurs, particularly when those arrivals return from a country that is openly challenging the mass torturer’s power. Given Maduro’s track record of human rights violations and torture, the probability is extremely high that many former TPS recipients will be detained in overcrowded prisons. At the same time, the Maduro regime interrogates them, likely using its violent prior practices.
Do we really have the stomach to send 600,000 humans into the “mouth of the shark,” as Warsan Shire powerfully described escaping brutality in her poem “Home?” How much torture is OK? A practical solution is extremely simple: delay DHS enforcement of non-violent Venezuelans with current TPS status as of November 6. With the stroke of a pen, Secretary Noem can prevent an imminent human rights crisis while still allowing the removal of violent criminal immigrants, whom most Americans agree should be the target of ICE action. Delayed enforcement of the end of TPS for Venezuelans has little cost or risk to the U.S. Prematurely sending those Venezuelans risks an eternal miasma of blood on our hands.
The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld Secretary Noem’s power to end TPS; the question is whether she has the judgment to stay her hand.
Jordan Martell has nearly 20 years of experience practicing law, primarily as in-house counsel for financial services firms. His passion is pro bono legal representation, where he spends most of his volunteer time working with immigrants.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.