Word of the US military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro reached Mayra Sulbaran while on vacation in Canada. Sulbaran—who fled Venezuela in September 2018 and lives in Washington, DC—was in Montreal to reunite with her brother, who she had not seen in nine years. “I was hugging him when we found out,” she told me over a Zoom on Monday morning.
Soon after Sulbaran heard the news, she joined other Venezuelans to celebrate what so many have prayed for and thought they might never see happen: the downfall of Maduro.
“Until there is true justice in Venezuela and the economic means to return and rebuild the country, I don’t believe Venezuelans can go back.”
Last weekend, US forces executed a months-in-the-making incursion into the presidential compound in Caracas to extract the Venezuelan strongman and his wife, Cilia Flores, who are now being held in a Brooklyn jail facing drug trafficking charges. President Donald Trump declared the United States would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” What happens next remains unclear. At first, Trump hinted at “boots on the ground,” while Secretary of State Marco Rubio talked of “leverage” to control the country.The US president also warned Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who has been sworn in as interim leader, that she would pay a bigger “price” than the removed president “if she doesn’t do what’s right.”
For so many Venezuelans like Sulbaran—a lawyer and pro-democracy activist who founded Casa DC Venezuela, a cultural center for the Venezuelan diaspora in the Washington, DC area—this fraught moment is filled with a complex mix of relief, dread, and expectation.
“It’s a very contradictory situation because we understand that [President Donald Trump] has a goal and we appreciate it…,” she said, “but we’re also very afraid because we don’t know what’s coming and whether a democratic process will truly be respected.”
Sulbaran is one of 8 million Venezuelans who have fled the country since 2014, part of the largest exodus in Latin America’s recent history and one of the world’s worst forced displacement crises. For Venezuelans living in exile and scattered across the hemisphere and beyond, this juncture has sparked hope of one day returning to a Venezuela freed from Maduro’s oppressive grip. But it has also instilled anxiety among the thousands of Venezuelans—even those cheering the US operation—facing deportation to a nation now influx where their safety is all but guaranteed.
“Until there is true justice in Venezuela and the economic means to return and rebuild the country, I don’t believe Venezuelans can go back,” said Sulbaran, now a US permanent resident. “It’s not just about changing a government, it’s about addressing an economic, social, and moral structure.” With the Maduro regime’s chain of command still ruling the country, she said the United States should offer protection to Venezuelans.
Since retaking office, Trump has done the opposite. He has vilified and singled out Venezuelan migrants as a threat, accusing them of being gang members and taking over American cities.
Last year, his administration ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—a discretionary reprieve from deportation for immigrants from countries stricken by natural disasters, wars, and other circumstances—for Venezuela, claiming conditions in the country had improved and allowed for people’s safe return. As I wrote then, that move impacted more than 600,000 Venezuelans and represented the largest de-legalization campaign in modern US history. It threw thousands of people into a legal limbo, with many losing legal status and the ability to work.
Now, amidst the ousting of Venezuela’s sitting president and a nationwide crackdown by the regime, there appears to be no plan to halt the deportation of Venezuelans. In an appearance on Fox News on Sunday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was asked if the administration would continue to send Venezuelans back to the country. “Venezuela today is more free than it was yesterday,” Noem said, adding that the Venezuelans who were stripped of TPS have “the opportunity to apply for refugee status.”
But the refugee program, which the Trump administration has gutted, is intended for people who apply for protection from outside of the United States, not those present in the country already, like one-time Venezuelan TPS holders. In response to questions from Mother Jones, a DHS spokesperson conceded that “applicants are only eligible for refugee status prior to entering the country,” which excludes the people Noem said could qualify.
“Secretary Noem ended Temporary Protected Status for more than 500,000 Venezuelans and now they can go home to a country that they love,” the spokesperson said. “[Deportation] Flights are not paused.” (In 2025, the US government deported 14,310 Venezuelans back to their home country, according to a flight tracker initiative kept by Human Rights First.)
Adelys Ferro, executive director of the Venezuelan-American Caucus, called on the Trump administration to restore TPS for Venezuelans. “This is not the right time to keep deporting law-abiding Venezuelan immigrants,” she said. “All of these vulnerable people that have already been hunted, discriminated against, and victims of all of these xenophobic and racist immigration decisions are in more danger than ever before.”
Ferro pointed to a decree by the Venezuelan regime ordering the police to identify and arrest “everyone involved in the promotion or support for the armed attack by the United States.” There are reports of armed gangs patrolling streets and setting up checkpoints to question residents and look through their phones. On Monday, fourteen journalists were detained, according to the National Press Workers Union. If Venezuela descends into further instability, it could also push more people to leave the country.
In that climate, Ferro expressed concern about what might happen to Venezuelans who celebrated the operation on the streets of the United States if they were deported back. “People are more terrified than before,” she said. “The ultimate hope is that there is a real goal of bringing back democracy for Venezuela and, as a consequence, the Venezuelans that are willing to go back can do it in a safe manner. But that’s not the case right now.”
At first, Ferro said she felt relief, joy, and a “sense of justice” to see Maduro removed from power. But following President Trump’s initial press conference, and Rodríguez ascent, that was overtaken by “disbelief, shock, frustration, devastation.” She took issue with the US government’s sidelining of opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado and backing of Rodríguez. (Machado, who the Venezuelan regime barred from running in the 2024 presidential elections when Maduro declared victory despite evidence that the opposition candidate Edmundo González was the legitimate winner, has said she plans to return to Venezuela “as soon as possible.”)
“At the end of the day, we’re not free,” Ferro added. “The opposition leadership was asking for the construction of a transition to democracy, not a long-term negotiation with a dictatorship.” Ferro said she had questions about what it means for the United States to “run” Venezuela, too—even if temporarily, as Trump promised.
“What I know for sure is that the people of every country have the right to decide their own future,” she said. “Venezuelans have been waiting for more than a decade—if you talk about Chavismo, 27 years—and fighting to decide our own future. We have voted. We have protested. We have been killed. We have been persecuted. We have been imprisoned. We have been tortured. We have done everything in our power to have a path to democracy, and we deserve that opportunity.”
Nathaly Maestre, who lives in Maryland with her partner and six-month-old baby, said there’s “a lot of tension and fear” in Venezuela right now. Her mother avoids leaving the house in an area where the pro-government armed civilian groups known as colectivos are active. They worry about having their conversations monitored and have stopped exchanging messages over WhatsApp, using phone calls instead. “The situation is worrisome because they’re intimidating people,” she said.
After fleeing Venezuela, Maestre sought asylum in the United States and later applied for TPS as another layer of protection. Since the Trump administration ended the program, she’s now reliant on her pending asylum case. Some of her relatives lost their full-time jobs as a result of not having legal status. But despite their vulnerable position, she said they have no plans to leave because Venezuela isn’t safe, perhaps even less so now. “I think we’ve awakened a monster that will now turn against civil society and against anyone who expresses an opinion,” Maestre said. She thinks, at best, it’ll take time for the country to really change.
During our call, Sulbaran also rejected a simplistic narrative that paints the reactions of Venezuelans to Maduro’s capture in broad strokes. She described Chavismo—the political movement of socialist leader Hugo Chávez—and the authoritarian government of his successor as a “farce.” Maduro, she said, is a “dictator” who oversaw a money-laundering “narco-state” as the Venezuelan people fell into extreme poverty and faced political oppression and violence. “We experienced firsthand, as a couple and as a family, what it meant to leave Venezuela to preserve our lives and the lives of our children,” she said.
But Sulbaran also tries to remain clear-eyed about the risks that may lie ahead. She worries that the result of the United States’ intervention in Venezuela and ousting of Maduro could just be the exchange of one “executioner” for another. Her hope is that Rodríguez will engage in a peaceful transition period before handing the reigns of the country to the duly elected González. “Yes, we’re nervous,” she said. “But we’ve come from the worst, from rock bottom.”
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.