Venezuelan family in US under curtailed humanitarian protections clings to faith amid uncertainty
HOPKINS, Minn. — Every Sunday, Johann Teran goes to worship at a Lutheran service in suburban Minneapolis, trying to find some hope that the future he was building isn't all slipping away.
Like hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans hit by political and economic crises , Teran, his wife and her mother applied for different kinds of humanitarian protections in the United States that the Trump administration has curtailed or is expected to end soon .
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In the past year, Maduro has ramped up repression, disappeared prominent activists, and imprisoned even low-profile protesters. An atmosphere of fear has swept Venezuela. The presentation called for investment in a democratic Venezuela that doesn't yet exist, without providing any guidance as to how exactly it was going to come into being. If Machado's team had anyone in mind to facilitate this transition—say, someone in the Trump administration—no one said so. Still, given that American financiers can do very little on their own to usher in the end of dictatorships in South America, Trump officials, if not Donald Trump himself, seemed to be the ultimate audience for the Machado team's new message—suggesting a new perception, among Venezuelan opposition leaders, of what will move the Trump administration to help their cause. During the first Trump administration, the notion that Washington might deliver Venezuela from Maduro didn't seem all that far-fetched (and didn't seem to require a profit motive). Trump often condemned Venezuela's dictatorship. In front of an excited crowd of Venezuelans in Miami in 2019, the president proclaimed that Maduro's days were numbered. He recognized Juan Guaidó, an opposition leader, as the interim president of Venezuela until the country could have free and fair elections. Dozens of nations around the world followed suit. The excitement fizzled out when it became clear that Maduro had no intention of relinquishing power, and Trump wasn't willing or able to make him. Since that time, the Venezuelan opposition has gotten stronger. Machado is much more popular than Guaidó, who emerged seemingly out of nowhere. Guaidó won Washington's backing because he happened to fill a certain role—he was the majority leader of the legislature—at a moment when that put him in line for the presidency. But Machado has a face that every Venezuelan recognizes because she has dedicated more than 20 years to fighting the country's dictatorship. She can rally crowds in the most remote parts of Venezuela. Even so, the second Trump administration appears to be more interested in deporting Venezuelans from America than in supporting a politician who could make Venezuela more livable. Gone are the days when Trump vowed to apply 'maximum pressure' on Maduro. I had a chance to ask Machado, just a couple weeks after Inauguration Day this year, what she expected from the new Trump administration. She said that she thought Trump would understand helping the Venezuelan opposition as a matter of 'national security and hemispheric security,' given the regional threats posed by the Venezuelan government. Maduro, after all, was the reason for the migrant outflows; he has also tolerated the rise of Tren de Aragua, the criminal gang Trump so frequently references. She didn't mention anything about economic interests. Machado had worked out a theory for how regime change could come about in Venezuela. If other countries exerted sufficient pressure on Maduro's government, she suggested, the 'cost of preserving the status quo' would go up. Top officials would eventually figure that their interests were better served by negotiating an exit deal with the opposition. That's why she supported American sanctions on Venezuela, regardless of what American think tanks and academics had to say about the pain they inflicted on Venezuelans. 'Sanctions to those who violate human rights harm the Venezuelan people?' Machado scoffed. 'What really harms the people is a criminal government that intentionally brought down our productive apparatus.' Machado does have one ally in the Trump administration: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who recently praised her as 'the personification of resilience, tenacity, and patriotism.' In November 2022, President Joe Biden issued a license to allow the oil company Chevron to evade sanctions in order to extract oil in Venezuela. Rubio has called this a ' pro-Maduro ' gift and pushed to let it expire. Unfortunately, for Machado at least, Rubio is not the only person in Washington trying to set policy on Venezuela. Trump's presidential envoy, Richard Grenell, appears to think that America stands to benefit from having a transactional relationship with Maduro. Shortly after the inauguration, Grenell traveled to Caracas to urge Maduro to accept deportation flights, and Maduro agreed to free six Americans detained in Venezuela. Grenell and Maduro shook hands and smiled for the camera—not exactly the ' maximum pressure ' Trump once promised to put on Maduro. Late last month, as the Chevron license's expiration date approached, Rubio and Grenell duked it out online. Grenell met with Maduro officials in the Caribbean, then went on a podcast to announce that the license would be extended–only for Rubio to contradict him the next day on X, where the secretary of state announced that the license would expire as scheduled. Eventually, the Trump administration settled on a compromise, extending the license but making it more restrictive. Observers have since talked about Rubio and Grenell as leaders of two competing factions within the Trump administration: the principled Venezuela hawks versus the pragmatists willing to make deals with Maduro. Now Machado appears to be trying to reconcile both sides. And she has a message for the pragmatists: Working with us will bring more financial benefits than dealing with Maduro. The stance has required an awkward bit of pragmatism from Machado herself. Her team has publicly urged the Trump administration not to revoke the protected status the Biden administration extended to Venezuelan immigrants. But Machado has also spoken in favor of deporting Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador, without questioning the Trump administration's allegations that the Venezuelans it deported were, in fact, gang members. When I asked a question about this at the press conference, a moderator demurred, saying that such 'political questions' would be answered at the end and asking if there were any more questions regarding the economic plan proposed. In a profile for The Spectator last July, the writer Paola Romero described Machado as mixing 'the crowd-pulling allure of Evita Peron with the politics of Margaret Thatcher.' Those are indeed the two Machados: one who tours her country to bring consoling messages of hope to Venezuela's poorest, and another who wears a pantsuit and jewels and praises the merits of free markets and privatization. Last year, Machado's presidential campaign was mostly Evita. The press conference was all Thatcher. In her closing remarks, Machado said that the interests of 'the people of Venezuela, democratic governments in the Western Hemisphere, and certainly investors' were all aligned. 'This is a win-win situation.'
