Elise Schumacher | staff writer

On Jan. 29, President Donald Trump signed the Laken Riley Act into Law. The new law requires the Department of Homeland Security to detain undocumented immigrants who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny or shoplifting. It includes an additional mandatory detention measure, which prevents any opportunity to be released on bond. It means individuals can be detained whether or not they are innocent of the alleged crime.

The law removes the government’s ability to dismiss cases due to lack of standing. Because every immigration case has a wide array of related actions, it is at the states’ discretion to “sue” them for wrongful arrest. The result: Faced with endless litigation, federal courts are drowning in lawsuits, in a recipe for chaos the Constitution intended to avoid.

Since coming back into office last month, Trump has made numerous steps toward making good on his promises of removing immigrants from the United States. Underscoring these actions is the false assertion of a direct link between immigration status and criminality.

On Monday night, two flights carrying Venezuelan deportees arrived in the country’s capital, Caracas. This comes after Trump’s executive order calling for the end of Temporary Protective Status (TPS) for the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who fled the country for the U.S.

Last week, Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said that by April, around 350,000 immigrants will no longer receive TPS. On Sunday, on an NBC Meet the Press interview, she claimed that Venezuela “emptied out prisons … and mental health facilities,” before sending these specific groups of individuals to the U.S. essentially claiming that Venezuelans (and other immigrants) in the U.S. are unstable criminals, who are bringing drugs into the country and contributing to a perceived crime spike.

The idea that protecting those who have sought refuge in the U.S. is not in American interests has always been an underlying belief of the MAGA movement, and now that he’s back in office, that belief has become a driving force in domestic and foreign policy. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro met with special envoy Richard Grenell, who traveled to Caracas to negotiate the release of six American hostages. In exchange, the Trump administration allowed Chevron’s oil license, which makes about 25% of Venezuela’s crude production output, to be renewed for six more months. Venezuela sees this as a crucial step toward the improvement of relations between the two countries, which in his first presidency, Trump openly antagonized.

Maduro seized power in 2013. Since then, close to 7.7 million Venezuelans have fled their country. As Maduro’s stranglehold tightened, the economy unraveled, and people increasingly feared for the safety of themselves and their families.

For Venezuelan immigrants, returning home could mean economic hardship, persecution and even death. One of the most striking examples of the dangers that may await migrants is Ronald Ojeda.

Ojeda, a former member of the Venezuelan military, was arrested in April 2017 after opposing the Maduro regime, following several other arrests in previous years. He was accused of rebellion, mutiny and treason, charges for which he was tortured.

In November 2017, Ojeda and eight other officers escaped while being transferred between prisons. Five of them, including Ojeda, fled to Peru, and were later granted asylum in Chile. Ojeda and his family remained in Chile, where he continued to advocate against Maduro.

It all came to a crashing halt earlier this month, when three men dressed in Chilean police gear barged into Ojeda’s home in the middle of the night. After breaking down the door with a battering-ram, they “arrested” Ojeda, forcibly dragging him from his wife and 6-year-old son. Nine days later, his body was found stuffed in a suitcase under five feet of concrete containing quicklime, a chemical compound that can rapidly speed up the rate of decomposition. This additional, very disturbing, detail points to the murderers’ obvious attempts at concealing evidence.

Three witnesses who remain anonymous, claim the order to kill Ojeda came directly from a close ally of Maduro. Chilean President Gabriel Boric condemned the murder. He said that, if true, it is a direct violation of Chile’s human rights and sovereignty. Since then, Chilean prosecutors have charged 19 people in connection with the murder, believing them to be members of the Venezuelan criminal organization, Tren de Aragua, who were hired to carry out the assassination. If the Maduro government is behind this, it could point to a terrifying escalation of Maduro’s efforts to put the country in a stranglehold, silencing dissidence once and for all.

Adelys Ferro, the director of the Venezuelan American Caucus, held a press conference in Doral, a Miami suburb, last Monday.

“We are human beings,” she said, “…small business owners.”

Mario Diaz-Balart, the Republican congressman of Doral, said he opposed the removal of TPS, and hopes people can be granted it on a case-by-case basis.

“The president should be very careful,” he said.

Ferro said she feels “beyond betrayed” by the Trump administration — “used” by the Republican officials who claimed, prior to his election, that documented migrants would not be touched, but rather, only undocumented people who could risk being returned to Venezuela. Getting legal status as U.S. citizens, including receiving new Social Security numbers and buying a house — all of these steps, undertaken by hundreds of thousands of migrants, now seem to be for nothing.