Caracas Chronicles

As votes were counted on November 5th 2024 and it became evident that Donald Trump would return to the White House in 2025, many Venezuelans at home and in the U.S. celebrated. During his first term, Trump paid special attention to the whims of the Venezuelan community in South Florida, meeting with their representatives regularly both in the White House and during campaign visits to the Sunshine State, recognizing Juan Guaidó as interim president and conducting Venezuela policy at times “through the prism of Florida’s electoral votes”. As one of the last official acts of Trump 1.0, El Catire even issued a memorandum instructing the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security to take “appropriate measures to defer for 18 months the removal of any national of Venezuela, or alien without nationality who last habitually resided in Venezuela” as a parting gift to a community that had been fiercely loyal to him.

Given Trump’s previous “pro-Venezuelan” positions, the expectation among most voters and advocates of Venezuela policy in the GOP was that Trump 47 would pick up where Trump 45 left off. After all, the Venezuelan-American community in South Florida was an ardent contributor to 47’s decisive victory in Florida: it is estimated that 150,000 Florida voters swung the 2016 election in Trump’s favour, while 90,000 Venezuelan voters in Orlando represent a significant group in Florida’s 9th and 10th congressional districts. However, far from nurturing the Venezuelan electorate as he previously did, Trump 2.0 has pursued targeted policies that can only be described as deeply unpopular by the Venezuelan constituency in Florida. 

We first saw the “unexpected” decision announced by Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem to rescind the most recent TPS extension—ending the legal stay and work authorizations for the second group of Venezuelans that obtained these protections—with the argument that economic and security conditions have improved in their country of origin.

Along came Ric Grenell’s very public visit to Miraflores—after which the special envoy returned home with six former Americans prisoners—and the administration’s disparagingly mixed signals regarding Maduro, Venezuelan oil, and Venezuelan migrants in the United States. Then came the invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, authorizing the state to summarily detain and deport all Venezuelans over the age of 14 without due process guarantees, best illustrated by the transfer of 238 Venezuelan immigrants to a Salvadorian mega prison. The latest move was the elimination of humanitarian parole for 117,000 Venezuelans in the U.S. (and other 400,000 people from Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba), who will need to leave the country or face deportation by April 30.

Republican politicians in Florida could have faced this new approach with few options or choosing between the lesser of evils, like staying quiet and bearing a still unquantifiable electoral handicap, or publicly denouncing the decisions of an administration that is notoriously averse to internal dissent. In practice, they have shown a degree of ambivalence to save face before Venezuelan voters while pushing for sanctions against Venezuela and promoting Trump’s Tren de Aragua narrative.

Venezuelans in the U.S. have been extremely successful in making Venezuelan democracy a bipartisan cause, and have been recognized for their efforts.

The best example probably comes from the “three crazy Cubans”: Mario Díaz-Balart, María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Giménez. On one hand, these Cuban-American House Representatives published an open letter to the president urging him to reconsider the TPS revocation for Venezuelans, while reportedly threatening to withhold their votes on a congressional budget resolution if Trump failed to remove oil licenses for foreign companies that operate in Venezuela. On the other there’s Rafael Pineyro, a GOP councilman in the City of Doral who remains the only Venezuelan elected official in the state of Florida. He had to reiterate his support for Trump’s immigration crackdown while warning that these policies could be costly in the next election.

While some foolishly claim that these measures will not affect decent people (gente de bien), the sweeping nature of removing deportation protections for more than half a million Venezuelans will affect Venezuelan-American families from all sides of the political spectrum almost equally. So it is rational to wonder why President Trump, having placed so much political importance to the Latino vote in South Florida, has now found it convenient to treat Venezuelans with an iron fist.

One could say that yes, Trump is honoring the central promise of his campaign: removing illegal immigrants quickly and by all means possible, aided by the idea that Venezuelan migration to the U.S. during Biden represents a deliberate effort from Maduro to establish the obscure networks of Tren de Aragua on American soil.

But given the challenges faced by Venezuelan stakeholders and activists in combating these narratives and stigma, one could say that the Venezuelan-American community has so far failed to play the game of American politics at full strength.

The challenge of building political muscle

For starters, political parties tend to prioritize organized groups that can mobilize voters, and most crucially, donors in support of their candidates. The ability to create these networks “leads to activism, while expanding social trust and cooperation for mutual benefit”, and translates into the creation of associations known in the U.S. as Special Interest Groups (SIGs). These are simply organizations that advocate for specific issues, representing the diverse interests of 300 million citizens in the richest nation in history. Notable ones like NRA, Sierra Club, AFL-CIO, NAACP and the National Council for La Raza are a small sample of the many SIGs that organize and mobilize their members to achieve desired policy outcomes. This is usually portrayed in the media as campaign contributions of political donations through the dreaded Political Action Committees (PACs), but these organizations also carry out massive lobbying efforts, advocacy campaigns at the local level, grassroot mobilizations, and public education campaigns.

When it comes to Venezuela, there have been several initiatives to organize and build social capital among the Venezuelan community. Organizations like Casa de Venezuela, the Venezuelan-American Caucus, IVAC, Visión Democrática Foundation, VEPEX, and IVAC individually represent Venezuelans along the political spectrum and have had moderate success in being recognized by the leaders of both parties. But these have largely failed to position the Venezuelan-American community as a powerful constituency at the local level in Florida, let alone at a national level.

Venezuelan-Americans are clearly able to run and win elections in unexpected places like Utah and the Appalachians.

A community needs three things to be successful in pressing for policy outcomes: money, the ability to speak cohesively, and political representation. So, why has it been so difficult for Venezuelans in the U.S. to follow the route of Cuban exiles?

Ade Ferro, a Venezuelan American activist who has led the judicial response to the Trump’s crackdown on Venezuelans immigrants, chalks it up to time.

“Cubans were initially rejected in the United States. It took years for them to develop their political strength and their political leadership came naturally once they were settled,” she says. In her view, Venezuelan Americans have achieved a lot in the past 25 years, since chavismo forced the first waves of Venezuelans to seek the palm-tree lined pastures of Weston and Doral.

Venezuelans in the U.S. have been extremely successful in making Venezuelan democracy a bipartisan cause, and have been recognized for their efforts. Ernesto Ackerman and Kennedy Bolivar—who have led the Venezuelan Republican Club and IVAC (Independent Venezuelan-American Citizens)—have become important players in South Florida Republican politics, and were successful in pushing Trump closer to the Venezuelan cause during his first term. The Venezuelan American Caucus (VAC) was welcomed by the Biden White House for a celebration of Venezuelan American Day. Ferro claims that the VAC was instrumental in holding the Biden government accountable to the promise of granting TPS to Venezuelans in his first 100 days in office. As Jose Antonio Colina, founder of VEPEX puts it, the Venezuelan-American community is “strong from a communications and activism standpoint but weak politically” because “communications and activism can be done from a personal level, but political power requires coordination”.

A voice of our own

This does not mean that Venezuelans have not been successful politically in the United States. Luigi Boria, for instance, was elected mayor of Doral in 2012, where Rafael Pineyro is a staple of the City Council. Closer to the nation’s capital, Patricia Rucker represents the 16th district of the West Virginia Senate as the most staunchly Magazuelan politician in the country. Natali Frani-González represents the 6th district at the Montgomery City Council in Maryland. But their electoral victories at a local level have been the product of individual efforts, instead of the concerted support of the Venezuelan community.

Which brings us to the crux of the matter. Venezuelan-Americans are clearly able to run and win elections in unexpected places like Utah and the Appalachians. But because of lacking collective coordination in identifying and supporting candidates like those above—who have the potential of being successful at a national level—the representation of the Venezuelan community is largely in the hands of Cuban, Ecuadorian, and American politicians, mostly from the south of Florida. 

Addressing this situation will not be easy. Kennedy Bolívar, who founded the Venezuelan Republican Club and is a likely strong candidate for public office in South Florida, believes that overcoming the infighting that has plagued Venezuelan-American politics over the last decade will be very hard going into the 2026 midterm election. A grim prospect, given the existential threat faced by the Venezuelan community coming from the White House at the moment. A united Venezuelan-American community could send a message through the polls to both parties by signalling that they are not single-issue voters, and that they care as much about what happens to their friends and loved ones in the United States, as they do about U.S. policy towards Venezuela. This will require a change of mindset from the top-down approach to politics that Venezuelans are accustomed to, and literally put their money where their mouths are.

This means maturing politically to a level where three Venezuelans are not running for one city council seat in Doral, so that they dilute the vote and lose. Running for office in areas where Venezuelans are politically strong and volunteering, to knock on doors and with phone banks to promote Venezuelan candidates, and perhaps most importantly, donating money to the campaign of emerging Venezuelan leaders—something that Ferro, Bolívar and Colina agree is the biggest challenge for representation.

Ultimately, the Venezuelan diaspora is positioned to turbo charge the political processes that took other communities decades. Venezuelans that have arrived in the U.S. over the years are generally wealthier and more educated than other groups, so it’s up to those established in the country to take the reins.