By: Staff Writer
February 21, 2025
Several Venezuelans and three immigrant rights groups have sued President Donald Trump’s administration over its decision to end temporary protections against deportation for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants living in the United States.
The opposition to Trump’s policies has led a group of Venezuelan mothers to organize in protest against the new Trump policy.
Almost every morning the Whatsapp group chat wakes up to two words: Buenos días.
Those words — good morning — are often followed by words of panic:
“Have you heard about the detainees in Guantánamo?”
“I haven’t heard from my son yet.”
“If you hear anything about my son … Please post it here.”
“I’m just a mother who needs to know that my son is OK.”
The messages are all from Venezuelan moms living in Venezuela, Colombia, and the U.S. They are desperate for information about their sons now detained at the U.S. naval station on Guantánamo Bay, Cuba as part of President Donald Trump’s effort to target what he says are migrants who have committed crimes in the U.S. or abroad.
The moms are using the Whatsapp chat group to share information about their loved ones, and to push back against claims their sons are part of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragual.
The chat groupis like a virtual version of Argentina’s Plaza de Mayo, where mothers whose sons had disappeared by the Videla dictatorship demonstrated for years.
The mothers say their sons don’t have criminal records in their home countries, or in the U.S., and that the men are being targeted just for having tattoos.
Immigrant rights groups CASA and Make the Road New York on Thursday announced a federal lawsuit on behalf of their members seeking to reverse the president’s termination of Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans, who could soon face deportation. They argue the administration’s decision to end TPS for Venezuelans in April and September is unconstitutional and racially discriminatory.
“This unconstitutional action forces nearly 600,000 Venezuelans and their families currently living in the U.S. with TPS protection into the untenable position of potentially being forced to return to a country experiencing what has been described as one of the worst humanitarian crises in the history of the Western Hemisphere,” the groups said in a statement Thursday afternoon. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in Greenbelt, Maryland, against the Department of Homeland Security and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.
A Venezuelan single mother and CASA member identified as E.B. said in the statement that the Trump administration’s decision “threatens not just me, but also my son, my elderly parents, and the life we have fought so hard to build.”
“This lawsuit is not just about me: it’s about every TPS holder who has built a life here, every parent fighting for their child’s future, and every family thrown into crisis overnight. We need the courts to intervene before it’s too late,” she said in the statement.