While the Trump administration sends humanitarian aid to Venezuelaand ratchets up its rhetoric against Nicolas Maduro's regime, a growing group of Venezuelans who've fled to the United States are finding themselves in legal limbo and calling on Congress for help.
"The US is talking about the persecution of the Venezuelan people," immigration attorney Juan Carlos Gómez says, "and yet not receiving the Venezuelans that are fleeing the persecution with open arms."
The problem, according to lawyers and advocates, is that even as the US government grows increasingly critical of Maduro, proving an asylum case in the United States remains a tough legal mountain for anybody to climb. And Venezuelans are no exception.
US deportations to Venezuela are continuing "even as the country conditions are terrible right now," says John De la Vega, an immigration attorney in Miami. "There's no special treatment for Venezuelans. They're the same as everybody else."
Fear alone is not enough to win an asylum case. And now, De la Vega says, Venezuelans seeking asylum in the United States are afraid they could lose their cases and be sent back into danger.
More than 70,000 Venezuelans have come to the United States seeking asylum in the past four years, according to the United Nations. Detailed statistics about how those cases have fared aren't yet publicly available. Immigration attorneys say many are still pending due to case backlogs.