As protests broke out following the disputed Venezuelan election this summer, Miguel David Pacheco Gómez tracked the rallies and government crackdown on social media. From his adopted home in Hopkins, he looked for ways to show his support for opposition leader María Corina Machado.
The former student organizer first fled Venezuela in 2016, a year when hundreds of thousands took to the streets to protest the economic policies and demand the recall election of President Nicolás Maduro.
“I feel sad not to be able to be there right now, also to do my part, to go out and protest,” Pacheco Gómez said from the sidelines of a softball game in September. “But I think it would also be in vain, maybe I would be imprisoned, I would be dead or they would be torturing me.”
Pacheco Gómez arrived in the U.S. in 2021, and made his way to Minnesota, where he joined a tight-knit community of Venezuelan immigrants and asylum seekers that has nearly doubled in the last three years.
One in four Venezuelans has fled the country in recent years due to the country’s political and economic turmoil. While most landed in neighboring countries, more than 500,000 are currently in the U.S., where many are eligible for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or another program, humanitarian parole.
But the election of Donald Trump has made the future uncertain for many Venezuelans, as he has threatened to scale back programs that shield more than 1 million immigrants and carry out the largest mass deportations in U.S. history.
Ana Pottratz Acosta, an immigration attorney who teaches at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law, advises those who do not have U.S. citizenship to talk to a lawyer and get in the safest position possible.
“I think we need to wait and see what happens with the incoming Trump administration in terms of what their decision is to re-designate Venezuela for TPS,” Pottratz Acosta said, noting that the secretary of Homeland Security has to prove that the situation in Venezuela has improved to end the designation.
“The problem right now in Venezuela is that the situation since October of 2023, when TPS was redesignated, has gotten much, much worse,” Pottratz Acosta said.
A growing community
Four years ago, when the local Venezuelan Softball League started, only four teams were playing. Now, twelve teams compete from April to October every year, each representing a geographical area of the country.
Pacheco Gómez joined the league two years ago at the invitation of a friend. He manages a team called Los Niños de la Tapestry, in honor of his church.
The church is one hub of the local Venezuelan community; the softball league another. Fernando Rivas, co-founder of the league, said it’s a way to build connections and also help incubate new businesses. Food vendors set up at games and also sponsor teams.
“They are entrepreneurs who are just starting, they don’t have a restaurant or anything,” said Rivas, who emigrated from Venezuela to Minnesota in 2018. “From there they get a food truck and then get a restaurant.”
Dressed in red aprons and caps, Johanna Bravo and Zonia Celis had set up their stand at a game in September. The couple sells shawarma and papa loca, a Venezuelan potato dish topped with chopped pork, beef, chicken, bacon and cheese.
Celis arrived first in Minnesota, in April 2022. Later on, Bravo joined her. The pair met in Ecuador, Bravo’s home country, where Celis traveled after leaving Venezuela. The two women decided to move to the United States to flee homophobia in their respective countries. In Ecuador, Johanna Bravo received death threats because of her sexual orientation and was beaten and shot at. When she fled, she had to leave her daughter behind.
As a Venezuelan, Celis was eligible for TPS. On weekdays, she works at a decoration store and, on weekends, she sells food. Back in Venezuela, she was already running a food business — and playing softball. Bravo, who has been in the U.S. for a year and a half, does not have a work permit and is not eligible for TPS. Both of them applied for asylum and the couple hopes to get a food truck in the future.
“I like Venezuelan people, they are very cheerful, just like in my country,” Bravo said at the softball game, a little before some music started playing on the field. “I identify with this atmosphere, because we are like that — the coastal people of Ecuador.”
A backlog of asylum cases
Ten years ago, Melissa Melnick Gonzalez founded the Tapestry Church, a Lutheran church that offers services in Spanish and English. A few members of the community were from Venezuela, most of them musicians, she remembers. But it is mainly since early 2023 that the Venezuelan community at the church has grown.
“Most Venezuelans don’t come as refugees,” Melnick Gonzalez said. “And even if they have TPS, they don’t qualify for much assistance, so we end up piecing together things that we can do.”
Some apply for asylum when they arrive in the U.S. The asylum backlog in the Bloomington Immigration Court has grown from seven cases in 2018 to 931 cases this year.
Melnick Gonzalez provides help in finding clothing, jobs, and assists with legal matters. “People who’ve been arriving more recently have far fewer resources than people who arrived in the early ’90s,” Melnick Gonzalez said.
With five other congregations, Tapestry also agreed to sponsor Venezuelans through humanitarian parole, a program launched by the Biden administration to provide legal pathways to immigration. The church has filled out more than 30 applications since March 2023, but is still waiting to hear back on those cases.
A year and a half ago, the church helped Pacheco Gómez apply for family reunification through humanitarian parole for his daughter, who stayed in Venezuela. So far, he has not heard back.
“It has been the hardest thing in my life to be separated from her,” said Pacheco Gómez. “My role as a father, I have not been able to enjoy that experience because, unfortunately and sadly for me, I had to emigrate.”
Between October 2022 and the end of August, close to 117,000 Venezuelans came to the U.S. under the program, according to Customs and Border Patrol data. However, Biden announced in October that people enrolled in the humanitarian parole process will not be able to renew their status when they have completed the two years of the program.
As many as 350,000 Venezuelans in the U.S. are currently protected from deportation under TPS and have the right to work. But that designation will expire next year, in April for those who applied for TPS for the first time last year and in September for those who have been TPS holders since 2021.
To Melnick Gonzalez, there is a lot of uncertainty. She also expects rules related to immigration to change drastically.
“Some people have lived afraid from deportation for a long time,” she said. “So [there is] a general sense of ‘We don’t know what the future holds.’”
Trump is also expected to target refugee resettlement programs. In Minnesota, 91 Venezuelan refugees arrived in fiscal year 2024, according to U.S. State Department data. In fiscal year 2023, only 19 Venezuelan refugees resettled in Minnesota.
‘The circumstances forced us’
Every Sunday, Tapestry congregants share a meal in the basement of the church. In mid-September, the congregation prepared a Mexican feast to celebrate its 10-year anniversary. Gladys Garcia, called Mileidy by her friends, sat at a table with Fernando Rivas and Ada, his sister.
The Rivas siblings are the first Venezuelans, outside of her family, that Garcia met, two years after moving to Minnesota. They quickly realized that they were not only from the same state, Zulia, but also the same village, Caja Seca.
Garcia moved to Minnesota in 2019 with her son. Her daughter was already living in the U.S., where she played tennis. In Venezuela, she was ranked in the top three of the country. Garcia, who was on the Venezuelan volleyball team, had a tourist visa to the U.S.
“I had no intention to emigrate,” said Garcia. “But the circumstances forced us.”
In Venezuela, Garcia and her family faced harassment. She opposed the government and signed the “Tascon list” demanding the recall of president Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor. When her daughter moved to the U.S., Garcia was harassed at work. Working as a lawyer in a national petroleum company, she was seen as a traitor due to her U.S. ties.
With the economic crisis, Garcia had to start selling items from her house. Her salary went down to the equivalent of $10 a month.
Garcia and her family now live under TPS and have applied for asylum. She passed a paralegal certification and helps other immigrants with their paperwork, while working as a Spanish teacher at a St. Paul language center.
Her brother joined her on humanitarian parole, and Garcia also applied on behalf of her mother. She is worried about the upcoming Trump presidency.
“He was very harsh on immigrants during his campaign, I felt like he was going to deport me, I took it personally,” Garcia said.
But as the election ended, Garcia thought that she should wait and see what Trump’s government will look like. She also thought that asylum is a law, a human right, and that the president-elect will not likely be able to change it.
Holding onto the culture
At the Lapiz Magico, children of Latin American immigrants can stay connected to the Spanish language. Ada Rivas runs a child care center in her Bloomington home where she teaches young children and toddlers through play in Spanish.
In Venezuela, she dreamed of opening this type of child care. But she was only able to do it long after she immigrated to Minnesota.
“Here, in my house, I get to be the teacher from Venezuela,” Rivas said.
Back home, she was forced to wear red, Chavez’s trademark color, and teach the slogan “motherland, socialism or death” to young kids. She also was required to hang images of armed soldiers or tanks on the walls.
On a morning in mid-September, children played with figurines on the floor under Rivas’ watchful eye. One of them, Kamila, a 4-year-old from Venezuela who recently arrived in Minnesota, was wearing a gauzy purple dress.
Rivas turned to them and asked: “Where is the soldier?” The kids looked into the bin and found a green figure. “It looks like a soldier but it does not have a weapon,” Rivas noted.
Rivas left Venezuela after the government threatened to close her family’s business when she wouldn’t toe the party line. She has lived in Minnesota for seven years, but was denied asylum.
Two years ago, she married her husband, whom she met at the church. But, while applying for a residency, the ICE questioned whether the marriage was real and denied it.
A perilous journey north
At the Tapestry church, Rivas also met Isaura Morillo, Kamila’s mother. Without a work authorization, Morillo started volunteering at the Lapiz Magico and enrolled her 4-year-old daughter.
Morillo and her family entered the U.S. through the Texas border in December 2023. They are not eligible for TPS; the deadline for application was in July 2023 for Venezuelans. The court date for her asylum case is not until 2027.
In the meantime her husband has occasional work in a mechanic’s shop. The couple has found an apartment with the help of a friend, after sleeping in shelters and churches.
“It was very complicated because every morning we had to go from one place to another,” said Morillo.
Originally from Guárico in the countryside, Morillo left Venezuela in 2020. In order to support her parents, who were often extorted by a local gang, she decided to move to the United States. It was a difficult choice for her to make. On the way to the U.S. she crossed Central America and Mexico with her husband and her daughter.
“Mexico was horrible, going through Mexico was worse than the jungle,” said Morillo, who remembers sleeping in the streets and fearing theft.
From her new home in Minnesota, she misses the food and the culture of her homeland, but more importantly her family.
“My mom told me that my grandmother was crying because she says she doesn’t know if she will see me again and that kind of thing is what hurts me the most,” Morillo said. “I hope to come back someday.”
Correction: This story has been updated to clarify that Ana Pottratz Acosta currently practices immigration law.
