Ana Gil Garcia has lived in Chicago for decades, and she’s been a US citizen for a long time, since 2002. But she wanted to help people in Venezuela as it grew increasingly impoverished. Seven years ago, she co-founded an aid group.
But then the mission changed.
“When Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refused to even come to Texas and to see the border crisis that they created, I took the border to them,” said Texas Governor Greg Abbott at the Republican National Convention last year.
Abbott was talking about a policy he started in 2022, of sending tens of thousands of people to Chicago, New York, Washington, DC and other Democratically-held cities.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson appointed Gil Garcia to the Advisory Council on New Americans to help with the sudden influx of new arrivals from the southern border.
When I interviewed her two years ago, she was focused on helping people find shelter, holding clothing and food drives and immigration clinics, and finding interpreters.
Looking back on it, Gil Garcia said she and other organizers assumed the first group of about 3,000 people would be it.
“You know, Chicago is too cold, they're not going to come to this way. Okay? Not realizing that these people that were coming to this way, they have no other choice. They were told as soon as they got to the border, you’re going to Chicago.”
Over the next two years more than 50,000 migrants were sent to the city.
Then things changed again when President Trump took office.
Especially for new arrivals.
"The fear they show"
On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship. While the order faces challenges in court and has not gone into effect, Gil Garcia said it could have serious consequences for a child born to Venezuelans living in the US.
That’s because Venezuela severed diplomatic relations with the US in 2019. The embassy and consulate offices are closed.
“That child will be a stateless. Why? Because it's different from a child that have mom or dad from Colombia. Because you can go to the Colombian consulate here in Chicago and the child will have a birth certificate. But where is a Venezuelan going to go?”
Without citizenship, Gil Garcia said these children have no government protections. They would be denied essential rights and services for education and healthcare and have no legal identity documents.
The new administration has also increased immigration raids across the country and in Chicago. This week it announced a new crackdown on undocumented immigrants in the city.
Trump is threatening to send in the National Guard in defiance of the governor. And the administration is in the process of terminating protected immigration status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and Haitians, though a federal judge ruled last week that the action is unlawful.
Donald Trump gave eligible Venezuelans an administrative 18-month stay of removal on the final day of his first term. Called a Deferred Enforced Departure (DED), it included work authorization. Trump said the action was prompted by the “deteriorative condition” in Venezuela and was perceived as national security threat.
President Biden granted protections under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which is a more concrete temporary immigration status under U.S. immigration law.
Enacted by Congress in 1990 and signed by President George H.W. Bush, TPS provided temporary protection from deportation to crisis-stricken countries. Despite the recent ruling against the Trump administration, the case is expected to ultimately be decided by the US Supreme Court.
At her office in Chicago, Gil Garcia said Trump is terrorizing the community.
“We can see that with the fear that they show. They don't want to, they [don't] even want to say where they're from.”
She said many are afraid to leave their home or let their children play outside for fear someone will call the ICE tip line to report a suspected illegal immigration violation.
Ignorance about asylum rights
Gil Garcia said while the government has the right to enact these policies, many people the administration refers to as ‘illegal’ came here legally to seek asylum.
“And this is something that even educated people they talk about: ‘they're illegals.’”
“No, they're not,” said Gil Garcia.
“And they say, ‘Ana, why not?’ I say, ‘Well, because when they came, they, they got to the border, they went to the checkpoint, and they said, I’d like to be asylum.’ The asylum process is an international law.”
Nelson Alvarez works at the Illinois Venezuelan Alliance with Gil Garcia. He said he followed the rules for asylum when he came to the US from Venezuela.
“When you hear someone got deported, even if they got papers or they got a legal status, that's when you realize that not even that guarantees you to be able to be here.”
Alvarez said he has a valid work permit. But when Trump came in to office, Alvarez lost the protected status previously granted to Venezuelans.
He said it’s hard for US citizens to understand because they have never experienced life in a country like Venezuela, where people can be punished for expressing their own views.
“Try to get a job, try to make a living, try to build a family, and you’re not able to do it. Not because you don’t want to, but because you don’t have the opportunities, or because if you try to do the things in the right way, you might have consequences for that,” Alvarez said.
Could it happen here?
Gil Garcia said many Venezuelans in the US have gone from supporting Trump to comparing him to authoritarian leaders back home.
“Many of those policies that we’re seeing now, there has some parallelism, you know, with what happened in Venezuela.”
Gil Garcia was a US resident before Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999. The democratically-elected president of Venezuela turned the country into an autocracy. He did away with checks and balances, including by firing civil servants who didn’t agree with him. Millions fled the country under Chávez and have continued to leave under his successor, President Nicolás Maduro.
“More and more, that's really what is being, the community is claiming. ‘We see this picture before.’ Now, the next thing is this. The next thing is this. And they keep a count of the things that they have now seen that happened here in the country.”
Things happening here in the United States that remind them of things that happened in Venezuela when it lost its democracy.
That includes recent events at the Centers for Disease Control, where the director just confirmed by the Senate was suddenly fired, reportedly after clashing with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over his controversial vaccine policy.
Gil Garcia described similar incidents from 25 years ago in Venezuela.
“Anybody who has a different opinion in the government, and you were a government employee, believe me, in less than one week you were out. Only political appointees were able to remain,” she said.
Gil Garcia said Venezuelans came to the United States because this was the most “robust” democracy in the world.
“And I want the country to preserve the ethic, the morality, the integrity, every of those values that I was told before coming to this country and I found here in this country. Now, I feel like I need to think about what is going on.”
Because, she said, it’s affecting her directly.
“And I wonder if this is something that is going to be a short-term or long-term. I don't know that anymore.”
