In the summer of 2025, José, his wife Carolina and their teenage daughter arrived for their first scheduled hearing at an immigration court in downtown El Paso. The family believed they were going to argue their case for political asylum proceedings after fleeing Venezuela.
Just over a year earlier, the family had followed the rules the Biden administration had established to enter the U.S.: They made an appointment through the CBP One cellphone application, met with a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent to request asylum, and received “parole” — permission to live and work in the country while their case was pending.
But at the court hearing in June, the judge dismissed the family’s case without hearing any testimony, following a Trump administration order that immigration judges dismiss cases en masse so officers could arrest immigrants before they walked out of courtrooms — a policy the U.S. Department of Justice later said was made in error.
As soon as they walked out of the El Paso courtroom, U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement agents arrested them and took them to the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, a privately-run facility operated by CoreCivic where the family said their 14-year-old daughter quickly fell into depression and was vomiting for days.
In April 2025, the Trump administration terminated the legal status of the more than 900,000 people who entered the country using the CBP One app — most had received permission to live and work in the U.S. for up to two years while their cases were pending. And it sent notifications to immigrants who had entered using the app that they needed to return to their home countries or they would be arrested.
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José and his family spent a month in the detention center, which has faced persistent accusations by advocacy groups of “inhumane conditions, routine mistreatment, and due process violations.” When they were released and allowed to return to Las Cruces, N.M., where they had lived for eight months, they had to check in with ICE every three months and received a new court date for June 2027.
Instead, the family bought one-way plane tickets back to Venezuela.
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Last month, U.S. District Court Judge Allison D. Burroughs in Massachusetts said in a 25-page ruling that the Trump administration illegally revoked the legal status of those who used the cellphone application. Burroughs ordered the Trump administration to reverse its actions, saying her order applied to immigrants who used the app between May 2023 and January 2025.
But for José and his family, the treatment they’ve received since last year has convinced them that they’re better off dropping their dreams of making a life in America.
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The post A Venezuelan Family Followed the Rules to Enter the U.S. After Being Arrested and Detained for a Month, They’re Leaving. appeared first on American Renaissance.
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